“Alabama has 3X the homicide rate of California,” [Gavin] Newsom wrote [in response]. “Its murder rate is ranked third in the entire country. Stick to football, bro.”

Bama!

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.”

… shot to death by a campus policeman.

He had taken LSD at a concert that evening and had gone on a rampage, attacking three other people before he got to the police station.

Video taken by a surveillance camera showed Collar nude and covered in sweat as he pursued the retreating officer more than 50 feet outside the building, Cochran said. Collar got within 5 feet of Austin and the officer fired once, striking the student in the chest, Cochran said…. [The Mobile County Sheriff] said he had “serious concerns” about the killing of an unarmed student when he first heard what had happened, but he better understood the officer’s decision to open fire after watching the videotape of the shooting.

“It’s very powerful,” [he] said …

Investigators are trying to determine who provided Collar with LSD and could charge that person with murder…

Debra Moriarity, the courageous University of Alabama Huntsville professor who confronted Amy Bishop as she tried to kill everyone in the room, will replace the murdered chair of the biology department.

I’ve already written a long post tracking the Amy Bishop story. As more details emerge, I’ll post them. Here are a couple of things worth noting.

The first isn’t about her, but about her university. Just last year, another UAH professor was convicted of murdering his wife.

As to Bishop: The Boston Globe reports:

The University of Alabama biology professor accused of slaying three of her colleagues fatally shot her brother in an apparent accident in Massachusetts more than two decades ago, a local police chief said.

Braintree Police Chief Paul Frazier confirmed the 1986 shooting in his town and slated a news conference this afternoon to discuss the incident.

She was twenty, he eighteen. While trying to “unload a round from the chamber of a 12-gauge shotgun,” she shot her brother in the abdomen.

The Globe article comes close to suggesting it might not have been accidental.

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As details of Bishop’s earlier killing emerge, things get a bit stomach-churning:

The Braintree police chief said today the woman accused of gunning down three in an Alabama shooting rampage shot and killed her brother during an argument in 1986 – but no police report exists and she was never charged.

Chief Paul Frazier said Amy Bishop shot her brother in the chest, fled the house, pointed the shotgun at another car, then fled into woods.

Police found her and arrested her, but during the booking process the former police chief called and interceded, Frazier said. No investigation took place after that and the incident report was lost or discarded.

“This would never happen in this day and age,” Frazier said.

Frazier has forwarded the case to the Norfolk DA’s office for investigation…

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Another account:

She fired at least three shots, hitting her brother once and hitting her bedroom wall, before police took her into custody at gunpoint, he said.

Before Bishop could be booked, the police chief back then told officers to release her to her mother, Frazier said.

UD‘s friend and editor, Scott Jaschik of Inside Higher Ed, alludes to UD‘s most recent IHE column – which includes criticism of an article in the Christian Science Monitor – in a piece this morning in USA Today:

… Almost as soon as word of the Alabama murders spread came the news that [Amy] Bishop, who has been charged in the killings, had been denied tenure and that an appeal of the denial had been rejected. This news prompted some media speculation that tenure stress may have led to the killings. The Christian Science Monitor ran with this theme, prompting criticism from academic bloggers (including one on Inside Higher Ed) who have noted that people are rejected for tenure all the time and don’t kill anyone.

Scott quotes psychology and security experts “dismiss[ing] the idea that the shootings could be blamed on a recent tenure denial.”

Likewise, in Psychology Today, the president of the American Psychoanalytical Association, Prudence Gourguechon, writes:

Stress, disappointment, PTSD, frustration, burnout, loss, shame and humiliation DO NOT LEAD A HUMAN BEING TO PICK UP A GUN AND START KILLING HIS OR HER FELLOW HUMAN BEINGS. Not having examined them, I can not know what is wrong, psychiatrically, with these killers, but I know that something is. And it’s not these human difficulties I just listed that are constantly referenced in the media stories.

It is important to distinguish between triggers–what might light the fuse–and the explosives that lead to the catastrophe.

Getting it wrong in the media does us all a disservice. If true but irrelevant facts are continually referenced, we start to think these things (eg stress) are relevant and truly causal, as opposed to possible triggers. And the media rarely or never mention the factors that are more important to consider: Delusions. Paranoia. Major Mental Illness. Schizophrenia. Psychosis. The vast majority of human beings who suffer from these symptoms or disorders are not violent or dangerous and can do very well with appropriate treatment. But these might be the things that lead a few human beings [to] pick up a gun and shoot their colleagues. That, plus easy availability of firearms.

