… rides the wave of the state’s future:

According to quarterly crime data provided by Fayetteville police, homicides in the city are up 366% so far this year compared to the previous one, with 14 incidents reported so far this year.

For comparison, Raleigh has reported 11 incidents this period, up 22% from 2024 over the same time period.

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At the Fayetteville Dogwood Festival on April 26, attendees were shocked as they heard gunfire nearby and were swiftly evacuated by police, who discovered a car just yards from the festival grounds with gunshots through it. 

The only thing shocking is the shock.

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With Fayetteville their role model, Raleigh and the rest of the state will find their own gun footing, and can expect similar, if not superior, carnage.

More than 31,000 Americans died by firearms in 2024. Among the victims, 250 were children younger than 11. More than 1,000 were between 12 and 17.

Seventy-five were police officers.

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The guy citing these numbers points out – uncontroversially, obviously – that almost no one in this country gives a shit. But UD has been proposing something else: Americans like it. They like watching it. They like doing it. As a country, we say: This is how we do it.

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And if you don’t let us do it – the way Hawaii isn’t letting us do it – we are gonna gang up on you and fucking FORCE you to let us do it. We’re gonna put you in legal HELL and make you pay to try to defend your low murder rate until you are fucking bankrupt.

For Show Kindness week at her elementary school, he gave her this hat to wear —

— and when the school told her to take it off (gun massacre at a nearby school not long ago) he filed free speech court cases all over the place! His appeals keep getting unanimously rejected, but I’m sure he’s planning to take it to the Supreme Court. What a dad!

… time, the Herculaneum scroll haltingly gives up its words. And we get to sit back and be amazed at the technology that finds them.

… where blogging continues.

Zippity doo dah
Zippity day
My oh my 
What a fine Houston day
Sixteen are injured, one passed away
Zippity doo dah
Zippity day

Guns represent many things. In the first quarter of the twenty-first century they are emerging as emblematic of the end of public events.

Festive parades and civic gatherings die when there’s always a respectable chance someone will shoot at the people gathered, or (just as demoralizing) a group of people nearby will be shooting at each other. The headlines are reserved for American parades where happy families are mowed down by nuts with guns, but you’re no doubt missing the smaller, quite frequent, stories of gatherings suddenly reduced to panicked stampedes by multiple gunshots. Something along these lines happens many weekend nights all over the country, the most recent last Friday in Tallahassee.

A large crowd gathered in the FAMU Way Playground near Railroad Square became a scene of chaos and gunfire the night of May 2.

It happened less than an hour after the conclusion of the Square’s monthly “First Friday” event, which celebrates the arts at the opening of each month.

Lt. Robin Abney, a watch commander for the Tallahassee Police Department, told the Democrat that the department was called to the area at about 9:50 p.m. with reports of shots fired. 

… One video of the scene circulating on social media shows a large crowd running after the sound of five rapid-fire gunshots. Another video shows a large fight in the crowd spilling into the street before the shooting, when people start screaming and running for cover.

The gunfire came after the close of the First Friday celebration that draws crowds to the arts district between 6 and 9 p.m.… [T]he incident took place in [a] city playground …

Yes, where kiddies play…

The shooting is at least the 22nd serious shooting this year in the capital city and county. 

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At least the 22nd… serious shooting… The number is much higher, but shooting is so common a lot of it isn’t called in. And how serious is serious these days? Does serious mean at least three people hit? More? Does someone have to be in at least critical condition, though not all the way to dead?

And consider the thinking some local arts enthusiast experiences now.

OOH the arts, the arts… What a fucking loser I am to get all excited about THE ARTS when all I get for showing up for THE ARTS is a barrage of bullets. Fuck the arts.

Read the whole thing.

New Mexico: Land of Drunk Heavily Armed Idiots

… Skyway.

It’s true that we’ve had a field day with lacrosse and sadism on this blog. Far as I can figure, the deep alcoholism endemic to the sport, its privileged-folk provenance, and the near-universal tendency toward hazing in high school and college athletics, produces extreme specimens like George Huguely, and less extreme but still very dangerous people like the guys on the Syracuse high school team.

