UD and her theory of her country’s latest massacre will graciously step aside when investigators discover some simple, graspable motive on the part of the gunman. Until then, how about this.

This was a crime of boredom and intellect. A metaphysical crime mixing a sense of entitlement with a sense of having run out of amusements. This was a hobbyist murder.

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UD will be surprised if, like Leopold and Loeb, Stephen Paddock had any acquaintance with Nietzschean nihilism. Maybe he read Cormac McCarthy. That’s the mental landscape I’m sketching.

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His brother calls Paddock highly intelligent, successful, and rich – quite like the buddies who decided, in 1924, purely out of boredom, curiosity, grandiosity, and intellectual enjoyment of the complex technical and analytical steps it would take to carry out a perfect murder, to kill a local boy.

If it’s true that one of the cameras Paddock placed in his room was positioned for him to film himself (this hasn’t been confirmed), this would complete UD‘s picture of a narcissistic game-player (he was a compulsive high-stakes gambler) at the very end of his distracting, engrossing pastimes, a man who never grew up (two divorces, no children) and who decided to leave, at the end of his maddeningly empty life, the ultimate roomful of a bad boy’s toys.

Paddock died surrounded by more guns than he could possibly fire.

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Since what I’ve written reminds one of my readers of Don DeLillo, here he is:

This is World War III. It’s a fact. It’s everywhere. Innocent people are being slaughtered everywhere. It’s terrorism that is expanding … almost geometrically. What’s left? What happens next? We have our lone shooters, our individual terrorists. Where do they come from? What motivates them? I think in many cases the gun is the motive as well as the weapon itself. A gun makes it possible for an individual, a man—a young man, usually—to make sense of everything that’s happening to him, either in three dimensions or in his mind. It gives him a motive. It gives him a sense of direction. It’s a substitute for real life and it’s the way he will choose to end his life, as well as the life of innocent people, of course.

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UPDATE: Not quite the same, but an affiliated theory.

Stephen Paddock very well may have contemplated mass murder as a sensualist exercise.

Again, recall Leopold and Loeb: “They did it to see what it would feel like.”

… says everyone this morning, after the Las Vegas bloodbath.

There’s a simple … well, it’s not entirely a solution to some of America’s many massacres, but it’s something that could perhaps be effective in certain situations.

For all public outdoor events in urban settings, require the presence onstage of at least one rocket-propelled grenade. At least one speaker/performer would have to demonstrate competence in its use before the event could take place. A child could do it.

These things are reasonably portable and can be positioned to hit pretty high up, so once you detect the source of the gunfire, you could blast the RPG in that direction.

Serious damage will be done to the building, and to some of the people in it. But this is war.

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James Melton [whose son was killed] described other “angels” who helped his son and daughter-in-law in “that killing field that must have resembled the Marines landing on Omaha Beach.”

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“At one point I looked up and I thought, ‘are we at war?’“

… fall semester.

Thank God the Second Amendment is alive and well in this country.

Make next year’s reservations now.

But the beauty of it is that she has both. Capulet, Montague, Smith, and Wesson – they’re all there now at the University of Kansas:

It’s [now legal] to walk down the middle of Kansas’ serene Midwestern campus with a hidden firearm. The carrier will need neither a permit nor training.

Coaches are being real wussy about it.

“It is a deal that I will be very adamant about in a way of banning [guns],” [a] Kansas third-year coach said. “I don’t want weapons around for our team. I know it’s a bad, bad deal for us. I understand the politics involved in it. I get that. But we’re talking about kids with lives and kids getting pissed with each other and kids that are highly competitive with each other. I fear what it could blow into.”

You can’t ban guns for the team, dummy! That would be illegal.

“It’s a little scary,” said Kansas State athletic director Gene Taylor.

Ooh, little Genie’s scared…

So is Oklahoma State’s coach:

“I was in college, been to a bunch of parties, been around a lot of football players,” the coach said. “Moderation that should have been part of what we did, wasn’t. It was college, we were dumb. If you throw a gun in the mix, it’s not good. You make poor decisions. When you have a gun there, you have a chance to make a decision you can never make up for.”

And back in Kansas:

Kansas basketball coach Bill Self called the law “unbelievable.” He did not elaborate.

