Rolling Stone examines a trend we’ve covered more and more on this blog: The remarkable suicide-by-gun epidemic of middle aged men in the American west.

As to why [exorbitant] travel and wardrobe expenses [for N.R.A chief executive Wayne La Pierrre] were billed through a contractor, and not directly through the N.R.A. — an arrangement that may also interest investigators — [a spokesperson] said it was a practice “abandoned some time ago” that had been done “for confidentiality and security purposes.”

Sometimes you stumble on a fact that seems to you to belong not just in the headline of a story, but on the national news. Blasting your head off via one of your several household weapons is already wildly rampant all over Utah; quiet yourself for a moment, reader, and consider how beyond-rampant head-blasting is in the tri-country area…

And of course “depression and suicide aren’t talked about [in the region] because of a fear of having guns taken away.”

Surely the masses of men (most are men) who are doing this to themselves understand at this point that the guns they so anxiously cherish are about suicide and sport, with self-defense a distant third. When (to quote the Beatles), it’s all too much, The Gun is Utahan for Death With Dignity.

“Injuries and accidents, keeping your job, having a job tomorrow. It’s so up and down,” said Val Middleton, a former oil and gas safety instructor at Uintah Basin Technical College in Vernal. “The guys don’t eat right typically. No exercise, hard work, long hours, no sleep. That’s what adds up. The divorce rate is high. Really high. The family life is low.”

Val forgot to add alcohol.

Is this corner of Utah the wave of the future? Can freedom also be thought of as the scope to debrain yourself when you can’t stand it anymore? Says here that shitty life + immediately lethal instrument + sudden moment of hopelessness = suicide. If that’s true – and it seems pretty obviously true for hundreds of thousands of people – and if our culture perceives suicide as a bad thing, a sad thing, a thing we should try to prevent – why aren’t we paying any attention to massively suicidal, gunned-up places like the tri-county area? UD proposes that the hypermasculine culture of autonomy in such places makes suicide both inevitable for many and – in the eyes of many – sort of routine. Sort of okay.

woke up still wondering how you could

have it in your soul to shoot up a school

this world disgusts me more and more every day

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Almost-daily massacres make precocious poets. This verse (well, a tweet turned into verse by UD) is by a high school friend of one of the injured students at the University of North Carolina Charlotte.

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Putting together the information that’s emerging, it starts to look like this (though again I’m guessing): The guy was a student at the school as recently as this semester, but he withdrew. If a mental health episode prompted the withdrawal, his attack on a classroom full of students (randomly chosen, one assumes) fits the classic angry white male American workplace/school massacre model. Resentment and paranoia engulfed him; if he could no longer be a functional human being/student, he would destroy people who could be.

All of this would make the attack a variant of the Elliot Rodger massacre. In 2014, Rodger, the same age as the latest shooter (22), killed six people near UC Santa Barbara.

Just before driving to [a] sorority house, Rodger uploaded to YouTube a video titled “Elliot Rodger’s Retribution”, in which he outlined details of his upcoming attack and his motives. He explained that he wanted to punish women for rejecting him and that he envied sexually active men and wanted to punish them for being sexually active.

Maybe today’s maniac has made this be about sexual envy; maybe it’s just about, as I said, homicidal envy of other peoples’ ability to be functional human beings.

Two dead, four injured. It happened last night. Not clear from initial reports if the killing is over.

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This says a suspect is in custody.

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Here’s UD‘s guess. Crowds of people were on campus for a concert. A fight broke out and of course guns were all over the place. Just takes one idiot to start the kill.

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Wrong, wrong, wrong. The shooting took place early this evening. And the shooter seems to have been a lone mentally ill person.

Holds ’em steady for a better shot.

… Just another football game.

Oh right. Georgia ain’t got no law infringing your right to leave a loaded gun in your car and then exit the car with your toddlers in it.

Get to know the inside of Waco Texas, the reason its rapists and illegal-weapon-brandishing killers get off scot-free, where everyone’s a Baylor University graduate.

Baylor – whose mix of ostentatious Christianity and de Sadeian degeneracy gives the Catholic priesthood a run for its money – generates the judges and DAs who ensure that good ol’ boys don’t get convicted of their crimes, while … uh … others…

Branch Davidians, Breastaurants, Bikers, and a bevy of weapons you will not believe: What better place for your college education?

[McLennan Texas] County District Attorney Barry Johnson released a statement on Tuesday in which he said keeping on with the case would be “waste of time, effort and resources. … In my opinion [the nine killings] would have, and should have, resulted in numerous convictions and prison sentences against many of those who participated in the Twin Peaks brawl … Over the next three years the prior district attorney failed to take that action, for reasons that I do not know to this day.”

It’s Texas, baby. If Good Old Boys With Guns don’t thrill you, move on up here to Maryland with UD.

If you’ve been here, you know. You know you’re in Fauquier County when the air changes. Take a deep breath, as our motto has it, and enjoy the musty aroma of sulfuric acid as our friendly people shoot at you for getting lost and driving onto their property.

Fast-paced city life melts into the distance, and your eyes rivet onto the amazement of Virginia’s Horse Wine and AR-15 Country.

Just 40 miles west of Washington, D.C., at the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains. So far from the inner city. And yet so near.

[UD thanks her sister.]

… AR-15.

It’s a little tricky.

America’s rapeabilliest campus, Baylor University (scroll down), conducts its life of the mind business in Waco Texas, famous for murderous cults, biker boy shootouts, and breastaurants. To be kind, Waco is probably as close to the creation of an atmosphere for serious learning and respect for women Texas can manage, so let’s not be judgmental. Let’s instead update ourselves on the various ongoing Waco trials of various biker boys.

The 2015 shootout, a routine druggie-gunnie turf war that spilled beyond the confines of a breastaurant onto streets where Baylor families were celebrating graduation, killed a lot of people and kinda left a bloody mess all over Waco but I mean bikers go to Waco cuz Waco loves guns so much. Gunnies feel genuinely welcome there.

475 weapons were seized following the incident. The number includes 151 firearms, 12 of which were long guns. Other weapons recovered included knives, brass knuckles, batons, tomahawks, a hatchet, stun guns, bats, clubs, a machete, a pipe, an ax, pepper spray and a chain.

It can get a little noisy trying to study at Baylor, but that’s the sound of freedom.

Now here’s one trial we can take a look at. Headline:

Bandido biker yells at Waco judge in court: “Three years and nothing!”

This guy, seen standing over the dead body of a rival biker at the shootout, is pissed because it’s taking a long time to hear his case and meanwhile he can’t carry his AR-57 or talk to gunmates. But the mean judge seems to think the guy still shouldn’t have access to firearms….

But haha you and I know the guy still carries guns; he just wants to do so and not risk arrest.

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UPDATE: But UD doesn’t want you to think that her very own neighborhood hasn’t been stockpiling too!

Professor Bishop, like the Aurora mass shooter, opened fire shortly after she learned of her termination (at the University of Alabama); and like the Aurora shooter she did the deed during a meeting with colleagues. And like the Aurora shooter, she had quite the violence/mental illness history (she sent bombs to perceived enemies; she shot her brother to death) and should never have had access to a gun. How much of the scary criminal background of these two employees did the university and the factory know about?