A country club in New Hampshire! A departure from hookah lounges in Louisiana.
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‘At least half a dozen people were taken to Nashua area hospitals with injuries that were not gunshot-related, sources told News 9 Investigates. Many were injured in the chaos of the shooting.‘
That’s one thing UD‘s been thinking about lately. In toting up our daily American shootings, we concentrate on the kill rate; we don’t focus much at all on the physically and emotionally injured that lie scattered about these scenes.
Oh, the nut in Nashua (he seems to have been another armed psychotic, but we’ll see) only managed to blow one person away; forget it; move on to today‘s bloody mess… We forget the maimed for life, the traumatized, the old people who snapped their legs trying to run, the children crushed by adults. We never bother thinking at all about, say, the owners and staff of businesses – like country clubs! – that labor every day to sustain an environment of calm, beauty, and sociality… sure, even of snobbery… and the whole point of the enterprise is its non-chaos, its safety from the shooting gallery out there. Regard them this morning, after one hundred people ran screaming from a killer on their trim verdant lawn: Glass everywhere, bright red blood on the bright green grass, Adirondacks upended and pulled apart, yellow police markers and tape, abandoned phones and games… It’s the last scene of the Great Gatsby, except that this is a group scene; it’s not just some rich guy gunned down in his magnificent pool on his magnificent estate. It’s a whole raft of wealthy suddenly wrenched from a subdued and beautiful setting into the savage insanity that is Anytown USA.
Watch for these would-be safety zones to look more and more like (ha) armed camps.