Wotta shocker: Another mass shooting at a hookah bar down south.

A notorious gunplay destination. Its enraged and frightened neighbors repeatedly beg the city to shut it down. The city does nothing; the place lays on more security.

More security seems to guarantee more gunplay – I mean, all it seems to mean are more people in the hookah lounges with guns, so instead of the classic two-way shootout we get a three-way.

They killed a high school kid. [UPDATE: Two high school kids, both members of the local school football team.]

UD‘s really scratching her head here. All over the country, hookah bars are staging mass killings, and no one in authority does jack. Is it a form of amusement for city councils?

Another HOOKAH BAZOOKA!

But this one’s like why hasn’t a mass shooting already happened forty times in that lounge. I mean, maybe it has, but locals are still pretending to be shocked at the mass shooting at another hookah bar down south.

As you know if you read this blog, there’s nothing more banal of late than mass shootings inside hookah bars in southern cities. And this one happened in Baton Rouge, and man I mean ROUGE like flowing all red in the streets!

Apparently there’s a grassroots movement down there to change the city’s name to SANG ROUGE. Better fit.

 Louisiana’s capital city [has made] it big in the world of crime and murder. Baton Rouge has outdone the rest of the state, which is [itself] 40 percent more violent than the nation as a whole. New Orleans is more popular, so Baton Rouge seized the opportunity to top the violent crime list. Baton Rouge isn’t a very large city, but it manages to attract attention by having 49 murders annually. If you have a death wish, it’s a great destination.

A few details here. Some locals – a few – feel kinda bad about the “lack of effort by the state government to address gun violence,” but baby baby baby that’s cuz they love their guns and they love it when they get a chance to shoot ’em off! Hookah bars concentrate large numbers of incapacitated victims in easily accessible, charismatic, locations, and, you know, take any random Saturday night and conditions are RIPE.

Given that everyone knows shooting’s gonna happen – note that Dior’s advertising stresses the word “safely” — wonder why – why does it… well… keep happening?

Look more closely at what Dior offers: Incredibly cheap booze. A dark chaotic place to whip out your guns and get some real killing off before someone notices. Rooms packed with idjits from LSU, one of America’s most violent and stupid locations.

Bloodbath keeps happening because Bloodbath is the state sport of Louisiana, and everything the state does — from basically zero gun restrictions to the proliferation of hookah bars – promotes the sport.

Shut down the bars? Are you fucking nuts? Death’s a way of life down there. UD‘s had enough of inauthentic local pols getting all ‘senselesstragic.…’ … I mean, being all negative about it. Millions of Americans adore violence and go out of their way to legalize, mainstream, and personally experience it. Bloody, almost dead, and dead people scattered everywhere is Sang Rouge’s effing calling card, it’s their Graceland, their Machu Picchu, their one reliable tourist destination. Find a violent psycho like Jim Jordan to run the city – someone who revels in blood – and GO TO IT.

Remember White Noise, the most important American novel of the last fifty years:

“Look past the violence. There is a wonderful brimming spirit of innocence and fun.”

Hookah Bazooka!

The trend of hookah bars down south featuring mass shootings with AK-47s is hotting up SO much that there’s now a new designation for the shooter venues: They are Hookah Bazookas, bars that can’t promise opportunities to use your weapons, but can certainly be said to have set up optimal conditions for armed street battle.

In order to get the designation, hookah lounges must be able to show that at least one mass shootout – with fatalities – has occurred in or near their property. Kulture Hookah, Melody Hookah, Hooka Lounge, and now Lounge 33 (scroll down) – all can boast mass death via massive firearms as part of the fun; these and several others are America’s Hookah Bazookas.

Where can you find them? Like I said, it’s ALL down south: Texas, Louisiana, West Virginia, Virginia. Folks at Lounge 33 are pretty fucking excited to join the Hookah Bazooka list, having lit up the streets of Houston with fifty – count ’em, 50! – ratatats from AK-47s last night.

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To be fair, a search of Hookah Club Shooting turns up locations across the great US of A.

 “We’ve had some terrible times with alcohol at this event, but nothing like this… ” [Swagerty] confirmed there had been motorcycle crashes and DWI arrests in the past due to the amount of alcohol consumed at the Memorial Day event. Asked whether the rally should be allowed to continue, Swagerty said, “Well, we’ve always thought of it as a positive, but it’s not a good day right now. It’s been a great economic boon, but it’s pretty bad right now.”

