Brevard Co.'s Representative Fine
Is so violent and wretched a swine
That even old AIPAC
Takes a startled step way back
When he speaks what is on his foul mind

‘The Hamptons are less a location that’s a beach than a beach that forgot it was a beach. The place has become the rictus grin of the nouveau riche. It’s the Upper East Side’s revenge against urban humidity and decay, a spiritual center of sorts devoted to musing smugly upon your life and how it’s gone so right.‘

Sing it.


Now is the panicle season
Humidity is hell
We're sweating well beyond reason
O hell now sing o hell

Because Nevada has its head up its ass, New Yorkers die.

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

“New York has some of the strongest gun laws in the nation. We banned assault weapons. We strengthened our Red Flag Law. We closed dangerous loopholes. But our laws only go so far when an AR-15 can be obtained in a state with weak gun laws and brought into New York to commit mass murder,” [Gov. Kathy] Hochul said in a statement on Tuesday morning. “Congress must summon the courage to stand up to the gun lobby and finally pass a national assault weapons ban before more innocent lives are stolen.”

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

Nevada permits open carry, whereas New York does not.

Additionally, assault weapons are banned in New York but allowed in Nevada; there are some exceptions to this rule.

Another notable difference is that in New York, local jurisdictions such as cities and counties can enact stricter gun laws than the state.

In Nevada, jurisdictions cannot impose stricter regulations than those established by the state.

Not sure where this incredulity comes from. Multiple mass shootings all over the country are producing volunteers/veterans/victims of more than one theater of war. I saw action in Vegas and in Reno…

UD doesn’t understand much of what real estate super-executive Wesley LePatner is saying here; but then, before LePatner was pulverized by an M4 assault rifle in her building’s lobby yesterday, she moved in a world alien to UD’s.

What UD does understand is that she was way smart (Yale, history), hugely enterprising and ambitious, an art-lover, and a loving wife and mother. She came from generations of accomplished New Yorkers, and embodied the energy, brains, and civic disposition of the sort of people who work inside the city’s most iconic buildings.

An altogether exceptional person. And she was at the height of her powers when a madman who was able to get hold of an assault rifle (this is America, after all) blew her to pieces.

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

And never was Wayne LaPierre’s famous saying (updated by UD) more true:

“The only way to stop a bad guy with an M4 assault rifle is with a good guy with an M4 assault rifle.”

It’s a goddamn shame Wesley LePatner wasn’t carrying an XM7/M7 Battle Rifle yesterday. What’s with New York’s restrictive gun laws?

” … I’m going to kill myself with an M4 assault rifle. But first I want to massacre whoever I encounter in this building.”

Killed five people and injured six in midtown Manhattan.

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

“[E]very country contains mentally ill and potentially violent people. Only America arms them.”

So begins the coverage of a suicide on the 13th best grounds – a man with a handgun, of course; and of course we are instructed to call it a tragedy long before we know the circumstances.

In America, all suicides are automatically granted tragedy (“an event causing great suffering, destruction, and distress, such as a serious accident, crime, or natural catastrophe”) status; but this increasingly common event, well on its way to becoming a banality in places like Wyoming, seems to UD to be running out out of gas, tragedy-wise.

Certainly – as UD can attest – when someone near/dear to you does the deed, it’s staggering; but qua daily American newsfeed, qua ye olde quotidian, it’s as impossible to tragedify tens of thousands of bummed guys with guns as it is to get worked up about tens of thousands of bummed guys pointing guns at others.

For guidance on this, UD goes to OK State Sen. Nathan Dahm, who, asked about his state’s astounding suicide rate, said “Everyone dies. That’s life.” When everyone’s got – let’s stick with 13 – guns around the house, including one right there on the nightstand for your convenience during a dark night of the soul (we all get ’em), what do you expect? Eventually the coverage of suicides (if coverage there be) will focus more on the rankings of the golf courses where some of them take place and less on the so-called tragedy of the event.

The suicide itself, in other words, ain’t much of a hook anymore; you’re going to have find another angle.

… Tom Lehrer songs – every single one of them – so it’s hard for her to know which to feature here. But there’s one she sings more than all the others, so…

Now that Hulk Hogan has died at 71, the media, top wrestling honchos, and particularly the Trump administration are verbosely mourning this leather-skinned mass of steroids and bile stuffed in spandex. 

LOLOLOL go, Dave Zirin!

