It’s called HANDMADE SHOTGUN, in honor of the shooter who killed Shinzo Abe.

A spokesman for Black Rifle Coffee explained: “He made his own shotgun. Cool.”

Ah cmon! It’s like all those HANG MIKE PENCE chants at our last president’s rallies: Just really, really, violent people having fun.

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It’s nice to think of American kids experiencing their first cup of coffee in Cowboys stadium…

“What’ll it be, buddy?”

“Trying to decide, Dad. Suck my Glock, Kill-Myself-Colt, Mutilate-the-Missus-Mauser and Slaughter on Psychotic Ten-Year-Old Avenue all sound good!”

First Black Rifle Coffee, and now AR-15.

Although Black Rifle is as it were holding its position, UD fears that – under the influence of unfortunate events – we are seeing the end of an era.

But there’s a little good news on the horizon: The most popular name for baby boys in Fairbanks Borough Alaska is currently Barrett REC 7, and among girls it’s AAC Honey Badger.

What a poor sport this newswoman is. (Scroll down for the video.) She actually cited the astounding suicide-by-gun statistic among veterans – the very group the Dallas Cowboys claim to be helping by promoting blood-soaked Black Rifle Coffee.

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There are now reports that the Cowboys are about to announce a second coffee partnership, this one with CTE Coffee, the brew for people who love football-induced neurodegenerative disease. Each flavor is named after a dead CTE sufferer – Jovan Belcher, Dave Duerson, Frank Gifford, Aaron Hernandez, Junior Seau – and each features a graphic of their pockmarked postmortem brains. Strong stuff, you say? You betcha! The Cowboys are calling CTE America’s Brew cuz no one does lethal head blows the way we do! If you don’t like it, move to North Korea.

… something stirred in UD’s headlet, and she searched the name Junod on University Diaries.

Sure enough, back in 2010, she cited Junod’s smart remarks about her beloved Don DeLillo; and one of those remarks has now helped her think about the Black Rifle Coffee/Dallas Cowboys controversy – a controversy that doesn’t seem to be dying down.

No, [DeLillo] has never written about Top Kills and Junk Shots and the odd flutter of hope elicited by the words “Containment Dome.” But in their suggestion of corporatized violence and above all in the violence they do to the language, they are DeLilloesque…

What DeLillo understood, long ago, is the end of the world would be experienced not as the end of the world but rather as a way of thinking and talking about the end of the world. What he understood is that the toxic cloud that has our name on it would be defined by its lack of definition; that we would never have as much information about it as we need to have or that someone else has; that it would turn into a free-floating void, exactly as withholding as it is encompassing; that it would become part of the landscape and that the landscape would become part of it; and that, of course, there would be footage, endlessly recycled but ultimately inconclusive.

Black Rifle, with its bloody brews (Murdered Out; AK-47), is corporatized violence becoming – via the Dallas Cowboys – a way of thinking and talking; a part of the landscape. What Brooks misses in his analysis of the origins and motivations of our teen massacrists is this normalization, this banality if you will, of apocalyptic weaponry and what it is doing to us. Coffee – that most banal of drinks – is now visually (via advertising footage, endlessly recycled) wedded to mass slaughter, to weapons that can literally murder us out.

An AK-47, first encountered by kids on a Jumbotron at a cool, fun, wholesome Dallas Cowboys game, is something that gives you the same vague chemical kick as a cup of Joe or a sports event. Everybody’s doin’ it.

Our violent psychotics do not necessarily, as Brooks argues, regard their AK-47s (often bought for them by daddy — Brooks has far too little to say about the depraved parents/suppliers of our killers) as charismatic icons of power and vengeance. They more probably seem to them utililtarian, normalized (how outlaw can AK-47s be when you get them from daddy, and when everyone’s drinking AK-47 coffee?), parts of the landscape.

Thus when Brooks gets melodramatically Biblical about guns (“The guns are like serpents in the trees, whispering to them.”), I wonder if he’s headed in the wrong direction. How can guns have this effect when dad’s chipped coffee cup has images of AK-47s all over it? When American parents routinely receive marketing pressing them to buy baby versions of AK-47s for their eight year old? When the raffle prize at the county fair is an AK-47?

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Our country’s most outspoken, violent teenager, after all, is famous for having boasted that he could “stand in the middle of 5th Avenue and shoot somebody” and it would only intensify his supporters’ enthusiasm for him. He didn’t know how right he was. Even his reported excitement about the impending death of his vice-president did nothing to dislodge him from his position of undisputed king of the nation’s Republican Party. His sons are even more violent – in word and deed – than he; and his congressional spawn … How surprised are you going to be when Jim Jordan can’t take it anymore and blasts into the January 6 committee room with a – you know – in his grip?

Go ahead. Laugh at this scenario. Go ahead.

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Just as the handgun has become the home appliance of choice when you want to grab something to kill yourself with in this, our massively suicide-ridden land, so the AK-47 is simply there, part of the landscape, the thing you grab (dad’s far too ruggedly independent to lock it up) when your loathing of humanity reaches – let’s go with coffee – the boiling point. “Every country contains mentally ill and potentially violent people. Only America arms them,” and only America goes a step further than flooding the country with guns for absolutely everyone and electing a pathologically violent president: America makes guns cute and sassy and savory, an unremarkable part of our shared corporate advertising world.