Yeah.

Today’s crazed eighteen year old family-slaughterer is a real religious dude. And God is good! Only gave him a rifle. If he’d had a better weapon, he could have killed the whole neighborhood.

… finds with ease the .40-caliber semiautomatic pistol her parents told her to use in case of an intruder. (The household has ten more weapons locked in a safe, but this one is in a bedroom, loaded.) She kills herself while her mother checks her email in an adjacent room.

Her mother says “she won’t live with guns in her home again.”

Remember 21 year old Tyler Hilinski. His college roommates had an AR-15 all ready for him.

Mom had a moment; Mom had a gun. Her kids – two very promising people, the daughter a journalism student at Boston University – were dispatched with ease. Give Mom (who killed herself after killing her kids) a knife, or any other weapon, and these two strong life-loving young people might have been able to fight back, to overpower her, to defend themselves.

There’s nothing like a gun to give your psychotic impulsivity episode full scope.

Did no one at all have the slightest inkling this woman was… troubled? Excessively vengeful toward her ex? Was her medical supply company being investigated? Did she have a substance abuse problem? Why did this troubled woman have a gun at home? For safety in her ultra-safe gated community? Did it occur to anyone to think about the safety of her children?

Oh, and kudos to the mayor of Atlanta, who offers us this: The peace of God… surpasses all understanding. Really?

… at USA TODAY! WHEEEEEEEE… HOLD ON TIGHT HERE WE GO AGAIN…

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Updated. Phony war.

Next?

“In retrospect Sandy Hook marked the end of the US gun control debate,” Dan Hodges, a British journalist, wrote in a post on Twitter two years ago, referring to the 2012 attack that killed 20 young students at an elementary school in Connecticut. “Once America decided killing children was bearable, it was over.”

Hey babe that pop POPOPOPOPOPOP pop pop POPOPOP is the sound of freedom!

And you ain’t seen nuthin yet. Wait til our 18 year olds with AK-47s organize. They’ll make Columbine look like a picnic.

… semiautomatic.

Seem to be up to around twenty in today’s butchery in El Paso. Could we at least begin to agree that since shooting up public spaces has become a rite of passage for remarkable numbers of attention-seeking young men, we must stop recording the killers’ names and photos and manifestos? If they’re at large, tell us who they are and what they look like so we can protect ourselves; if they’re dead or arrested, move on.

When close to one hundred percent of the people in a part of Arlington Virginia registered opposition to a gun store opening in town near an elementary school, a lawyer for the shop owners expressed bafflement. “What’s the danger they anticipate? Do they think 2- and 3-year-old children are going to come over and buy guns? … Or somebody at the store is going to start shooting up the place? I don’t know what they think is going to happen.”

Perhaps UD can help him out. At 3:00 AM last night, about a mile away from her house…

Four suspects are on the loose and one person is dead after a burglary at a Rockville, Maryland, gun store…

… As there are four possibly armed suspects on the loose, police are urging local residents to navigate the area with extra caution.

… The five suspects rammed into a police cruiser as they were fleeing the scene, causing police to shoot at the car, officials said.

Police later found the car a few blocks away from the area with a dead man inside, according to police.

Police say they found a bag with multiple firearms inside in a backyard not far from the scene. Three other guns were found outside the car the suspects tried to get away in. It appears two stolen cars were used in the incident — one to ram the storefront and a getaway car.

I just don’t know what people think is going to happen.

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.