Where else? It’s long been one of America’s most twisted locations. Nothing surprising here.
Shooting pledges with air guns, making them eat butter with dirt on it and making them drink bong water led to a Coastal Carolina University fraternity’s five-year suspension … [A] first-year student pledging the fraternity was injured after being shot multiple times with an air gun as part of the group’s initiation process… [He] was shot twice in the head, twice in the stomach and multiple times in the back… [The] student sought medical attention in the following days for headaches and hearing difficulty… Shortly after, he received texts from some of the fraternity members, including one who allegedly told him to “keep the frat’s name out of your mouth,” according to the report. The pledge withdrew from the university on Jan. 9, 2023, for medical reasons.
Three shootings in 8 hours. Eight wounded. Some tourists say they won’t be back.
Others, however – bikers, boozers, gunnies – are beginning to think their usual vacation spot – Panama City Beach – lacks the je ne sais quoi of the pride of South Carolina.
Ladies, UD can’t think of a more perfect synergy than taking your semesters at rape-friendly Baylor (located in biker-friendly Waco) and your semester breaks at pop-pop-pop-pop-pop-pop-POPPIN’!!! (watch that way-viral video NOW – start at 1:44 to go RIGHT to the fun stuff – for the amazing spray of bullets!) Myrtle Beach.
“We’re gonna send a message to do everything that’s humanly possible to stop this violence in our city,” [the city’s Mayor] said.
But you’re not going to, are you? Because the simple stuff you have to do in order to stop attracting large numbers of violent criminals to your beach involves getting merchants to stop pandering to them. But this is America, and we don’t fuck with the free market.
The thing you do, which is turn the city into a police state during the warm months, doesn’t seem to be interrupting the flow of bullets.
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WOW! Myrtle Beach managed to find time to squeeze in a fourth shooting on Sunday night!
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SUPER wow! A fifth one!!
After a fifth shooting Monday night, Gov. Henry McMaster also asked State Law Enforcement Division Chief Mark Keel to meet with local law enforcement and address the spate of violence.
With five, you get a concerned governor thrown in.
The only thing separating Ocean City, at this point, from Beach Blanket Bloodbath Myrtle Beach, SC, is that for some reason no one at this latest event has a gun. Someone always has a gun during brawls in Myrtle Beach.
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The reason these particular beaches are singled out for gang violence? Too simple. If you build it, they will come. Look at the sorts of commercial establishments that dominate these towns. And there’s too much money and political power on the line to change that. Note that no police appear at any point in the video.
… beachy municipalities with wall to wall bars and little law enforcement attract really big vicious crowds. As one traditional spring break town after another says enough to the carnage, larger and larger groups of drunk fucks concentrate in smaller and smaller spaces, to the point where South Beach, and the handful of other still-certified SB locations, are absolutely choked with traffic jams police stops drugs guns fights biker gangs and open-air rapes for as long as two months. Residents seem to think this isn’t the best way to welcome in the spring, and even the merchants who in the past haven’t minded the grossness because it brings in so much cash have begun to respond to the city council’s pleas that they close up early or stop feeding infinite liquor to everyone who shows up or whatever.
UD wonders, though. Bestiality will have its way, and our enterprising country should be able to produce one or two cities/towns willing to make a name for themselves as crapulous destinations of last resort. I’m putting my money on Myrtle Beach.
According to Mark Kruea, Myrtle Beach’s public information officer, no shooting deaths occurred this year [there were three shooting deaths last year] and only one person was injured in a shooting …
Kruea said three motorcyclists and one moped rider died in traffic accidents. Other riders filled local emergency rooms to capacity with non-fatal injuries. Several crimes occurred, including robberies and kidnappings.
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Bikers are pissed with all the security measures.
Alonzo Pritchard, a Memphis tire shop manager who attended Bikefest for the 18th consecutive year, said the city had sapped the life out of the gathering… Sean Robinson said he would not be returning [to] Myrtle Beach until officials got rid of the traffic loop, did away with the barricades and let motorcyclists travel without major impediments. As far as he was concerned, he would rather spend his money somewhere more hospitable to riders.
Little by little, even America’s most dissolute locations are refusing to host spring breaks and bikefests. So where’s the American city enterprising and sketchy enough to become the go-to hospitable place for all of this country’s frats and bike clubs?
UD’s putting her money on Reno.
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Note to moped riders: Do what everyone else who lives anywhere near Myrtle Beach does during Memorial Day weekend: FLEE.
Myrtle Beach police said in a statement that Reginald Rivers, 23, of Charleston struck a North Carolina man riding a moped on North Kings Highway at 6:42 a.m. Sunday.
