You don’t pay any attention to Hastings, Nebraska. Hell, you don’t pay any attention to Nebraska. But it’s itty bitty news stories like this one out of Hastings that tell you what’s going on in gun-blast USA.

Time was a punk revving his car a million miles an hour up and down the street where he lives would respond to complaints about that behavior by spitting on complainants or kicking the air and saying fuck you. Now, however:

Anthony Copley, 20, pulled a rifle on one of his neighbors, threatening to kill them.

The dispute came after one of the neighbors complained about Copley speeding through the residential area.

Police arrived on scene and arrested Copley for terroristic threats and use of a deadly weapon to commit a felony.

“Terroristic threats” is a new one; I guess it allows the court to increase jail time. But anyway, the wee lad no doubt owns lots of big guns and this is no doubt far from the first time he’s pulled the rifle he has on him at all times and stuck it in the face of someone bold enough to confront him about his behavior.

So this describes the new normal inside the blast furnace: Terrifyingly, terroristically, no place in America is safe from a rifle in your face because no place in America is without guns in everyone’s hands. You always have to assume that any complaint you make to any stranger or neighbor under any circumstance could eventuate in a rifle in your face.

Every locality in America has tons of stupid angry assholes like Anthony Copley, and almost every asshole has a rifle. Certain states – Alaska, Wyoming, Louisiana, Montana, New Mexico, Mississippi, Alabama – pretty much guarantee you’ll get a rifle in your face at some point. Everybody’s got guns and I guess everybody’s an asshole in those states. Enter at your own risk.

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And yet our bloodiest gunniest states, like Texas, absolutely refuse to blame all the guns for all the blood. Too dumb to grasp correlation, they cannot see that the gunniest states are, overwhelmingly, the bloodiest states. So here’s the poor desperate mayor of Bryan, Texas begging citizens to help him at least slow the gun bloodbath.

“If you see something, report it. If you know something, report it. The problems we are having right now is with youth with guns. It’s not the guns that are bad, it’s the person holding the gun, pulling the trigger,” [Bobby] Gutierrez said. “Please, I’m asking on behalf of our council here. Do your part as well and report and make sure the police aren’t there by themselves to do this by themselves cause if everyone is there during a shooting in the middle of a park, and no one sees anything, and no one’s giving them anything, they can’t do their job.”

It’s not the guns that are bad, folks! It’s the person pulling the trigger. Plus we have a moral issue with all the people standing around watching a shooting in the middle of a park who don’t say anything to the cops about what they saw.

Wonder why witnesses don’t talk. Wonder why blast-furnace states have large populations of silent terrorized people too afraid of all the assholes with guns even to give police a description of someone depraved enough to shoot guns in a public park.

“The person holding the gun” has always lived in Texas; assholes are always around. What’s changed is exactly the number, the normalization, the open carry, and the ease of purchase, of guns. What’s changed is the breakdown of civility and the emergence of paranoia in regard to all other people.