A local reporter chats with frightened, anonymous business owners along the deadliest stretch of Murder Beach. Most cite large numbers of menacing, armed, high teenagers as their least favorite thing about life on the boardwalk. The sense of menace, and the big police presence that scary people draw to the area, more and more discourages folks looking for a relaxed good time with their kids.

What sucks is there’s no solution. South Carolina prides itself on having just about the weakest gun laws in the nation, and I guess the legislature is working every day to make them even weaker. Says here SC also (natch) “suffers one of the highest rates of gun homicides in the nation,” but if it really were suffering it would take a look at laws insisting that every tyke in the state get a big effing gun and tote it around. Maybe it could tweak the laws so that armed teenyboppers stop bopping everybody.

It’s almost always an argument at a large private house party, almost always a paid admission party; and as the gunfights proceed, many bloodied screaming people almost always pour out onto the driveway, the yard, the street, and the neighbors’ yards. If there’s a continued exchange of fire (likely), pedestrians and neighbors had also better run.

When (five minutes later) forty police and emergency vehicles race to the location, many groaning dying bullet-riddled bodies greet them. This week’s mass shooting took place in cute l’il Hickory NC, and at least twelve high school students were shot. UD’s gonna guess the killer was a 17 year old guy.

It’s like a battle scene. It’s also like a movie, since reporters have also arrived, and they are watching and filming.

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

Since the people who run the towns, cities, and states of this country know with total assurance that jammed late night paid admission house or boat parties, and of course jammed late night sleazy lounges, are prime mass shooting locations, you might wonder why officials don’t shut down/curtail open-all-night sleazy lounges full of local gun-bearing criminals. You might wonder why they don’t respond to neighbors’ complaints about the parties. Why do they wait for the gunfights and the dead bodies? Once they know what houses are being rented out to crazy gunnies, why don’t they shut down their business?

The answer is obvious. Gunlove in America looks the other way when children are massacred by known madmen with guns at our elementary schools; gunlove looks the other way every bloody Saturday night. Remarkably, most Americans really don’t care.

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

Multiple shooters; at least eighty shots fired.

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

“[W]e don’t believe that this was random in a circumstance that might endanger the community.”

Also like clockwork, local authorities announce that hundreds of people running through your neighborhood, desperately trying to elude multiple AK-bearing shooters, in no way endangers your community.

Like high school graduations.

Theme of this year’s Garrett Park July 4 parade is The Novel, and UD is going as Ulysses. I’ll be tossing lollipops that say READ ULYSSES to the throngs.

Imagine no more!

O sole mio!
He was my sun!
Now Leonard Leo
Has come undone

He is a sleazebag
He has b.o.
His brand-new name tag:
STINKBUTT LEO

O porco, o porco Dio!
Disgusting Leo
Sta in front a me

“To say it’s not a threat to the community is a big reach,” said [Jeremy] Evans.

I mean, on the most literal level, one or more people shooting wildly into crowds is an obvious threat to any local community; and in this latest case the police haven’t arrested anyone, so the threat remains.

And after all shooting is not uncommon in notorious Myrtle Beach and environs, so a general menace remains. UD can understand the comical tendency of local officials everywhere to declare, after big mass shootings/killings, that yay! our community is safe but yeah we keep getting these isolated, totally not dangerous events… but she’s with Jeremy Evans – a spot of honesty would help.

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

Update: They’ve made an arrest. A 19 year old.

… but for you, only the best: A golf course in super-exclusive Jupiter Florida – typical residence along the course – where four golfers were shot at by a guy who lives in one of the residences. They piled into their golf cart to escape. Must have been cursing all the way: Fucking golf cart! Next time I’ll park my Hennessey Venom F5 on this hole!

Mayor [Errick] Simmons stated, “Over the past several days, our community has been deeply shaken by a surge in violent crimes, including multiple shootings, acts of gun violence, and senseless killings.”

In the same statement, the mayor declared an “immediate State of Emergency.”