Local Red River NM pol Craig Swagerty is being too modest. His town’s annual biker rally has long also featured drug arrests (everyone knows about biker gangs and the drug business), fights, property damage, weapons charges, and forced temporary migration/home detention of scared locals …

But, you know… Red River folk consider tens of thousands of fucked up armed bikers packed onto their streets for days as a positive, and they keep welcoming back the boys — and the boys bring their kids, too, so this year the little ones got to be part of the hysterical stampede of people trying to get out of the way of bullets. “I’ve never seen anything like this,” said another resident. “I was told not to go out [as soon as the rally began] and so I was staying at a friend’s house. It honestly sounded like a whole clip was unloaded. It was a lot of gunshots at once.” Yep, must be quite a sight for one of the 500 permanent residents of tiny Red River to see/hear 28,000 heavily armed people outside her door. Town sure don’t need to worry about adequate policing with them numbers!

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So now everyone’s talking about this year’s blowout – the bloodbath is all over the national and international news and I mean Craig whodathunkit?? Who could have foreseen that 28,000 drunk assholes carrying 40,000 weapons would shoot some of them off? What’s America coming to?

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In these Great Carnage days, you’d think a few people would look at and think about the lowest hanging fruit, the locations where mass shooting is practically guaranteed. Apart from the obvious – urban drug turf – UD will now helpfully single out two places guaranteed to generate routine atrocity:

  1. Hookah lounges
  2. Biker rallies

There are plenty of other places you, like the Red River resident smart enough to get the hell out of the way of the rally even before it started, definitely ought to avoid if you dislike open air gun battle. The boardwalk in Myrtle Beach or Ocean City MD… Public high schools in Glocksucker states… etc etc etc yada yada yada. I mean, do you read the news at all? Ain’t it kind of obvious?

NOT that UD‘s offering even a whiff of a suggestion that guns should be restricted or you should have check points in locations guaranteed to kill people repeatedly! Perish the thought that you and your family shouldn’t be free to perish at the hands of a drunk, high POS with a Glock! NOOOOO. I’m only saying we should designate these places, with big easy to read signs, Most Likely to Murder, so people can choose to stay away, or, as some folks in places like Myrtle Beach and Red River do, leave town until event season is over. Rather than the town of Red River promoting bike rallies on its tourism website and promising fun for the whole family (current town policy), you’d have the mayor say something like this (she made the comment to the Taos newspaper — Taos: the classy town, forty miles away from trashy Red River, that along with everyplace else anywhere near Red River went into lockdown right after the shooting):

“Everybody needs to understand that this really isn’t an event that we promote. There’s not really an event sponsor; it’s not a town-sponsored event. It’s something that occurs every year. It’s an event that’s grown and happens and we do our best to manage it.”

Course they do promote it. It’s right there on their website… Oh wait! Someone done taken it down!

Not only that, but lookee here what sober rule-bound Red River’s doing now!

“For everyone, there will be zero tolerance from this point forward,” [the local police captain] said at a [post-massacre] news conference. “That is traffic violations for 1 mile an hour over, seat belts, jaywalking. We are going to stop and talk to everyone if they violate any law — traffic or criminal.”

Look sharp, lad! From now on we fuckin promise it’s gonna be Pyongyang around here! And cut your hair!

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Fun for the whole family signage in Red River.

(Chancey Bush/ Albuquerque Journal)
Dadeville, ever after to be known as Deadville…

… shows that we’ve moved from late night sketchy gunfight locations (hookah bars) to wholesome kids’ dance class locations. Look at the Facebook page for this once-wonderful, now utterly bloodied, place.

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Four dead, many injured, most in their teens. UD‘s gonna go ahead and guess that what got the fight going was the same old shit – two guys arguing over a girl. But now, along with fists, lots of kids have got a gun.

And it was so innocent a place – a dance studio for kids – that I’m sure no one thought they’d need to pat people down for weapons.

Yet surely they knew that everyone in this story lives (died) in the seventh most gun-friendly state in America. Guns per capita: 33.15. Look at this list! Do people in Alabama look at these lists??

Not to be mean, but what the fuck sort of thing do people think is going to happen.

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Keenan Cooper, the DJ at the party, told WBMA-TV that the party was stopped briefly when attendees heard someone had a gun. He said people with guns were asked to leave, but no one left. 

See how it is? No security. “Asked to leave.” WTF. Alabama has to accept what it is – 33.15 guns per capita – and act accordingly. No place is even a little safe with 33.15 per capita. Get it?

Nope. Deadville’s nihilist mayor says “trying to control guns would prove … futile … .”

You can shoot up a big city like Las Vegas and it’ll come back. I mean, it won’t go away in the first place.

