Well, you know what they say. Firearms in the home are far more likely to kill you than save your life by allowing you to kill an intruder. Here’s a rather blatant example – you grant your dumb fucked up 15 year old access to your weapons and watch him slaughter all of you cuz he reasons that the best way to deal with flunking a test is familicide.
Dumb? He tried to palm the massacre off on his younger brother, telling police the kid killed himself after blowing everyone away. Except that his head had ‘several’ holes in it.
The hapless Gresham High School principal unable to perceive, and respond to, the carnage over which she presides has resigned. (Background here.) Certes, whoever replaces her faces the same appalling violence and gunplay; but almost any form of leadership is better than Blanche DuBois sashaying around, spraying perfume, throwing paper shades on bulbs, and insisting everything is peachy.
Maricopa County prosecutor Neha Bhatia said at Jeffrey Michael Kelly’s initial court appearance on Wednesday that federal agents told her about the large seizure made after Kelly’s arrest. Scopes, body armor and silencers were also found, she said. A machine gun was discovered in the car he was driving.
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A teenage boy allegedly killed his engineer father, his mom and three of his four siblings in their home …
Mark Humiston, 42, his wife Sarah and three of their children were found shot dead on Monday inside their rustic mansion in Fall City by Lake Alice, about 30 miles east of Seattle …
When Olmos Park police obtained a search warrant for [a] residence on Monday, authorities found an AK-47 manufactured in China [hidden from police] behind a TV mounted inside of [a] bedroom, the affidavit stated. A video obtained of a walk-in safe room full of guns inside [presumed wife-murderer] Brad Simpson’s house showed what appeared to be the same weapon.
Through further investigation, authorities confirmed that the gun was an AK-47 that could switch between full and semi-automatic …
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The largest number of gun-indebted Americans are the tens of thousands of dead depressives in our vast Suicide Belt.
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UPDATE on the fanatic:
“A rough calculation estimates that this guy spent somewhere between $75,000 and $100,000 on ammunition. It’s hard to imagine it was to defend his life and property, unless he was preparing to defend them against the North Korean army. And I don’t think he spent it for sportsman’s purposes, unless he was hunting a T. rex for Thanksgiving dinner.
This country’s insane affection for its firearms is enough of a problem in normal times. But finding a guy with his own personal heavy-weapons platoon in his bedroom at this particular time in history makes me want to hide under the couch until it all passes.”
Deason built a small private, elevated beach for lounge chairs. Not a fan of the coarse California sand, the billionaire spent about $40,000 to import the Georgia sand found at Augusta National Golf Club …
It’s impressive to see Americans finally perceive the reality of much of the amazing bloodshed around here. Literary types like UD know this as a variant of Chekhov’s Gun Principle:
“If in the first act you have hung a pistol on the wall, then in the following one it should be fired. Otherwise don’t put it there.”
If you’re going to hang weapons in every corner of your state, the weapons are going to be fired. We tend, like traditional playwrights, to affix motives to this firing, but the world has moved well past Chekhov and Ibsen, into Beckett and post-Beckett, and this is a world in which people just do things. No reason.
“Vladimir: What do we do now? Estragon: Wait. Vladimir: Yes, but while waiting. Estragon: What about hanging ourselves? Vladimir: Hmm. It’d give us an erection. Estragon: (highly excited). An erection! Vladimir: With all that follows. Where it falls mandrakes grow. That’s why they shriek when you pull them up. Did you not know that? Estragon: Let’s hang ourselves immediately!”
Stage One: Clear a biggish circular area at the very top of our property. Decades of twigs, vines, trash trees, and odd elements (some previous owner lay down a small square outlined in bricks) had to be raked and lopped through, leaving a well-established vinca/English ivy ground cover. A rough circular dirt path already sort of exists; parts of it also need to be cleared.
Happy Soldier Mr UD carries a red rake full of leaves away from the garden (on the left).
Dog poses in the garden-to-be, amid stumps and bricks.
This stage will continue for awhile. In line with the garden’s purpose, I listen to Life Wisdom (Alan Watts, Carl Jung, the Stoics, others) while I work. One immediate problem: They mainly disagree with each other.
I’m thinking a lot about elements. A fountain definitely appeals. A fire pit. Solar lamps. Aromatic plants. Grasses for motion… Yet the place is pretty shady, closely circled by very big old trees…
News reports … said the city could be short as many as 300 police officers… Birmingham was [in fact] short [only] 63 “patrol officers,” [insisted the mayor]… [Later that day he admitted] the number was actually 172 patrol officers… That number didn’t include other officers such as homicide detectives responsible for investigating the city’s record-setting murders.
… Between 2021 and 2023, the city lost 200 police officers.
That’s 24% of its police force gone in just two years.
The department is losing civilian employees, too, but more steadily and over a longer period. Between 2014 and 2023, the department dropped from 277 civilian staff to 177.
By the summer of 2023, combining sworn officers and staff, the Birmingham police department had at least 294 vacant positions.
