Or twenty miles north; I’m figuring the local shooters moved this weekend’s fun away from Murder Beach proper cuz it’s crawling with cops.
This distance from the boardwalk, they were free to shoot eleven people. An impressive number, even by American standards.
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UPDATE: Happened on a party boat! Did people jump into the water? And eleven shot because it’s hard to run away when you’re drunk, high, and on a boat.
Police are searching for “a motive.” Hm, hm, what could it be. Cram a bunch of drunks, several of whom are armed, on a boat. Motive would be, you know, someone pushed someone aside while reeling around trying not to fall over. BANGBANGBANG
ANOTHER UPDATE: When you go to Facebook, you get all kinds of video and commentary. Some say it was an argument. Some say it was a hate crime. Some say some people drowned. We’ll see.
AND ANOTHER: For all the fervid imaginings of Facebookers, it sounds as though our latest mass shooting was exactly what you’d expect: Too many drunk/high assholes packed into a closed space. Someone always seems to get pissed off (or just pissed) and start shooting everybody.
“Just seeing people hit the ground and taking cover and, I took cover and balled up like a hamster, so fearing for my safety but thankful I’m still alive and okay,” [a beachgoer] said.
Read my blog’s intermittent coverage of bloody Myrtle Beach to get a sense of its astounding gun violence. Even if it doesn’t end in your curling up like a hamster, the action on the beachfront features lots of large, dangerous, fights.
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Some people like a challenge:
“There’s trouble all over the world, we can’t control that. So we just have to come and not let fear spoil our vacation. We still come here to enjoy the sights, enjoy the views, so I don’t feel threatened at all,” [one visitor] said. “I’ve been coming here for years. I’ll still come.”
Hey, if that’s how he feels, he should vacation in Haiti – much cheaper, and spectacular scenery.
We hear also from a local politician:
“It’s very unfortunate that people feel they need to solve their problems with guns but it’s an isolated incident and not indicative of the reality that most Myrtle Beach visitors encounter.”
Hon, ‘isolated’ don’t earn you Fifth Deadliest Beach …
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 focus on 2025 Ocean Boulevard shootings [in Myrtle Beach] began on April 26th when 11 people were sent to the hospital in a police officer involved incident where the juvenile who fired into a crowd was killed.
Several Ocean Boulevard shootings on successive weekends have happened since. Day trippers from towns approximately 100 miles in circumference to Myrtle Beach cause much of the violence … downtown on Ocean Boulevard.
Unsupervised teenagers ranging from 16 to 18 carry guns with them to the beach. Despite the pattern, Myrtle Beach police have yet to come up with a system for dealing with these unsupervised teens before the violence begins.
SC does not have truancy laws enabling MBPD to detain unsupervised juveniles until their parents retrieve them. Even when they identify potential violent teens, their hands are tied until the shootings start.
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Can this really be? A police force can’t detain suspicious people? They have to stand there waiting for them to start shooting?
So far it’s just middling spring stuff – Saturday night fights/shootings, killing one or two, injuring ten or twenty – but come July the gunfire’s gonna be SIZZLING.
Not just on the weekends, and much more productive body bag work – that’s what I’m talking about.
Bring the kids, bring granny – you’re never too old or too young to run screaming for your life and the lives of your loved ones while hundreds of gunshots pierce the balmy air. Get ready.
Myrtle Beach Police observed a disturbance involving multiple people in the 900 block of North Ocean Boulevard … During the altercation, one person began firing a weapon. [A police officer] responded by discharging their firearm…
Exchange of fire! Rumble! Melee in Myrtle! Run for your life!
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This is how you get “one of the highest rates of gun homicides in the nation.”
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.”
“To say it’s not a threat to the community is a big reach,” said [Jeremy] Evans.
I mean, on the most literal level, one or more people shooting wildly into crowds is an obvious threat to any local community; and in this latest case the police haven’t arrested anyone, so the threat remains.
And after all shooting is not uncommon in notorious Myrtle Beach and environs, so a general menace remains. UD can understand the comical tendency of local officials everywhere to declare, after big mass shootings/killings, that yay! our community is safe but yeah we keep getting these isolated, totally not dangerous events… but she’s with Jeremy Evans – a spot of honesty would help.
In Myrtle Beach, in Philadelphia, mass gatherings and rapid gunfire from weapons modified with gun switches guarantee many fellow Americans for us to memorialize.
Bikers compete in the burn out pit at Suck Bang Blow bar in Murrells Inlet, S.C. during the 2024 Myrtle Beach Spring Rally. Their spinning tires burn rubber often shredding tires and filling the air with smoke, the roar of engines and the cheers from the crowd.
Like Myrtle Beach and Panama City Beach, Ocean City (where, devoted readers know, UD‘s family has deep roots) has long put its fiscal faith in any and all forms of scummy behavior. This commitment to pandering to the worst has worked out beautifully at all of these resorts for decades; but a problem has lately arisen related to the ownership of guns by increasing numbers of the people who go to these places. They’re shooting them off on the major thoroughfares, and they’re scaring away a lot of vacationers who don’t want to die.
What to do when large stretches of your resort are designed to appeal to people who get in fights that turn into public gun battles? Where do you start changing that?
Point One: You don’t. There are tons of shooting ranges within an easy drive of Ocean City, and they’re expressly designed for visiting gunnies looking for a place to go bangbangbang. Carrying and shooting guns is in the DNA of places like Ocean City.
Not to mention all the cheesy hotels, bars, and restaurants whose livelihood depends on lowlifes. Much of the place depends on encouraging gross noisy dangerous behavior.
Point Two: One modest place to start shifting from gang- to family-friendly, if you do want to try that, would be the tee shirts for sale along the boardwalk, catching the eye not only of gross people, but also of non-gross people. And indeed OC is looking into this right now:
Ocean City Council plans to pass a new ordinance that … would limit the display of obscene material and language on merchandise on the boardwalk.
Gross porny shirt merchants are understandably upset: One of them points out that Brass Balls saloon and many other porny establishments abound, but they’re not getting shut down.
This is a good argument: Lots of commercial OC is explicitly violent/smutty in one way or another; and even when the city has tried to shut down America’s most disgusting events, they’ve failed to do so. They’re kind of locked in to being the host city for H20i, for instance.
OC has chickened out of going after obscene merchandise this year. They’ll chicken out next year too. Place has gotta make a living.
