In Chicago, One Weekend, 66 Shooting Victims, and Zero Arrests

For Every Manafort You See, There are so Many You Don’t

No arrests in Chicago; and “[f]ederal prosecutions of white-collar crime … are on track this year to reach their lowest level on record.”

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I guess that leaves pink collar crime and terrorism?

63 people have been shot, nine fatally, since 5 p.m. Friday. 34 of the shootings and five deaths occurred between 10 a.m. Saturday and 10 a.m. Sunday…

One paramedic described Saturday evening into Sunday morning as “a war zone.”

… Guv.

Meanwhile – thousands of people are sending thoughts and prayers.

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UD thanks dmf.

Postmodern techno-efficiency dispenses with irrational exuberance about suicide rates in America. If you want to keep rates high, make the act very simple and one hundred percent fatal.

The coach explains his no weapons policy for University of Florida football players.

“It’s a no-weapons policy in certain situations of how to be educated to not have (issues)…No weapons, that’s easy to remember. If I write out all the different (scenarios)—no weapons in these situations or have a weapon for a hunting situation, if I’m doing this, I store it at this location, I keep it here, I have gun safety rules and knowledge—that’s not a quick catch to them to register in their mind. Does that make sense?”

Which neatly explains why one of his players, found to have a loaded AR-15 in his car, will suffer no punishment.

As a Deadspin columnist rather querulously notes, ‘If a “no-weapon” policy isn’t designed to keep players from carrying assault weapons for the purposes of shooting people during altercations, there really is no point at all in having any weapons policy.’

Maybe it applies to nuclear weapons.

[A UF football player] told police he needed [a loaded AR-15 assault rifle in his car] for protection from locals in Gainesville because “they be coming after us.” The stop came after tension (and at least one fight) between some Gators and Gainesville residents, including Devante “Tay Bang” Zachery.

Best part of all: Police can’t arrest him. Cuz it’s perfectly fine to drive around the state of Florida with a loaded AR-15 in your car.

The University of Florida is well on its way to being America’s first university to host a protracted armed conflict on campus. Talk about town/gown.

… now has a very high-profile homicide.

Gun-mad Utah – there are municipalities there where you MUST keep guns – has done it again. Let’s see.

For those outside Utah’s batty-for-bullets culture, it’s not at all easy to get inside this special, universal-carry, littered-with-child-suicides, locale, but perhaps this will help: UD will take a few paragraphs from a local account of the baby changing table incident, and will autocorrect – Utahcorrect – the piece.

RUGER — The Salt and Ashes County District Attorney’s Office will review the case of a person who left a gun in a bathroom at the Dying Planet Automaticum.

A customer at the Automaticum left a revolver in the bathroom on Tuesday…

[The woman who brought the loaded gun into the no-weapons building] was very apologetic and embarrassed about leaving the gun in the bathroom… The woman said she had put the gun on the baby changing table and went to use the restroom… When she got out, her child started running around and she forgot to retrieve the gun…

Could happen to anyone! In Utah. Momma don’t go nowhere cepn she got her revolver nice and snug in her panties cuz you never know and folks is always trying to kill you specially in aquariums. But how do you drop em and do your business without your gun ploppin into the basin? Plus you got this kid runnin round!

Ah. Right across there in the stall – a nice soft white gun rest. Cradle it there real sweet while you pee and then… Lester? Lester what the hell are you doing? I can’t keep up with you …

And you know? I kinda remembered I dint have no gun as I was leaving the Automaticum but I was so busy with Lester and after all a nice bright loaded revolver is a kinda pay it forward thing… Like that new documentary is right you’re never too young to love a gun and it made me kinda happy thinking about the six-month old with a dirty nappy discovering the revolver and entering right then and there into the beautiful Utah way of life.

Yes. Wouldn’t want to get into why the dean of Research and Planning at Rio Hondo College not only felt compelled to take a loaded gun to a campus bathroom with him, but why he left the gun in the bathroom, lying atop a magazine (“Meetings Today”) one assumes he was reading in there. We’ve made him resign; could we leave it at that?

But youth wants to know: Was he sticking it up the wazoo while exciting himself with “Meetings Today”? Did he put the gun and the magazine down in a post-orgasmic fog and forget them both?

Amen. Take a step back and ask yourself why you’re being so judgmental toward a Biola University student storing in his dorm room an unregistered AR-15 assault rifle and an unregistered 9mm handgun.

Assuming no concealed weapons on his body, go on up and give him a big hug.

The University of Wyoming’s latest marketing slogan (which UD has cited and … extended a bit … in her headline) is generating controversy.

NOT because cowboys (plus all them guns, natch) have given Wyoming jest ’bout the country’s highest suicide rate, but because the slogan’s offensive.

House-sitting, gunny-style.

“[E]very country contains mentally ill and potentially violent people. Only America arms them.“

Was.. He got in the way, today, of one of America’s thousands of thoroughly demented people with big big big guns.

In the matter of the more than ordinarily mysterious suicide of the young (he was only 21) Washington State University hero quarterback, most people are talking about the recent autopsy finding that Hilinski already showed CTE. He had the brain of a sixty-five year old, the doctors said.

Which means scads of university football players in their twenties are probably running around with some degree of CTE. Hilinski after all was a quarterback, a position which typically receives less cerebral punishment than many others.

Et alors? Virtually no one in this country cares; they love football too desperately to give much notice to the early gruesome deaths of their gridiron heroes. People only noticed Hilinski because he wasn’t a mentally eviscerated former pro in his sixties, but still a kid. Same age as Owen Thomas.

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No, ol’ UD is more struck by Hilinski’s father’s comment up there in my headline. Hilinski’s father thinks it’s pretty fucking weird that his kid’s buddies in the dorm had an AR-15 style rifle. Handy, simple, 110% deadly – just the thing for an impulsively self-destructive guy who’d barely hit legal drinking age. (Almost all very young suicides are impulsive.) Hilinski had never handled a gun, but his clueless buddies were happy to give him some pointers, shortly after which he stole the AR-15 and – with this powerful weapon of war – blew his brains out. An incredibly violent bloody suicide, this one.

“We’re always going to have suicide,” [one researcher says,] “and there’s probably not that much to be done for the ones who are determined, who succeed on their 4th or 5th or 25th try. The ones we have a good chance of saving are those who, right now, succeed on their first attempt because of the lethal methods they’ve chosen.” … The element of impulsivity in firearm suicide means that it is a method in which mechanical intervention — or “means restriction” — might work to great effect.

Hilinski’s father’s intuition is absolutely correct; had his son’s demise been more difficult and less absolutely certain than a firearms death, things might have turned out differently.

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It looks as though no one in any way saw Hilinski’s appalling act coming. His suicide note, which will not be released, apparently revealed little or nothing of his motive (UD‘s going to guess that this means its content was pretty short and simple: Goodbye. Sorry.). FWIW, here’s a possible scenario.

Always very strong and healthy, he had begun to experience troubling symptoms: Some mental confusion, maybe some occasional trembling in his hands. Given his lifelong intense devotion to football, this would have panicked and horrified him and made him wonder about his future in the sport, not to mention the future of his general health.

Further, plenty of people who knew him have commented that he exhibited the macho stoicism typical of football guys: If you’re suffering, you don’t tell anyone.

Throwing a convenient big ol’ killing machine into that mix is just asking for it.