This is a city with not even 200,000 people. Turns out nobody likes to get shot. And Alabama is ALL about guns.

A Washington Post survey of 51 of the country’s largest school systems showed that 58 percent of [gun] seizures in those districts last academic year were never publicly reported by news organizations... Even an exhaustive review of local news sources cannot account for guns carried into schools undetected, gun seizures never disclosed by districts and guns found on campuses located in communities underserved by news organizations... In many communities, the number of guns found has more than doubled, a trend that mirrors a precipitous rise in school shootings. [That’s found, mes petites.]

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Here’s the beginning of an official communication from a typically gun-soaked American high school: “While any weapon found in our schools is not a positive thing…”

Not a positive thing. Do you know how many principals don’t tell students and parents when a gun is found? Lots of ’em. I mean, it’s not a positive thing…

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Hot off the press, here’s today’s high school killing field report, complete with all the blithering idiocy/pathetic denial that keeps kids going in for the kill.

America’s long luxurious gun-soak has reduced the reality of some high schools to that of hookah lounges in the deep south: Choked with human and techno security (which makes the experience of being there creepy and oppressive), they are nonetheless incredibly dangerous, as ways continue to be found to smuggle in weapons.

When there are five ill-secured guns inside many of your students’ homes, do you really think students are going to leave them alone? There are 450 million smokin’ hot guns in this country – whaddaya expect some sixteen year olds to do with that? Leave them alone?

So you’ve got this sick toxic thing of high school principals stubbornly thinking they’re high school principals rather than bouncers, and meanwhile students die or almost bleed to death or run screaming from armed psychos in restrooms pretty much every day all over America’s public school system.

The future is fucking obvious. In the next few years, we’ll get to 500 million guns – or more. And the weaponry will be much more lethal. Every news story about an insane sixteen year old blowing ten peoples’ brains out will inspire many more insane sixteen year olds to try their hand at it. Only insane parents will keep their kids in creepy oppressive public school. Private school/home schooling will be the only way out, and public high school as such will cease to exist.

Eighteen theatregoers at Stuttgart’s state opera required medical treatment for severe nausea over the weekend after watching a performance that included live piercing, unsimulated sexual intercourse and copious amounts of fake and real blood.

… Napolitana.

… on the steps of the Wisconsin Capitol Building.

[Photographer Bennett Waara.]

Taken at six AM this morning in my front yard.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Just one poll. But a girl can dream.

Elites who read long eloquent essays in the Atlantic comparing George Washington and Donald Trump – the glorious first, the gruesome second – aren’t (if you ask ol’ UD) making very good use of their time, pre-electionwise. It’s by now a tired warhorse, the dangerous vileness of DJT, and one can certainly continue playing variations on it, as Tom Nichols has very prettily done all the way up and down the scale; but at this point the question is not How Existential a Threat is this Authoritarian to the American Republic? Or How Far Exactly Have We Fallen from George Washington?

The question is Why is Half of the Country Voting for an Authoritarian?

The release of a pseudo-memoir under the name of a presidential candidate’s wife can at best occasion jokey remarks (see above) by those tasked with pseudo-reading it. Some of the reviewers’ lines are pretty good.

Another reviewer pissed to have gotten the assignment quotes sentences from the book like this one:

 “Living my life with a core set of principles provides me with a foundation that leads to consistent and rational decision-making.”

The reviewer’s anger intensifies as she’s forced to rifle through the book for quotations for her review (wasn’t flipping through the fucker once enough?), and her final paragraph makes explicit what other reviewers merely signal: Vacuous people shouldn’t write memoirs cuz ain’t nothin to write.

We want to believe that whatever shallowness or stupidity that appears is a survival mechanism a woman had to take up when dealing with a misogynistic world. Well, sorry: sometimes women really are like Marie Antoinette’s pastries, … filled with nothing more complex than artificial fillers and dead air. 

Yet another pissed reviewer (“I let out an exasperated snort.”) excerpts/comments:

Melania Trump team[ed] up with a company run by “successful businesspeople” to introduce the American public (the “consumer base”) to a “line of high-end skincare products” because, after all, “people frequently asked me about my regimen, marveling at the health of my skin,” and so, you see, what she really wanted to do was find a way to “empower women,” and if that means charging you $150 an ounce to put fish eggs on your face, then so be it. 

[W]hether you’re the firearm owner yourself or anybody who lives in the home [where] there’s a firearm present, their risk for death by suicide goes up three to five times.

And it’s not that the firearm makes them vulnerable to thinking about suicide. It’s just that if someone is thinking about suicide and they have quick and ready access to the most lethal method, then they’re at greater risk of dying. If you take all the other suicide attempts together in the United States to combine them, less than 5% of those attempts to result in death. There’s nothing that compares to firearms in terms of how deadly they are in a suicide attempt.

A Birmingham AL politician gets it said.

Weeks later, the police can’t find the killers.

Anyway, after all the rain, a bunch of them

are growing in one of my containers.

Headline of the day.

I…. dunno. When does Birmingham Alabama become so blood-soaked that, well, it ain’t really what you’d call a great city? The letter to the editor from which I’ve drawn this post’s headline is written by a person who has made sure to live well outside the bloody city limits; so it’s not really his great city. He moved out years ago.

And, as I say, Birmingham doesn’t really strike UD, who has seen multiple videos of police hosing gobs of blood off of its main streets, as a great city. The people who gunned down 24 souls the other night, killing four, only wanted to kill one particular guy standing with the crowd outside a club — this was a standard-issue gang vengeance killing, apparently. So what kind of city produces people who say hell since I’ve got a machine gun I think I’ll kill that guy plus everyone else? Not a great city.

This is far from Birmingham’s first mass shooting. And of course the numbers killed and injured all over Birmingham all the time keep rising. The letter writer seems to think that letting teenagers open carry any old gun without needing a permit or anything is maybe a mite unwise…

“Soon applications to our UAB University and Medical School may be affected.”  Yeah, and just when everyone is bleeding out all over the street. Since Alabama also has a punitive, total ban on abortion, I can imagine potential students and medical staff explaining to UAB that “Welp, after I get out of prison for providing maternal health care, I’ll be gunned down in front of my favorite brunch spot. I think not.”

Background here.

And here’s the judge, sentencing her to nine years.

Here, the defense has, and Ms. Peters in particular, remained quite defiant, which is her right, but certainly not helpful for her lot today… Your lies are well documented and these convictions are serious. I’m convinced you would do it all over again if you could. You’re as defiant a defendant as this court has ever seen. 

… You are no hero. You abused your position and you’re a charlatan who used and is still using your prior position in office to peddle a snake oil that’s been proven to be junk time and time again. In your world, it’s all about you.

… You have no respect for the checks and balances of government. You have no respect for this court. You have no respect for law enforcement, and you do not have respect for your … colleagues when you were a clerk and recorder who weren’t in lockstep in your beliefs. 

… Your explanation about what happened is preposterous. It’s on video. You have no problem lying to officers. It’s happened multiple times. They’re recorded conversations. It’s just more lies... Yes, you are a charlatan and you cannot help but lie as easy as it is for you to breathe. You betrayed your oath for no one other than you.

… And this is what makes Ms. Peters such a danger to our community. It’s the position she held that has provided her the pulpit from which she can preach these lies, the undermining of our democratic process, the undermining of the belief and confidence in our election systems... Every effort to undermine the integrity of our elections and public’s trust in our institutions has been made by you.