Why have we substituted “stress” for psychosis as a causal concept? Why have we confused triggers for causes? What is the consequence for our society? One consequence I fear is that there will be a continually diminished tendency to consider and diagnose and treat psychosis and major mental illness, and therefore there will continue to be undiagnosed and untreated disordered minds picking up guns and going to a meeting to kill.

Society needs to know and be reminded that people can– in rare but significant instances– lose touch with external reality, and substitute a dangerous irrational inner world where, for example, they feel persecuted and terrorized.

With her long history of violence, paranoia, and cold-bloodedness (After the massacre, Bishop’s husband told a reporter, she phoned him, and in a perfectly calm voice said to come to the building and pick her up for their dinner date.), Amy Bishop is a poster child not for tenure unattained, but for psychosis misperceived.

… [The latest mass murderer] seems to have been driven by an all-consuming, destructive force, a nihilism—the conviction that life is meaningless; that words like truth, justice and God are empty slogans; that everything must be razed…

Earlier this year, the FBI introduced a new category of criminal: the Nihilistic Violent Extremist, or NVE.

If jihadis kill for Allah, and anti-government extremists like Timothy McVeigh killed in the name of some demented notion of freedom, then NVEs kill simply because they want to kill. They don’t have much in the way of ideological commitments—as the confusing hodgepodge of aphorisms Westman scrawled into his rifle, pistol, and shotgun makes clear—beyond a commitment to chaos and evil themselves…

[Let me pause here and say yes. Lots of people are rummaging in this guy’s writings/statements for this hatred/that cause; but since the man was manifestly, classically, paradigmatically insane, this is a waste of time. His was a literally fractured psyche. One can learn things – most of them already known – about psychosis from him, but that’s kind of it.]

“The kind of person that we’re seeing today,” Martin Gurri, the author of The Revolt of the Public and the Crisis of Authority in the New Millennium, told me, “is not promoting a cause.”

He added that they were propelled by a general, wide-ranging fury…

[W]hy [have] so many Americans … become so susceptible to the void?

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To the void, and to the rage that the sense of the void generates.

One can feel free-floating nihilism without the destructive rage.  Albert Camus, one random evening in Prague, suddenly felt overwhelmed by “the death of the soul.” James Agee, alone on a broiling Sunday in Alabama, felt

… the subdual of this sunday deathliness in whose power was held the whole of the south… nothing but the sun was left, faithfully blasting away upon the dead earth…

This is writing that captures the conviction and the feeling all thoughtful people occasionally have, that – in the words of Leopold Bloom, struck down for a moment in a Dublin pub by absolute nihilism – no one is anything. 

Don DeLillo, in Libra, imagines Lee Harvey Oswald feeling nihilistic one hot afternoon in Texas:

He walked through empty downtown Dallas, empty Sunday in the heat and light. He felt the loneliness he always hated to admit to, a vaster isolation than Russia, stranger dreams, a dead white glare burning down.

But Oswald’s angry nihilism, like that of the jihadis and McVeigh, emerges into the light with a particular ideology that justifies slaughter, whereas the NVE is more insidious because ideologically he remains largely underground, unconnected to a group or group identity. He may be discoverable in this or that online violence cult, but basically unless the people closest to him – parents, friends, teachers – are sufficiently alarmed by his accumulation of weapons, or increasingly wild behavior, to report him to the police and/or try to get him committed, he’s free to mass slaughter.

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And this is UD’s thing: People have to report. And the report has to go somewhere. Why aren’t these manifestly, frighteningly, sick people on our radar? Part of it is indifferent, protective, deluded, or themselves crazy, parents. Some of these parents pay a very high price – their kid kills them before heading off to the local preschool; or, if they survive, some of them go to prison.

I ain’t claiming that in every case parents should have suspected something and acted on that suspicion; what I’m saying is this: It’s a new world in the US; hundreds of millions of high-powered guns are around, and anyone can get plenty of them. The pope calls this “a pandemic of arms.”

Which makes having even a mildly disturbed, mildly in trouble with the law, child/adolescent (look at what Sue Klebold, mother of a 17 year old mass murderer, has said about this) very worrisome, and at the very least our schools (where every day loaded guns are discovered in backpacks) should be ready to expel people who give evidence of being dangerous. It’s obscene that it’s still quite hard, in our public schools, to remove fledgling gunnies; in all respects — family, school — we have to toughen up.