According to police, Rivers was driving at a high rate of speed when he struck Brandon Brinson, 21, of Magnolia, N.C. Brinson died from injuries sustained in the crash.
Rivers was charged with felony DUI resulting in death and hit and run resulting in death, along with driving under suspension, possession of a firearm by a felon and five counts of threatening the life of a public official.
At a 6 p.m. Sunday bond hearing, Myrtle Beach chief municipal judge Jennifer Wilson said she couldn’t set bond on the felony DUI and hit and run charges because Rivers was already out on bond on an armed robbery charge in Charleston.
A circuit court judge will have to hold a bond hearing on those charges.
Wilson did set a $50,000 bond on the five threatening the life of a public official charge, $20,000 on the possession of a firearm by a felon and $544 on the DUS charge.
Rivers told the judge that he couldn’t be charged with the DUS “because I don’t even have a license.”
When Rivers was brought into the city courtroom, he was very unsteady on his feet and continuously talking to which Wilson admonished him a number of times to remain quiet.
After several rambling conversations, Wilson tacked on a 30-day contempt of court charge because Rivers would not be quiet and follow the judge’s instructions.
For the city charges, Rivers faces a court date of June 10.
No date was set for a bond hearing for the charges of felony DUI and hit and run.
Wilson appointed a public defender for Rivers though he told the judge that he already had a public defender in Charleston on his other charges pending there.
He asked Wilson how long it would take to get a bond hearing in General Sessions court because he was afraid it may take a long time.
“I have no idea,” Wilson said. “Mr. Rivers looking at your record, you should know how the court system works.”
There will always be scuzzy cities (hello, Myrtle Beach!) where spring breakers can continue to crash cars, rape, and shoot during those two special weeks in March. (This behavior is also all over Myrtle Beach when it isn’t spring break.) But when even SB locales as notorious as Panama City Beach introduce restrictions, you know the event’s really getting out of hand.
And you know it won’t change a thing. Kansas City had close to a thousand police at the Super Bowl shootout; the next Super Bowl celebration will have one National Guard member for each partygoer. But it’s just too easy to whip out your AK47. No one’s going to stop you. Same deal here.
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 Craigwhodathunkit?? 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:
Hookah lounges
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!
Why this tidbit shows up at the very end of a long piece detailing 2022’s especially barbaric spring break is beyond me. Surely, as we enter this year’s fun, the escalating arsenal in the hands of drunk, massed, seventeen year olds belongs in the first paragraph.
We expect midday rapes on the beach, lethal blotto-toppling from balconies, car crashes, blah blah. What we really need to look for this year, as the country hoards four hundred million guns, and as every popular SB destination announces that armed law enforcement plans to show up against the revelers, is, well, warfare. Europe has Ukraine; the United States has Myrtle Beach.
I’m talking about a two-front war: Not just the established business of wasted guys blowing other wasted guys away in open street warfare because rivals find the same woman attractive, but battalions of wasted people blasting away against the police.
What makes you think the hordes of drug dealers who expect to do a… bang-up business at these week-long events won’t protect their turf the same way they do on city streets?
Local bars are furious about the imposition of early closing hours, stepped up i.d. harassment, blatant police presence, etc., etc. What makes you think they and/or their patrons won’t start shooting?
UD‘s great-uncle, Nathan Rapoport, settled in Ocean City in 1912 and built some of its first boardwalk businesses. UD‘s father graduated from Ocean City High School. She follows the sad fortunes of that resort closely.
Like notorious Myrtle Beach, OC has over decades allowed large stretches of itself to sink into squalor, with resulting high crime rates, guns, drugs, fights, and even riots. Both of these locations might have done something to discourage their takeover by sleazy motels, cheap bars, ugly and dangerous city thoroughfares, and many other marks of civic degeneracy. But there was money in degeneracy.
Until there wasn’t. Non-degenerate locals and visitors are leaving.
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Now an established low-life magnet, OC is trying, late in the game, to de-magnetize. It banished, for instance, the annual vile H20i gathering of assholes with loud cars; but scofflaws don’t exactly care whether you banish them, and year after year thousands keep coming, turning OC, for a week in September, into a wasteland of smoking squealing crashing hulks circled by drunks recording the fun on their phones. After each year’s debacle the town revisits and revises its laws in hopeless, increasingly police-state, measures.
This month’s tweak, described in my headline, involves real surveillance state stuff, with, what, drones? satellites? tracking the movements and collecting the identities of the asshole brigade.