Who needs to elaborate? You bring a bunch of big macho guys to a college campus. You pump them up to be even more macho, more violent, on the field. If you’re the University of Oregon, you put up signs in their cafeteria that say EAT YOUR ENEMIES. You and everyone else treat the guys like kings, giving them free muscle cars, willing “hostesses” among the coeds, tutors to write their papers for them. The local cops look the other way when the guys do bad stuff. The guys learn that they can get away with anything because they play the game really violently.

Doesn’t it stand to reason that giving them a concealed weapon can only be for the best?

Off it goes, an unsecured gun in the Myrtle Beach Cracker Barrel.

“Yeah, all day today we’ve been showing off the bullet hole to customers, they’ve enjoyed the story, so at the end of the day everyone was okay and our customers are getting a kick out of it.”

The image of an important American politician crawling in agony across a baseball field, trying to limit himself to just one semiautomatic bullet, comes right out of the novels of this nation’s most celebrated contemporary writer, Don DeLillo.

Anyone who has read White Noise or Players knows that postmodern death and near-death à la DeLillo typically involve some combination of playtime activities, guns, and videotape. In DeLillo, death has lost the majesty, the redemptive possibilities, it had as late as, say Tolstoy’s famous story, “The Death of Ivan Ilych.” Now it’s a sudden violent event that happens while adults are playing miniature golf; and someone’s usually around to film them expiring on the little fake putting green.

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In Players, affluent American death occurs on a grownup golf course on a bright shiny day, with middle-class men, dressed in crayola colors, engaged in “that anal round of scrupulous caution and petty griefs.”

The golfers on this sweet green morning attend to their game. Together again momentarily on a particular fairway they appear almost to be posing in massed corporate glory before a distant flag. It is now that the vigilant hidden thing, the special consciousness implicit in a long lens, is made to show itself.

A man, his back to the camera, rises from the underbrush in the immediate foreground, about two hundred yards from the golfers. When he turns to signal someone, it’s evident he has a weapon in his right hand, a semiautomatic rifle. After signaling he doesn’t reassume his crouch. One of the golfers selects an iron.

This leisure-time massacre is actually part of a film being shown first-class passengers on a WhisperJet. None of them watches with much attention; they’re in an alcoholic/anxious haze.

The audience’s emotional distance from the bloody mess on the screen is deepened by the fact that they’re in an in-flight piano bar, with a performer who uses his instrument to comment in a campy way on what he’s seeing — on the irony of simultaneous golf and terrorism.

Watching golfers being massacred, to trills and other ornaments, seems to strike those in the piano bar … as an occasion for sardonic delight.

Not all postmodern deaths involve bullets, but virtually all, as presented in the work of DeLillo, involve playtime. In White Noise, set in a university, Professor Dimitri Costakis is “lost in the surf off Malibu. During the term break.” The school’s dean, who once “serve[d] as adviser to Nixon, Ford and Carter,” has recently met “his death on a ski lift in Austria.” Death in America is something that happens when you’re having fun. The ski lift dumps you out; the surf engulfs you; men with guns interrupt your game.

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A blimp flying over the U.S. Open went down Thursday just beyond a rim of trees surrounding Erin Hills. The pilot, the blimp’s only occupant, was airlifted from the scene of the crash but was reported as alert and conscious, according to police.

Fan video caught the deflated blimp as it floated to the ground.

That one happened on the same day as the baseball game. It’s hard not to laugh at some of these misadventures, hard not to greet them sardonically. The disparity between the triviality (“petty griefs”) of blimpish voyeuristic activity, and the deflation and airlifting is just funny. It’s just so graphic an illustration of our superficiality, our childish spectatorial lives, so utterly unprepared for seriousness, reality, the crash, the spray of bullets.

… and has now been shot dead.

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Update: Maybe not a gunman.

[A] university spokesman …. said some of the victims had been stabbed and others hit by a vehicle. It was not clear whether the attacker used a gun.

Now you can do this on campus as well as off! Y’all come down.

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Our students’ safety and well-being are paramount at the University of Texas.

SWAT officers ordered the suspects to come down with their hands up.

“Seeing that in West Campus is really just alarming,” [a student] said. “I saw the guns on them and the shields, so I was pretty terrified.”

Well, hold onto your hat, UT student! Booze, frats, and guns galore: Life of the mind, Texas.

Missouri legislators are furious: Football players at the University of Missouri can’t carry handguns. Coach says so.

Rep. Joe Don McGaugh, R-Carrollton, called the policy “unbelievable.”

McGaugh is clearly shaken. He will need time to himself before he’s able to focus on countermeasures. I’m sure his fellow legislators are in the same boat.