We all know that the 15 year old in Washington state who killed his family with a gun to which the father gave him access didn’t just wake up one night and do this; but because by many accounts the household had little do with the outside world, no one beyond the immediate family could judge how nihilistic/enraged he was. This isn’t an argument for an intrusive, freedom-constraining state, but it is an argument for far greater social/familial awareness/responsiveness around the now-toxic mix of adolescence, mental disorder, and guns.

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All of this is necessary because of a much larger nihilism: In this nation, we assign no particular meaning or value to death by gun. It’s something that triggers a thoughts and prayers tweet. It doesn’t even have meaning when children are pulped. We just continue working to make it easier for everyone to get and carry guns. “Everyone dies. That’s life,” says an Oklahoma state senator in response to a question about his state’s astounding gun suicide rate.

That’s very strange, that he says that, but we can’t afford to waste time analyzing it. As we speak, the next insane teenager with a high capacity arsenal prepares.

Whether Amy Bishop or Matthew Harris or Bryan Kohberger, seriously disturbed and disturbing people on campus present schools with a serious dilemma, as in: What the hell to do? Psycho killer Bishop was a well-known and scary presence among her colleagues (and they didn’t even know that she had murdered her brother!), but they thought if they stayed real quiet and denied her tenure she’d go away. Harris, a minority, got promoted from woke campus to woke campus until someone woke up and started screaming about him. Mass murderer Kohberger turns out to have been a well-known nutcase at his school (see my headline), but they acted slowly and feebly in trying to neutralize him.

It’s easy after the explosion to say how could they have etc etc. But universities are civilized, deliberative, tolerant places, ill-equipped to deal with the not yet fully-flowered criminally insane. And of course we want universities to value oddness, to act slowly against even problematic people.

UD‘s thing is that the new insane proliferation of guns in America makes this otherwise creditable hesitation impossible. It’s now simply irresponsible to wait and see, or to sanction a bit, people who seem threatening. At the very least they should be made aware that the school is aware something’s wrong; they should be made aware that campus security is keeping an eye on them.

Trial coming up for one of the University of Alabama’s many gun-mad basketball players. Couple years ago a whole bunch of players went out for some fun and ended up shooting a woman to death. I mean, one of them, a friend of the players’, actually shot her, but one of the players provided the gun blahblah.

So the guy who actually shot her just got sentenced to life without parole, and things don’t look too good for the player who handed him the gun. Trial coming up.

Another player out with his teammates that night had already established a “pat-down” entrance whenever introduced before a game (this was a precursor to the much higher profile Ja Morant bit), and he kept it going even after he began to be investigated in connection with the murder. Straightlaced Deadspin considered the fact that the pat-down guy was allowed to play at all “quite shocking,” but c’mon. It’s ALABAMA.

Anyway, here’s a local opinion writer gettin all boohoo bout bloody Bama but really baby nobody gives a shit.

News reports … said the city could be short as many as 300 police officers… Birmingham was [in fact] short [only] 63 “patrol officers,” [insisted the mayor]… [Later that day he admitted] the number was actually 172 patrol officers… That number didn’t include other officers such as homicide detectives responsible for investigating the city’s record-setting murders. 

… Between 2021 and 2023, the city lost 200 police officers.

That’s 24% of its police force gone in just two years.

The department is losing civilian employees, too, but more steadily and over a longer period. Between 2014 and 2023, the department dropped from 277 civilian staff to 177.

By the summer of 2023, combining sworn officers and staff, the Birmingham police department had at least 294 vacant positions.

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Bama thinks it can pass laws making guns of any kind available to people of any kind, at any time, and NOT have trouble attracting police to its municipalities. You got idiots shooting off guns all over the place, and you think rational people will take jobs that put them in the way of all those bullets every single day? Bama is SOOOO STOOOOOPID.

After crunching the numbers, the large [American] city with the highest cost of crime [for 2023] was Birmingham, Alabama. The violent crime rate – which includes instances of murder, manslaughter, rape, robbery and aggravated assault – in Birmingham was 1,682 per 100,000 residents. The property crime rate – which includes burglary, larceny, and vehicle theft – was 4,173 per 100,000 residents.

If you stopped brunching every time people were blown away by machine guns in Birmingham, you’d never get anything to eat. As for the streaks of fresh blood on the restaurant walls, look away look away Dixieland.

People don’t know about Birmingham, cuz, you know, Chicago; but it’s time we paid it some mind. It is trying to tell us about American gun laws and American gun love.