On the streets and even highways leading from the Bay Bridge to Ocean City, wall to wall police will engage in constant arrests, and, with those crowds no doubt pushing back, we can expect lovely results. Rumble strips will be everywhere. City officials have been having nice chats with the proprietors of the dumps that house the crowds and nicely explaining to them that if they keep housing overflows of people the town will put them out of business. Cars will be impounded, and, in an interesting twist, owners can no longer just come and claim them but must hire companies to drive them out – at no doubt great expense.
Oh – and next year:
In 2022, Ocean City hopes to hold a three-day concert during the weekend of H2Oi. Additionally, the town wants to host a sporting event that weekend.
“For the last 10 years when the pop-up rally was here, we’ve kind of been on the defense,” [the OC mayor] said. “I think we all feel it’s time to go on the offense and set our own destiny.”
Try to imagine what it’s like to live in Ocean City. You get to witness a yearly actual reversion-to-barbarism event. And you get to look forward to next year’s raid, which will add huge numbers of pissed off (what’s with all the police and those car assholes?) sports and country music fans. Where do I sign up.
… which this blog has long covered, has morphed into a military-grade assault on American municipalities. Even the grossest, most self-serving of locations – places like Myrtle Beach and Panama City Beach – have begun wondering whether it’s ultimately… advantageous to them to be associated in the public mind with open-air rape, open-air drug dealing, street riots, and incessant gunfire. A lot of people seem to think these conditions aren’t family friendly. A lot of people in these localities are trying to unload real estate.
Throw in covid and you get Miami Beach, another notorious spring break location, and one that in recent years has really struggled with epically disgusting behavior. Unable to cope with this year’s fusillades, the city has imposed severe, weeks-long, curfews.
“I believe it’s a lot of pent-up demand from the pandemic and people wanting to get out,” David Richardson, a member of the Miami Beach City Commission, said on Sunday. “And our state has been publicly advertised as being open, so that’s contributing to the issue.”
… a place where her family has roots starting in 1911. Like Myrtle Beach, OC has allowed itself (for stupid short-sighted commercial reasons) to be taken over by anarchic and/or criminal elements; and now that it’s a guns/booze/street fights/muscle car wasteland, there’s not much it can do about it. It’s hard to walk back the destruction of civic life.
The mayor, for instance, outlawed a major car rally for this year, after it spent last year trashing the city and “terrorizing” residents. But the rally guys said fuck you we’re coming anyway. They’re in OC right now, and will stay for a few more days.
In the language of a desperate, last-minute law the city got through the General Assembly, these are the actions that can trigger a $1,000 fine and/or sixty days in jail.
… is appalling. Keep in mind while reading this short chronicle of the last few days that the city has itself to blame for the escalating violence. (It’s sheer dumb luck no guns have been involved; but that luck will certainly run out.) It has done little to make the place unattractive to violent people. No curfews; plenty of late-night bars with cheap booze; insufficient police patrols.
Boardwalk violence used to be about crowds of drunk frat boys (see my posts about OC sister-cityMyrtle Beach); but while that of course still goes on, the really scary stuff now is about gangs.
Around 4:30 a.m. on Sunday, June 7, the OCPD responded to a fight involving multiple people on the Boardwalk between 6th Street and 7th Street. During that incident, one unnamed individual was stabbed and was taken to Peninsula Regional Medical Center in Salisbury. The victim’s status in unknown.
Last Tuesday, OCPD officers responded to two simultaneous serious assaultson the Boardwalk, one at 11th Street and another at 15th Street. Around 11:20 p.m., OCPD officers responded to a reported stabbing that had just occurred. The victim was transported to PRMC for treatment and severity of the victim’s injuries are not known.
Just after midnight last Wednesday, the three-day spree reached a crescendo when a fight broke out on the Boardwalk between large groups of young adults. At least one young man was punched repeatedly in the face while sitting on a Boardwalk bench to the point it appeared he fell unconscious. Other skirmishes broke out during the larger altercation which carried over to the beach area. A video of the incident captured by a witness and posted on social media went viral and left many in the community with more questions than answers…
Just after 5 p.m. last Thursday, two individuals entered a West Ocean City restaurant and were asked by employees to leave because they were not wearing masks or face coverings in violation of state COVID-19 directives. The individuals did leave as directed, but returned a short time later with a third individual and allegedly confronted employees and threw bottles and other items around the restaurant before fleeing on foot. One individual, identified as Roger Ja’Mil Brown, 19, of Severn, Md., was arrested a short time later and was charged with disorderly conduct, resisting arrest and disturbing the peace.
Around the same time last Thursday, another man was reportedly attacked randomly while shopping at the outlets in West Ocean City. The victim and his girlfriend were allegedly attacked from behind by five unknown assailants in broad daylight. The victim reportedly suffered multiple facial fractures including a broken cheek and a broken eye socket.
