… gun range suicide. Nobody’s paying much attention, but GRS’s (as UD calls them) are becoming a social fact, a thing. Range owners are of course aware of the deepening problem, but what can they do? Shooting ranges HAND you a gun, babe, and it don’t get no better than that if you want to die. Just pick up the firearm and point. No at-home trauma for your family. No need even to pay for a gun.

We have oodles of suicides in this country, with some states (Montana, Wyoming) veritable self-killing fields. And these tend to be the same states with shooting ranges on every street corner. Watch as the GRS phenom becomes A Major Social Problem.

[A Baltimore woman] waited at [a] stoplight and allowed [a] squeegee worker to clean her car window, but noticed she had no cash and asked if he had Cash App or Apple Pay.

“He said I can put my information in, and I gave him my phone. I mean, very trusting, because I wouldn’t think that anybody would do anything bad. And he’s fiddling around with the numbers, and then he says, ‘Oh, Apple Pay didn’t work. I can do Cash App. And so he said, ‘I’ll put my information in.'” 

[She] said that the unidentified squeegee worker gave her phone back and said that it’s blank and it needs a password. At first, she said she did not understand what he was talking about as he handed her the phone back. 

“I figured it out, and when I put that number in, it said, ‘You sent $900.'”

O Canada.

Nevada is in crisis amid a catastrophic statewide freeze on gun sales due to a cyberattack. Two weeks on, the still-unresolved shutdown has The Silver State seeing red, with one state senator calling it “the worst disaster I’ve seen here since the 2018 Martin Fire.”

Inadequate fire power has kept so many Nevadans sheltered at home that schools across the state have shuttered, and mental health professionals report an increase in psychiatric holds as the situation overwhelms more and more people. “I thought it’d be a day or two and they’d fix it,” said Gladys Spangler of Eureka. “Two weeks later I’m like what in God’s name am I supposed to do?”

“Let us spray.”

Although gun dealers have urged patience, hundreds of thousands of citizens are becoming more and more militant. In the highest-profile response, believers all over the state now spend Sundays jammed into megachurches, where pastors hand out surplus pistols to parishioners and lead so-called Packing Prayers, in which worshippers shoot the guns upward while chanting Lord hear our recoil.

... Alberta let that slippery slope slip down
First you outlawed soft core
Now it's 1984
Alberta let your slope slip down

• Zen Lounge – 5316 Washington Ave
• Bar 5306 – 5306 Washington Ave Ste C
• XO – 5023 Washington Ave
• Lincoln Bar – 5110 Washington Ave
• Luxx – 5002 Washington Ave

You wanna lop off some of the country’s gun crime, you shut down the clubs. Clubs are where fuckwits with Glocks get drunk, start fights (usually over the club girls), and pull out weapons. And babe, it happens ALL THE TIME. Almost every Saturday, fuckwits and Glocks, Glocks and fuckwits.

Note that in Houston (see above list of now-shut clubs) most of it happens in Fuckwit Central, Washington Avenue. The folks who actually live around there have dreamt for years of a life without bullet holes in their bassinets. (Why isn’t supergross, supergunny Lounge 33 on the Houston closure list?) (Oh, okay. Already closed.) And wa-a-a-a-ll the mayor’s been doin this and been doin that but ain’t nothing changed see and who knows why maybe they don’t want federal troops but now they’re actually doing something.

Much of the crime has been associated with nightlife. Houston Mayor John Whitmire (D) last month announced the formation of a “club unit” of the Houston Police Department designated to target bars and clubs with citations.

His effort resulted in five club closures in a three-day period…

That’s so not enough closures, but, because the clubs represent a large and influential subculture, no city’s gonna have the balls to really get rid of them. They’ll shut them for awhile and then pretend to believe the bullshit the club tells them about new superduper hightech security (leaving open the question why an entertainment venue needs anti-terror level security) and reopen them. They’ll let them reopen under new names. And of course as to the guns — it’s Texas, folks! The more the merrier.

Tannerite, an explosive that goes boom – big boom – when hit by a high-velocity bullet, is part of the fun at a gun range near a housing development.