The Hulk Hogan of 2025 embodied all that is wrong with this country. He should be remembered as a living expression of our national decay: a hero exposed as a fraud, a fraud exposed as a coward, and a coward who cried with joy upon finding an authoritarian who told him that his sins were, in fact, virtues.

You know. Trump.

Child on child murder (time was, we’d go the shooter is only 28? now it’s yeah yawn he’s 18…) in a University of New Mexico dorm room seems to have involved the shooter going berserk, either from drugs/alcohol, or natural berserkness.

 Fuentes fled the dorm room and went toward his car. State police say Fuentes ended up on the first story roof of the Mesa Vista building where they say he smashed multiple windows, injuring himself.

State police say blood stains, a stolen Glock 9mm handgun, keys, and a pair of blue jeans were left on the roof of the Mesa Vista building.

He was driving his father’s car and holding a stolen gun; in a desperate effort not to be caught, he ditched the gun, the car, his bloody pants, etc.

Two guys in a pickup truck thought it’d be a good idea to pick up a crazed bloody half-naked kid, though they must have had second thoughts cuz the cops arrested him on the highway.

His young life flamed out in one way action packed gunny night… He’ll spend the next fifty years telling the story of his last free day to generations of inmates…

‘Norway grants full pay, capped at a level higher than the average wage, for up to 12 months of continuous sick leave, part of what the International Monetary Fund has called a “costly and distortionary social benefit system.”‘

To: All editors and writers

Subject: Letter approval policy

Someone approved publication of this letter to the editor which appeared in yesterday’s edition. We need to find out who did this, and we need to remind staff of Daily Cowboy policies. Hence the meeting.

The letter breaks a variety of editorial rules, prominent among them restrictions on content linking firearms and suicide. But it goes well beyond this, lecturing our readers (from the writer’s perch at the Bloomstein School of Health in New York City) on red flags, storage, and other matters in which this state and this paper take no interest.

I look forward to seeing all of you at the meeting.

Managing Editor

New Mexico is currently – arguably – America’s most dangerous state. Read this post about Albuquerque. Remember that in 2023 a desperate NM governor declared a health emergency that made it illegal for anyone to carry a gun for thirty days. Everybody went nuts and boohooed and fuckyoued and i’ll sue your assed but the poor woman had just had enough of eleven year olds reduced to bloody pulps and she couldn’t think of anything else to do. She had it in her silly mind that murder by gun has something to do with guns.

Things are still so bloody in NM that I would avoid the state. An artsy weekend in Taos, sure; but don’t, for instance, let your kid go to college there. As we speak, the University of New Mexico is locked down – on new student orientation day! – because a shooter has already killed one person and injured another, and the police can’t find the guy.

What I’m trying to tell you is that statistically you’re significantly more likely to get blown away in and around Albuquerque NM than in most other places in this country; and even if you dodge every bullet, you might find it a little traumatizing to be in this ultimate gunny setting all the time. There are tons of colleges in Boston.

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

They caught the dude but haven’t identified him yet. Based on voluminous precedent, let’s play Pin the Tail on the Suspect.

He’s a guy.

He’s nineteen years old.

Skinny.

White.

Lives with mom and dad, who own twenty guns. He owns ten.

Name long Mayflower kind of thing: Edwin “Win” Stackpole the Third.

Everyone who knows him knows he’s nuts, “and I always tell everyone,” says an acquaintance to a reporter, “that he shouldn’t be anywhere near guns.”

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

I was off on the age by one year. Nineteen seems young, but in fact the killer was eighteen, and he killed a fourteen year old.

 [T]he four were hanging out in the dorm room — which belonged to one of the occupants, a student — playing video games when the shots rang out. He said police were still investigating why gunfire erupted. He also declined to discuss why the 14-year-old was on campus, or what relation he had to others in the room.

Ooooh motive let’s see… The babe wouldn’t stop playing Bulletstorm and it pissed off the teenager who has been looking, for some time, for an excuse to shoot off one of his guns. There’s your motive.

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

18-year-old Suspect Arrested in Shooting at University of New Mexico that Left 14-year-old Dead

In current American terms, 18 means ‘veteran shooter.’ Gun-onset age keeps dropping, so much so that soon the more routine headline will read

14-year-old Suspect Arrested in Shooting that Left Ten-year-old Dead

and so on, over the years, down the line.

And hey – capitalism.