Thuggery is mainstreamed at the University of Alabama…

That’s not quite right. It’s celebrated; it’s an occasion for amusing witticisms, as it was for the Alex Murdaugh defense attorney who pointed an assault weapon at the opposing table and said “Tempting.” In this case it’s Haw look at me I carry guns so much officials have to check me for them before I play basketball. Haw.

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Don’t bother Bama none that they recruit murderers and accessories to murderers. Guns? Everybody’s got ’em and fuck you.

The fact that he’s done this intro throughout the season is no excuse for his failure to read the room.

Huh? Who says he ain’t reading the room? What room? The US House chamber?

Anyway Brandon Miller’s pregame pat-down can’t hold a candle to New Mexico State’s pre-game introduction, where each basketball player pulls off his pants and invites the other players to finger his anus.

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Here’s a guy with absolutely no sense of humor. Boo.

… really shone in South Carolina last night, with the home crowd shouting GUILTY and LOCK HIM UP at one of three Bama players involved in gunplay/a fatal shooting not long ago in Tuscaloosa. There was also a fight in the stands.

Now, since the player those mean people shouted at didn’t actually himself shoot the fatal shot (I mean, yeah, he provided the gun; and he’s spending most of his off-court time talking to authorities; but he didn’t you know SHOOT the woman; his teammate did), he remains a player in excellent standing at that excellent institution.

And, you know, Gun Normalization being what it is around here, I’m sure all three players will soon be reinstated. I mean, young people hanging out on the street at night with guns YAWN. As for … mmm… let’s call it… killing some woman who in some way irritated them well think of it like this: The mere possession of a gun is liable to escalate … consequences… in these situations. People use the implements available at stressful times. If they’d had knives, the woman might have survived. Unfortunately, they had a gun. No one’s fault.

South Carolina lost the game, by the way; and who’s surprised? BAMA HAS THE BEST SHOOTERS. Now that DC isn’t using it, Bama’s changing its team’s name to the Bullets.

But take heart, SC! Alex Murdaugh himself is about to take the stand!

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UPDATE: This guy thinks murder and provision of a gun for murder are enough to shut down a program! And not just any program: BAMA.

It would be a major step for the No. 2 team in the country to suspend its season. At some point, though, [given an ongoing team-related] murder investigation, student well-being and simply doing the right thing must prevail.

LOL. Look, babe. High-powered, heavily recruited college teams assembled by rich cheater coaches always yield some naughty lads; and the lads’ teamwork may run to more than shooting baskets together. How many stories have we covered, on this blog, of college football and basketball teammates raping and robbing and hazing ensemble? Guns have always been around these programs – you’ll find them in players’ cars, frat houses, and dorms. And the guns are multipurpose: Football hero Tyler Hilinski’s suicide was made possible by dormmates who, at the moment Hilinski was really feeling down, just happened to have had an AR-15 style rifle in their room. High-level drug distribution conspiracies operating out of a bunch of San Diego State U frats wouldn’t have gotten anywhere without a cache of weapons to protect the merch. What I’m trying to say is that, exactly as in the larger culture, guns are everywhere on many campuses, especially in the Greek/football/basketball subculture. Bama’s unscandalized response to a shooting death apparently facilitated by one of its active players is what you get when everyone’s owning and carrying and shooting. No big deal.

Take a bow, Bryan! You really know how to pick ’em! Darius Miles is so hot he’s got the whole campus running to get out of his way!

Look at those Alabama students run!

She killed both of her adult children – and then herself – with a gun (or guns) she had in her house. Why did Marsha Edwards have guns? The police are saying very little – not about guns, or a final note, or substance abuse issues, or psychiatrists… With the exception of one neighbor who apparently called her a “very, very unhappy woman,” we got nuthin. We got lots of the use of the word “tragedy,” and lots of Give God the Burden, which UD finds mighty odd for a double murderer. Of her own children.

What is it about some women who kill? UD‘s reminded of ol’ Amy Bishop, who shot her brother to death and was sent home to mommy. I understand you can’t do anything to Marsha Edwards now (Bishop, decades later – after she mass-murdered her University of Alabama colleagues – was indicted for the fratricide), but we should at least find out why a murderously deranged mother was able to buy a gun and kill her kids with it. She lived in a wealthy, ultra-safe, gated community… Why the gun? Can we ask when she bought it, or if she got it from a friend, or whatever? It’s the thing that ended three lives – shouldn’t we know something about it?

As the Marsha Edwards story vanishes into that tragic woman plus the cosmic mystery, it leaves the stink of the normalization of a household appliance able to be used with stealth, ease, and one hundred percent fatality.