Some wonderful sentences in this review of a film centered on the Yale philosophy department.

Against all of this allegedly heady stuff, the score—by Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross—intentionally jars us from encroaching drowsiness with chortling woodwinds and shardlike piano chords that are the aural equivalent of jagged Plexiglass off-cuts. Remember, this isn’t just a movie; it’s art.

LOL.

And a paragraph for UD’s Morrissey-fan sister:

… [Chloe Sevigny] owns the movie’s single greatest moment: sitting with Alma at a college watering hole, she marvels that they’re playing a Morrissey song on the jukebox, given that he’s become persona non grata for his far-right political views. Alma corrects her: it’s not a Morrissey song that’s playing, but one by Morrissey’s band, the Smiths. (It’s “Heaven Knows I’m Miserable Now.”) Sevigny responds with a “same difference” shrug and goes back to her goblet of red wine. Not every encounter or exchange needs to entail a lesson in semantics, or the tyranny of cultural sensitivity, or the dominance of white males in academia and everywhere else. Sometimes a Morrissey song is just a Morrissey song. Even if it’s by the Smiths.

Thousands of militant hijabis all in black from head to toe and mad as hell cuz turns out some Iranian women aren’t militant hijabis all in black from head to toe — these chicks is real hard to control when they mass in the street and get whomped up about whores who don’t veil. They is spoiling for a fight, and, if the Islamic state doesn’t discourage them, will soon be shaving the heads and then beheading the heads of the hussies. So the president himself went on tv tother day to say okay okay if you don’t want to wrap your whole self in black I guess you don’t have to…

Concerned parents are speaking out after more than a dozen fights broke out during the Parker vs. Ramsay football game at Legion Field, an event meant to celebrate non-violence.

****************

Hey but no one fired a gun. In Birmingham Alabama, that counts as non-violence.

He is one tough son of a bitch; but what do you want? He’s a southern sheriff! Blythewood SC’s lawman, Leon Lott says, “It is legal for people to shoot guns on private property, but [I] draw the line when homes are being hit by bullets.” All over a nearby residential neighborhood, bullets shot by some dude and his friends at a homemade gun range are piercing walls and chairs and tables and NOT people yet, but hold on jest a bit and they’ll kill some kid playing outside.

It thinks letting parents wrap their ten year old daughters in veils and black sacks is a beautiful instance of religious freedom, and that keeping that behavior out of schools is ‘discriminatory and authoritarian.’ But of course covering up your child like that is utterly discriminatory and authoritarian, which is why country after country is banning child veiling in schools.

We all understand that you have to throw black coverings over girls at the youngest age possible so they begin right away to accustom themselves to being inferior and hidden relative to their brothers and fathers and male schoolmates. We get it. But we don’t have to like it, and we have laws. In Europe, we think women are equal to men.

… [The latest mass murderer] seems to have been driven by an all-consuming, destructive force, a nihilism—the conviction that life is meaningless; that words like truth, justice and God are empty slogans; that everything must be razed…

Earlier this year, the FBI introduced a new category of criminal: the Nihilistic Violent Extremist, or NVE.

If jihadis kill for Allah, and anti-government extremists like Timothy McVeigh killed in the name of some demented notion of freedom, then NVEs kill simply because they want to kill. They don’t have much in the way of ideological commitments—as the confusing hodgepodge of aphorisms Westman scrawled into his rifle, pistol, and shotgun makes clear—beyond a commitment to chaos and evil themselves…

[Let me pause here and say yes. Lots of people are rummaging in this guy’s writings/statements for this hatred/that cause; but since the man was manifestly, classically, paradigmatically insane, this is a waste of time. His was a literally fractured psyche. One can learn things – most of them already known – about psychosis from him, but that’s kind of it.]

“The kind of person that we’re seeing today,” Martin Gurri, the author of The Revolt of the Public and the Crisis of Authority in the New Millennium, told me, “is not promoting a cause.”

He added that they were propelled by a general, wide-ranging fury…

[W]hy [have] so many Americans … become so susceptible to the void?