The Greenville [Miss.] City Council voted on the curfew. According to the mayor, the curfew will be effective immediately from 9:00 p.m. to 6:00 a.m. Additionally, nightclubs and other similar businesses must close by midnight.

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

Gettin too bumpy with all them guns, and now with this Alex Foster thing bloody Greenville’s all over the national media. Now everyone knows our little town’s a bloodbath. Let’s try something.

Short of doing anything about the guns, of course. It’s Mississippi. “Single worst rate of gun deaths in the country.”

LOL

Steven Pinker.

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

More:

Universities should set the expectation that faculty members leave their politics at the classroom door, and affirm the rationalist virtues of epistemic humility and active open-mindedness. To these ends, a bit of D.E.I. for conservatives would not hurt. 

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

As with its other maladies, Harvard’s antisemitism has to be considered with a modicum of discernment. Yes, the problems are genuine. But “a bastion of rampant anti-Jew hatred” with the aim of “destroying the Jews as a first step to destroying Western civilization”? Oy gevalt!

… The concern for Jews is patently disingenuous, given Mr. Trump’s sympathy for Holocaust deniers and Hitler fans. The obvious motivation is to cripple civil society institutions that serve as loci of influence outside the executive branch. As JD Vance put it in the title of a 2021 speech: “The Universities Are the Enemy.”

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

The Faculty of Arts and Sciences has eliminated the “diversity statements” that vetted job applicants for their willingness to write woke-o-babble…

[Yeah. UD was shocked when Harvard allowed itself to get pulled in to this archetypically bush league faculty mandate. She isn’t surprised that crappy to mediocre schools insist on them. But Harvard?]

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

Pinker himself is an example of a truly beleaguered minority: A morally decent rationalist.

 Using his Kurdish connections, [Peter Galbraith] has helped get more than two dozen children of various nationalities out of [ISIS detention] camps… Over the course of a year, he made three trips to Syria to search [for two young boys]. On his third visit, in November 2022, camp officials brought [them] to meet him in a small office… After a DNA test proved their identities, the boys were transferred to an orphanage-like facility within the camps, where they were able to have weekly video calls with their grandparents in Minnesota.

They now live with their family in Minnesota. Their [repentant, cooperating] ISIS father will be in jail here for ten years.

Those who follow TSU know that the jailing, for eight years, of one of its law school deans, was hardly the thievery of one set of hands. The school’s always been pretty filthy, top to bottom.

Now in its [seventy-eighth] year, it has hardly known a time when its fiscal affairs were not in chaos, when its board of regents was not dysfunctional, when its graduation rate was not shockingly low…

The theft of scholarship money by a dean does in fact reflect the culture of TSU, a corrupt and dysfunctional school that should not exist.

In Myrtle Beach, in Philadelphia, mass gatherings and rapid gunfire from weapons modified with gun switches guarantee many fellow Americans for us to memorialize.

Or twenty miles north; I’m figuring the local shooters moved this weekend’s fun away from Murder Beach proper cuz it’s crawling with cops.

This distance from the boardwalk, they were free to shoot eleven people. An impressive number, even by American standards.

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

UPDATE: Happened on a party boat! Did people jump into the water? And eleven shot because it’s hard to run away when you’re drunk, high, and on a boat.

Police are searching for “a motive.” Hm, hm, what could it be. Cram a bunch of drunks, several of whom are armed, on a boat. Motive would be, you know, someone pushed someone aside while reeling around trying not to fall over. BANGBANGBANG

ANOTHER UPDATE: When you go to Facebook, you get all kinds of video and commentary. Some say it was an argument. Some say it was a hate crime. Some say some people drowned. We’ll see.

AND ANOTHER: For all the fervid imaginings of Facebookers, it sounds as though our latest mass shooting was exactly what you’d expect: Too many drunk/high assholes packed into a closed space. Someone always seems to get pissed off (or just pissed) and start shooting everybody.