Back in Ocean City, the violence erupted again on Friday night with multiple altercations up and down the Boardwalk throughout the night. The situation reached a crescendo on Friday when law enforcement was forced to deploy pepper spray or a tear gas-like substance to break up the crowds.
On Sunday around 2 a.m., police broke up a fight among a group and apprehended at last two suspects on the Boardwalk.
On Sunday afternoon, the Alaska Stand on 9th Street announced on social media it was closing its doors early due to customer problems. Additionally, some other downtown businesses, such as the Crabcake Factory Poolside, did not even open Sunday due to concerns over safety.
In its social media message, the Alaska Stand wrote, “We are closed! … wehave had more than enough this weekend dealing with a whole new level of disrespect to our staff, our business and our town and we are tired of being the brunt of undeserved verbal abuse by the public when ordering and picking up … we will regroup and try again … get it together OC … we apologize to our beloved and well mannered customers, we cherish and appreciate you to no end.”
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By some measures, Ocean City has for some time been the most dangerous place to live in Maryland. Fixing the problem will make the place feel even less carefree and vacation-like: Extreme police presence; curfews; huge numbers of new rules; a general air of suspicion and threat. It’s sort of like what has happened to soccer (feast your eyes) in certain European countries: Organized gangs were allowed to proliferate, and now the game setting is one hundred percent male (women and families have abandoned the arenas; it’s only police and young male fans now) and way violent. Ocean City is getting there.
… reminds ol’ UD to talk about a trend among prospective students and faculty at our country’s universities.
Krugman points out that
our madness over guns [is] just one aspect of the drive to turn us into what Thomas Hobbes described long ago: a society “wherein men live without other security than what their own strength and their own invention shall furnish them.” And Hobbes famously told us what life in such a society is like: “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short.”
There are larger and larger areas of this country where
[people regard any] public action for the public good, no matter how justified, as part of a conspiracy to destroy our freedom.
This paranoia strikes both deep and wide. Does anyone remember George Will declaring that liberals like trains, not because they make sense for urban transport, but because they serve the “goal of diminishing Americans’ individualism in order to make them more amenable to collectivism”? And it goes along with basically infantile fantasies about individual action — the “good guy with a gun” — taking the place of such fundamentally public functions as policing.
Anyway, this political faction is doing all it can to push us toward becoming a society in which individuals can’t count on the community to provide them with even the most basic guarantees of security — [including] security from crazed gunmen…
We’re beginning to see evidence of some faculty leaving, and some students not applying, to universities in these frontier settings. Bullets, rapists, and riots, oh my…
Many such locations are already cultural wastelands; some are also beginning to look like shooting galleries.
Why, for instance, would anyone with a choice want to live – even for a few years – in Waco, Texas, home of armed cults,armed motorcycle gangs, and Baylor University? Why would a non-Hobbesian want to work there, live there, go to school there, teach there? It’s not as if there’s any cultural compensation to living in the Wild West. It’s guns and strip malls and megachurches where you beg divine protection.
Why would you go to Hammond, Louisiana and attend Southeastern Louisiana University, famous for being the last school in America willing to take Jonathan Taylor? Can anyone be surprised that at 3 AM yesterday a fight broke out on campus and a bunch of people got shot?
These schools are part of America’s Hobbesian wastelands, where you grabs your AR-15 and you takes your chances. The idea that a university could thrive under these conditions is hilarious.
Trying to teach or learn in these settings is like deciding to take your family vacation in Beach Blanket Bloodbath Myrtle Beach. Why? Unless you’re a Hobbesian and you enjoy that sort of thing?
UD anticipates a militarization of certain campuses – having been abandoned by civilization, they will become weedy tracts patrolled by open-carry paranoids offering Active Shooter Response seminars.
If you’re in the wasteland, and you can leave, you should. Get out while the getting’s good.
‘A man was eating his lunch with his family in the restaurant’s back dining room when a small revolver fell out of his pants pocket and went off.’
‘The bullet lodged itself in the wall of the restaurant.’
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‘The joke about Cracker Barrel is that it’s exactly what it sounds like: a container for backward white people.’
‘A Change.org petition in 2015 called for the company to change its name to Caucasian Barrel, and 16,000 people signed, in mock protest of P.C. culture.’
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“It was complete chaos because people were going on like who has a gun and the man that had it didn’t realize that it was his that had went off.”
“Yeah, all day today we’ve been showing off the bullet hole to customers, they’ve enjoyed the story, so at the end of the day everyone was okay and our customers are getting a kick out of it.”