*******************

To the void, and to the rage that the sense of the void generates.

One can feel free-floating nihilism without the destructive rage.  Albert Camus, one random evening in Prague, suddenly felt overwhelmed by “the death of the soul.” James Agee, alone on a broiling Sunday in Alabama, felt

… the subdual of this sunday deathliness in whose power was held the whole of the south… nothing but the sun was left, faithfully blasting away upon the dead earth…

This is writing that captures the conviction and the feeling all thoughtful people occasionally have, that – in the words of Leopold Bloom, struck down for a moment in a Dublin pub by absolute nihilism – no one is anything. 

Don DeLillo, in Libra, imagines Lee Harvey Oswald feeling nihilistic one hot afternoon in Texas:

He walked through empty downtown Dallas, empty Sunday in the heat and light. He felt the loneliness he always hated to admit to, a vaster isolation than Russia, stranger dreams, a dead white glare burning down.

But Oswald’s angry nihilism, like that of the jihadis and McVeigh, emerges into the light with a particular ideology that justifies slaughter, whereas the NVE is more insidious because ideologically he remains largely underground, unconnected to a group or group identity. He may be discoverable in this or that online violence cult, but basically unless the people closest to him – parents, friends, teachers – are sufficiently alarmed by his accumulation of weapons, or increasingly wild behavior, to report him to the police and/or try to get him committed, he’s free to mass slaughter.

***********************

And this is UD’s thing: People have to report. And the report has to go somewhere. Why aren’t these manifestly, frighteningly, sick people on our radar? Part of it is indifferent, protective, deluded, or themselves crazy, parents. Some of these parents pay a very high price – their kid kills them before heading off to the local preschool; or, if they survive, some of them go to prison.

I ain’t claiming that in every case parents should have suspected something and acted on that suspicion; what I’m saying is this: It’s a new world in the US; hundreds of millions of high-powered guns are around, and anyone can get plenty of them. The pope calls this “a pandemic of arms.”

Which makes having even a mildly disturbed, mildly in trouble with the law, child/adolescent (look at what Sue Klebold, mother of a 17 year old mass murderer, has said about this) very worrisome, and at the very least our schools (where every day loaded guns are discovered in backpacks) should be ready to expel people who give evidence of being dangerous. It’s obscene that it’s still quite hard, in our public schools, to remove fledgling gunnies; in all respects — family, school — we have to toughen up.

We all know that the 15 year old in Washington state who killed his family with a gun to which the father gave him access didn’t just wake up one night and do this; but because by many accounts the household had little do with the outside world, no one beyond the immediate family could judge how nihilistic/enraged he was. This isn’t an argument for an intrusive, freedom-constraining state, but it is an argument for far greater social/familial awareness/responsiveness around the now-toxic mix of adolescence, mental disorder, and guns.

*****************

All of this is necessary because of a much larger nihilism: In this nation, we assign no particular meaning or value to death by gun. It’s something that triggers a thoughts and prayers tweet. It doesn’t even have meaning when children are pulped. We just continue working to make it easier for everyone to get and carry guns. “Everyone dies. That’s life,” says an Oklahoma state senator in response to a question about his state’s astounding gun suicide rate.

That’s very strange, that he says that, but we can’t afford to waste time analyzing it. As we speak, the next insane teenager with a high capacity arsenal prepares.

It’s very much local news, but see how parents got together and petitioned and packed meeting rooms at this Arlington Washington high school and succeeded in throwing out a pistol packing menace? “The gun had a bullet in the chamber, the safety off and an additional full magazine of bullets.” Insane public school rules make exile very difficult to achieve, but under humongous pressure school administrators got this person’s parents to agree to move him online or something.

Meanwhile, after a junior high school student brought a loaded gun to a Springfield Mo. school, one of the parents there said something rather quotable.

“A student shouldn’t be scared to go to school. Really, they shouldn’t. It’s supposed to be fun. Not death.”

We should soon expect to see this new motto on school buildings all over the US: FUN. NOT DEATH.