The local loon who killed sixty and wounded for life hundreds and hundreds and hundreds six years ago didn’t shut down the place. Most of the killed were tourists at an outdoor concert; maybe if his ultrapowerful weaponry had shredded people strolling residential Henderson, there would have been a bit of an exodus. But big metropolitan areas are incredibly resilient. Look at the slow-mo daily murder/wounding rates in Oakland, Balto, etc. The core of the city of UD‘s birth has indeed lost population, but just outside the city, in bedroom communities, population rates seem steady.

Vegas itself is the sixth most murderous city in the US, and its population booms.

Universities are different. True, current applications at Virginia Tech are up; but it’s been fifteen years since its massacre, and the campus, in the wake of the event, has become one of the most highly secured in the world.

The Va Tech massacre occurred before America began experiencing daily mass murders, before certain locations became notorious carnage hubs. Only a fucking idiot, for example, would wander into a hookah bar late on a weekend anywhere in the States or Canada; and more and more of us know this.

As for universities, most remain insanely open locations – unlocked doors, large milling crowds, young heedless people, a massacrist’s delight. This is why essays about Michigan State this morning have titles like Requiem for the Spartans; people know that at least for awhile that show’s over.

Many students are leaving campus – who knows for how long. Everyone assumes universities are, in Bartlett Giamatti’s words, free and ordered spaces, but the free part begins to bite the dust as every hopelessly insane paranoid in America is issued an arsenal.

‘It’s essentially telling me that people have to keep dying in order for this place to shut down,” [Pooja] Gandhi said. “People have to keep getting shot, there have to be more people dead, for this place to get shut down.’

Well, when you’re Chicago, you have the nation’s highest kill-rate to maintain. Shutting down hookah bars, which guarantee several mass shootings a year, is not something you’re going to do lightly. Whatever the silly neighbors say.

Lake Charles, Louisiana: That Great Ol’ American “Can Do” Attitude!

Since Lake Charles is just about the most dangerous place in the country, itty bitty clubs like the VVS1 Hooka Lounge have EIGHT security guards. Eight! How many people can be in a hooka club on a Tuesday? Thirty? But so many of them carry guns and shoot em off that a itty bitty club on a Tuesday night has 8 – count ’em – 8 – armed guards.

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Now, even though they say right there on their website that they have outdoor as well as indoor spaces, in the harsh light of last week’s mass shooting there, the owner seems surprised that

weapons were brought in through the court yard where a tent was set up.

Oh, they brought them in through that door!

That’s what I mean by can-do. You close off one avenue, we’ll find another. Then we’ll kill everybody.

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One more thing about can-do. The club owner will be paying out millions in damages. The city can in principle shut the abattoir down. The owner could close the place. But the place won’t close!

Lake Charles Strong. We’ll come back from this tragedy better armed, with much bigger guns in the hands of younger and more insane people, courtesy of gun-friendly Louisiana.

Did I say gun-friendly? We can do better than that! Louisiana has the highest murder rate of any state in America. VVS1 can’t shut down. We have a record to uphold.

US General Kenneth F. McKenzie, Jr. to assume emergency presidency of Virginia Tech University

It’s rare that wee UD gets an actual scoop, but she can report here that in the wake of last night’s hookah club bloodbath, and with the memory of campus gun massacres past still fresh, just-retired General McKenzie has agreed to take over command of the Virginia Tech sector.

“The Tech front is particularly challenging,” McKenzie said in his first public statement as incoming commander. “Virginia Beach is also a hot zone, but a decision has been made to position our defensive forces here in Blacksburg at this time. We want students and their parents to be assured that we have established a machine gun perimeter circling the campus, with snipers positioned at vulnerable locations inside Blacksburg itself. Defensive training and equipment will now be standard for all students, faculty, and administrators. I pledge to make the campus and its surroundings a truly hard target. Go Hokies!!

Scathing Online Schoolmarm says: If you can’t write, and you MUST write, find someone else to write for you.

If you’re Huntington West Virginia’s attorney, and you have to write a piece in the local press defending the city against charges that its inept appeals board let a pretty obvious criminal open a bar where a mass shooting gained national attention, you need to know how to write English. You need to know how to write what writing instructors like SOS call a persuasive essay.

In the case of this obviously botched process, you need to begin by conceding that the city could have done better; after that, you can go to town defending Huntington as having done not that badly, or whatever.

Huntington’s attorney has instead produced a miserable mess, a blahblah brew that (as comments on the article suggest) only confirms everyone’s prejudice that lawyers are people who produce double talk and bullshit on request. On the simplest level of word meaning, this writer fails.

The frightening prospect of a dispute resulting in the shooting of several people that occurred between the prosperous downtown area and Marshall University warrants our collective focus and resolution that no similar event can occur here again.