Huguely, currently rotting in jail, was a U Va lacrosse player who got drunk and beat his girlfriend to death:

In truth, there are many places in [lacrosse’s] culture where nights like the one Huguely had at Washington and Lee University in November 2008 – when he was Tasered after resisting arrest and shouting slurs at a black, female officer who had found him stumbling into oncoming traffic – garner acceptance and credibility. As with other sports teams and fraternities, stories like these are traded like war stories among lacrosse players; they’re the battle ribbons of a culture that enjoys hard-drinking and recklessness. They’re a kind of proof of one’s weekend warrior bona fides.

One thing to remember, as we talk a bit more about the latest degeneracy, is that the lads have guns now. When you add guns to alcoholism, entitlement, and sadism, you get what people refer to as extreme hazing, which is simply extreme sadism. Among the very young. Sixteen. Fifteen.

Aggression and alcohol abuse, of course, are hardly the province of lacrosse alone when it comes to men’s [high school and] college athletics. But, when it comes alongside lacrosse, there’s an implied element of absolute indifference and arrogance as well.

We’re into group psychopathy at this point, an unbounded Lord of the Flies viciousness. As a team you derive splendid new forms of human abuse and let their effects amuse you as you film your victims in order to share their agony with other sadists. (Sadism, you know, is very common.) Or just to watch your weeping pleading shrieking victims over and over in your bedroom. Lots of hazing – fraternity as well as sports – now involves threats with guns; but we can certainly anticipate actual killing with guns in the hazing setting quite soon.

You recall sports-only Marshall’s criminalized football team that we met back in 2015, right? Remember its way-impressive ranking on the Grid of Shame? Its contempt for its entire non-football playing faculty? Did I mention its criminalized football team?

Well, reverence for the Marshall Way of Recruitment survives all these years later, with one of their recent additions all drugged up and shot up on the streets of Huntington — and Marshall has even been quick to 404 the dude from its heroes page and good job on that Marshall though when you do it as often as this school does I guess you get it down to a science.

Are you kidding? Now I’ve heard everything.

You're never too deranged
To get firepower at a range.
Even if you're totally off
You'll still get a Kalashnikov.

Complaints about shooting and violence are nothing new in downtown Myrtle Beach. In 2017, a shooting on Ocean Boulevard on Father’s Day injured six people and brought much attention to Myrtle Beach because a tourist happened to livestream the incident on Facebook.

In 2018, an off-duty employee of RidTydz on North Ocean Boulevard was shot inside the establishment and died. A lawsuit filed by the man’s family said that the popular tourist spot “was becoming known as a problem area for increasing incidents of violence, shootings and murders to the extent that Myrtle Beach had been infamously nicknamed ‘Murder Beach.’”

In 2020, then-Myrtle Beach City Councilman John Krajc told ABC 15 News that the violence had to end. “If we stop making ourselves the ‘discount beach,’ over time that culture can change,” he said. “We have to remember this is Myrtle Beach, not ‘Murder Beach,’ not ‘Dirty Myrtle.’” …

[The mayor complained about] “hotels who choose not to clean themselves up, and offer rooms at $40-$45 a night” and businesses along Ocean Boulevard that cater to the wrong crowd by selling “graphic” T-shirts, drug paraphernalia and “things that are not welcoming to families.”

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Murder Beach isn’t working class; it’s sub-proletarian. It’s dirt cheap, ugly, porny, druggy, boozy, gunny. Its clubs are loud, extremely gross, and feature really cheap alcohol. Outside the clubs, squatted trucks and hordes of motorbikes screech by. “The last time I was in Myrtle my Uber driver had a gun between his knees because he was worried about getting robbed again.”

And Myrtle Beach is wall to wall gun ranges, so don’t forget your own guns!

All wrapped up in South Carolina itself, Murdaughville!

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I mean, yeah, this might appeal to a few… non-standard… families, but I’m thinking all of that plus a pretty constant atmosphere of menace on the main thoroughfares – deepened by a huge police presence – doesn’t exactly broadcast safe family fun. I mean hey why do they need battalions of officers? Aren’t we supposed to be having a relaxed carefree sort of experience?

Any family with the means to vacation someplace better than Myrtle Beach should certainly be expected to do that. Your chance of getting shot might not be great, but you can count on feeling menaced and cheapened by the setting.

And of course everyone says that thing about changing the culture, but there’s real big piles of real big money behind the purulence, and the business owners making all that money aren’t about to fuck with their model.

It’s about time.