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.

Just as Banquo’s Ghost returned to haunt Macbeth’s dinner, now Epstein’s ghost continues to hover over Trump’s Oval Office.

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

 [I]t’s difficult to muster any sympathy for the Mar-a-Lago Macbeth, as Epstein’s ghost plagues him like a sleazier Banquo.

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

I get why several commentators compare Trump’s haunting by Epstein to Macbeth’s haunting by Banquo: Two powerful men, in hard-fought, seemingly secure possession of political dominance, cannot escape, and eventually are perhaps brought low by, the return of the repressed. Their past deeds rear up, eerily reincarnate manifestations, for the world to see.

Yet the second writer’s use of the word ‘sleazier’ points to problems with the comparison. Because after all Banquo is a moral exemplar, come to torture Macbeth with guilt over his crimes, while Epstein is a moral catastrophe, a ghost vindictively gleeful at Trump’s entrapment by Epstein’s degeneracy.

UD suggests that another ghost story – the Henry James fiction “The Turn of the Screw” – might be a better comparison. For the primary ghost here – Peter Quint – seems not only evil, but evil in a very Epstein way: He seduces children. The plot of the James work revolves around the narrator’s failed effort to protect children from sexually threatening adults; and what better echo of the sorry tale of the world’s failure to protect Epstein’s victims? Or of Trump’s failing effort to protect himself?

‘Did any of the masseuses … perform sexual acts for Jeffrey Epstein?

I have just answered the question.

No you haven’t.

I have.

No you haven’t.

Yes I have.

You are refusing to answer the question.

Let’s move on.

I’m in charge of the deposition. I say when we move on and when we don’t. You are here to respond to my questions. If you refuse to answer, the court will bring you back for another deposition.’

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

UD‘s gonna guess Ghislaine is exactly the same person today.

If pseudo-remorse plus lies equals a shorter sentence, then she’s ready to perform.

The lethal cruelty, I reckon, remains.

Zut alors! Now ze game it is on.
Here's the lawsuit from Brigitte Macron.
And the statement from Candace?
"Ah shit man oh man, this
Is totally very pas bon."

Heard this one before?

[Logan] Thorp walked up to the church side of the building and tried to open the doors, which were locked. He pressed the buzzer and a member of the church staff came to the door …

Thorp pushed past her, despite her telling him the church wasn’t open. The staff member summoned the superintendent, who found Thorp in the sanctuary. The superintendent talked with Thorp for a while, trying not to agitate him. Eventually, Thorp tried to walk down the preschool [corridor] but found it locked, and the superintendent directed him to the exit.

On his way out, Thorp said he would have kicked the glass in if the church staff member hadn’t let him in … After he left the building, Thorp stood on top of his truck and used his hands to mimic holding binoculars up to his eyes pointing at the church. When the superintendent asked what he was doing, Thorp made a motion with his finger and hand going across his neck as if to indicate a threat of harm.

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

Amazingly, he not only failed to shoot up the place, but was just convicted of carrying a gun on school property. Should keep us safe from him for a year or two.