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Once McGaugh and other lawmakers feel able to act, UD can guarantee that the kids will get all the handguns they want. Relax.

If you’re from Texas you know this venerable phrase, reminding you every morning to pack your cock (not Glock) in your knapsack (UD is so old she calls backpacks knapsacks) before you go to school. It’s part of a campus-wide protest against the new conceal-carry-in-classrooms law.

UD, a fervent supporter of this nascent open dildoes movement, admits to struggling a bit with the concept, though. What is the connection between showing a dildo in public and protesting against people bringing concealed guns to university classes?

At first blush, the gesture sounds merely aesthetic:

Cocks Not Glocks, a [University of Texas Austin] protest group formed last fall, is urging students and others to openly carry the sex toys around campus, offering a multicolored counterpoint to the concealed weapons that holders of handgun licenses can now legally carry inside UT classrooms and most buildings.

One of the organizers elaborates:

“As long as you have a dick on your backpack, people will be thinking about the guns inside of other people backpacks” [Jessica] Jin said Tuesday, dildo strapped to her backpack.

So it’s an aide–mémoire, a way of jogging your memory about the new fact of concealed guns all around you. Plus: obscene/obscene:

“The State of Texas has decided that it is not at all obnoxious to allow deadly concealed weapons in classrooms; however, it does have strict rules about free sexual expression, to protect your innocence. You would receive a citation for taking a dildo to class before you would get in trouble for taking a gun to class. Heaven forbid the penis.”

However, the university has announced it’s down with the dong, the more the merrier, go ahead with the dildoes, so the obscenity thing lacks a certain oomph.

I guess UD thinks of it as a counter-demonstration sort of thing, a provocative, amusing “response” to conceal carry… Also maybe a comment on guns as an aide-de-male-sexual-inadequacy-feelings? The gesture certainly skews female, certainly suggests a mordant womanly comment on boys and their toys…

Anyway there’s a rally on campus today and you should go if you’re in town because there’s something deeply shameful – not to mention dangerous- about so many guns out and about in states like Texas. UD doesn’t blame the UT architecture dean for resigning and moving to a non-lunatic state in response to campus carry (which, if I know Texas, will very soon be campus open carry), and she certainly hopes other faculty follow. Already a number of people who had planned to enroll as UT students have announced they’ll go to gun-free schools instead. And now you’ve got the dildo brigade, which is at once amusing and deadly serious.

I’m a gun owner and Donald Trump doesn’t speak for me – or any of the gun owners I know. His suggestion on Tuesday that we “second amendment people” could take matters into our own hands if Hillary Clinton makes undesirable supreme court justice selections makes all gun owners look unhinged. But he doesn’t speak for us. He speaks only for himself.

… The responsibility to keep Trump out of the White House is on all of us, and that includes gun owners. We can’t let our care for the second amendment mean we turn a blind eye to this latest of many red flags.

After all, in the navy’s firearms training, we learn that ignoring the signs of danger can get us killed – so why would we ignore them here at home?

He-Man Trump and his hunting party bagged them some big donor game in Portland Oregon. Lined up three rich guys from that city to host a Seattle fundraiser in a couple of weeks. His campaign sent out fancy invitations in their names and waited for the RSVPs to roll in.

One of the three hosts is a Portland State University trustee – UD mentions this merely because this is a blog about universities and it’s always nice to find a university angle.

So with the press alerted and the invitations circulating, one, two, and then three of the hosts listed said it was the first they’d heard of it and actually Donald Trump can go fuck himself.

A Ferndale state senator is forced to explain why three Portland businessmen listed [as hosts] on an invitation for an upcoming Seattle fundraiser for Donald Trump say they have no plans to attend.

Republican Doug Ericksen is a Trump campaign leader – he says the draft invitation was prematurely circulated and released to the media before plans were finalized.

Premature circulation is the sort of thing that can happen to any guy who’s too excited for his own good, shooting stuff out before asking if it’s also good for his partner.

And it can definitely lead to hard feelings. That Portland State trustee, for instance.

“I have requested that the campaign and Republican Party correct their records,” [Peter] Stott says, “and remove my name from any invitations or other materials.”

He doesn’t sound happy.

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Update: Ah fuck it.

Trump has cancelled.

When you’re nineteen and you live in America and you’re bummed out about a breakup, you can mosey on down the lane and buy an AR-15 and blow away your ex plus a couple of random people in her vicinity. The shooter was about to be a sophomore at the University of Washington.