Put aside the indecipherable wordy weirdness of the sentence altogether – the redundancy of the passive, ugly “occur,” the bizarre placement of the shooting’s location not at the Kulture Hookah bar but I dunno somewhere between the prosperous (why is prosperous relevant?) downtown (you don’t need area, unless your goal is to lard and muddy and fog and vagueify and pass the buck and pretend what happened didn’t sorta actually happen), the tea party word dispute instead of fight… Seven people aren’t left crawling among broken beer bottles inside and bullet casings outside after a dispute. Put all of that aside and notice that the writer thinks prospect means fact.

This event wasn’t in some cloudy future, much as the writer clearly wants it to be; it happened. Hence the word he ‘s looking for is fact, or event, or episode, or incident.

Of course, if he knew how to write he would have avoided this problem altogether: The frightening shootout at Kulture Hookah can never happen again. That’s all the poor man needed, not all those other words. But writing like that communicates an open straightforward grounding in reality, which is the last thing this guy wants, has, or is capable of expressing.

The rest of the opinion piece dances around the failure of the city to check the bar owner’s heroin distribution background before granting her a permit.

The writer ends in this way:

Every person who had a hand in addressing the matter performed his or her job with competence. The shooting occurred because of unpredictable criminal behavior…

Nothing to see here! We concede nothing! Absolutely everyone who runs the second largest city in a state with the highest opioid death rate in the United States is doing a great job!

Do you REALLY want to go to college here?

This blog has featured some less than ideal places to attend college or university, places that seem to UD not optimal if you’d like a little peace and quiet and not too much gun-play to go with your studies. Trigger-mad Waco, Texas, for instance, with its breastaurant-biker riots/mass killings, rape- friendly university (Baylor) and good ol’ boy judges (most of them Baylor grads) does not seem to UD to shout pursue a higher education here. Unless you already know you want to study American cults up close and personal (the Branch Davidians raped their children here) you might want to look elsewhere.

Similarly, Huntington, West Virginia, home of appalling Marshall University, might not be the best place for you to study. Folks there saw in 2020 by shooting everybody up at a bar that calls itself Kulture Hookah and has a very strange, uh, provenance.

Back in July the city approved the place because its owner was a fine lass struggling to raise drug-free kids and she was fervently opposed to alcohol and any form of acting up in the joint. This would be a quiet, strictly private refuge full of oldies. Profits from the place, she told the unanimously-impressed Board of Zoning Appeals, would go toward the eradication of the town’s well-known drug problem.

One sharp-eyed commenter on the story about this in a local paper asked

Is the owner the same person convicted of operating a heroin distribution house in Huntington in 2016?

but the Huntington zoners got all choked up at her sob story and didn’t see any need to check newspaper articles or court records about how the hookah bar owner

pleaded guilty in 2016 to maintaining a residence for the purpose of distributing heroin.

[She] was sentenced to 15 months in prison.

They musta been mighty surprised to find out, day after the mass shooting, that

The bar advertised their New Year’s Eve party via social media and left an aftermath of drinks, party favors, and blood on the floor.

I mean. How can UD say this politely? Some places are just too stupid for you to go to school there.

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Update. When asked if [the bar owner] would have been given a business permit given her criminal history, [Huntington’s mayor] said it’s important to have all the information when making those decisions.

Yeah, it’s important but we’re too dumb to have it… I mean, we’re too high to have it… And yeah, I hear you: The state with the nation’s highest overdose death rate should maybe keep a bit of an eye on heroin distributors and maybe not give them permits to open bars, but … uh… (nods off)

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Second Update: Getting better and better.

The flier for Wednesday morning’s party included a picture of a woman holding an assault weapon.

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Third Update: Just before she was given her certificate of occupancy for the retail shop, court papers reveal [Kulture Hookah’s owner] was cited for shoplifting at Walmart.

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Dunno. At this point there are two distinct possibilities: Huntington West Virginia is actually this stupid; or everyone in the government is getting huge sums of money to coordinate running the city with the best interests of the well-established Huntington/Detroit drug cartel in mind.

La Kid, Spring Break, Paris

“… We went to the Café Maure de la
Mosquée de Paris and got lots of
peppermint tea and smoked a little
bit of hookah and we felt very authentic.
It was really fun. We just sat and talked
for two hours. We saw the Arc de Triomphe
last night which was awesome and tonight
we’re going to the Eiffel Tower and getting
dinner by Musée d’Orsay. We got a really
yummy dinner last night at a restaurant
called something Odéon and then we
just wandered around St Germain…”

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