Crazed firearms expert with military training still on the loose, killing anything that moves in Lewiston, Maine. Just “discharged from a mental health facility,” but getting hold of high-powered assault-style rifle a piece of cake.
Maybe the genius who discharged him gave him a therapy gun as a goodbye gift.
Maine has “no independent background check system, no red flag law to identify those at extreme risk for gun violence, no requirement that convicted domestic abusers turn in their guns and no permit requirements for concealed weapons.”
Today’s crazed eighteen year old family-slaughterer is a real religious dude. And God is good! Only gave him a rifle. If he’d had a better weapon, he could have killed the whole neighborhood.
Arms them? We do more than that, baby! We ARMthem!!
An armed man wearing a bullet proof vest has reportedly taken three people hostage inside a veteran’s home in California after firing between 15 and 20 shots, law enforcement officials said…
Adam Gopnik has in mind people like raving lunatic John Sawchak, who for fifteen years — thanks to the give-a-shit Minneapolis police — terrorized his neighbors and finally shot one of them. The cops’ argument seems to be that they didn’t arrest him because they’re afraid of him, which is one hilarious argument, mes petites, but anyway, incredible as it is, the city authorities just let Sawchak endlessly slash and burn his way around the streets surrounding his house despite everyone begging them for help.
Only when he almost shot to death a guy trimming a tree did the police sit up and take a little notice.
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Sawchak’s just like that crazed old dude who brought Atlanta to a halt the other day while blasting various guns off his balcony. Neighbors confirmed he was a well-known, very heavily armed, berserko, but the apartment/city decided the best thing to do was continue allowing him to arm himself and only act when he did a Charles Whitman. One thinks also of Stephen Paddock, who carried an army’s worth of guns and ammo to his Las Vegas hotel room without anyone stopping him and asking why he was taking so many enormous packages over many days onto the elevator.
See my thing is if you WANT 450 million guns (and growing) and no serious gun laws, something’s gotta give. And that thing is personal liberties. The country can’t afford non-militarized high schools. It can’t afford non-institutionalized aggressive crazy people. Fifteen year olds didn’t back in the day carry loaded guns to school; now they do, on a very routine basis. Crazy people didn’t routinely amass armories and take aim at crowds of people from balconies and other locations.
Charles Whitman used to be something of a novelty.
If Paddock wasn’t as overtly nuts as those other guys, he was a well-known weirdo at the casinos, and he was known to own massive numbers of guns. He should have been under active surveillance before he killed sixty and wounded 413. It’s amazing that gun-mad America ignores its gunny and mad population.
A family member known to be mentally ill goes out of control and is desperately handed off by his father to his mother — WITH FOUR WEAPONS ON HIM INCLUDING AN AK47.
“[E]very country contains mentally ill and potentially violent people. Only America arms them,” writes Adam Gopnik. And man this story out of Maine makes that pretty graphic, don’t it. Son killed his mother in the car, then exited and took up a position along the road and starting shooting at passing vehicles. Killed one person and badly injured two before he decided it was time to kill himself. (With the AK47. That’s gotta hurt.)
Shades of Adam Lanza’s mother, who believed giving her violently insane son lots of guns would be therapeutic.
You kinda wonder under what conditions these people would call the police. Or an ambulance. If he had twelve guns on him? Body armor? IEDs?
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What is with these people? Gotta be a death wish.
And meanwhile, civilizationally, it’s really not a good look. “Not even the most primitive of societies can compete now with our new predictable savagery.”
… where will the mass shooting take place – inside the courtroom or out? Assault weapons are absolutely everywhere in and around the South Carolina courthouse, with the latest use involving the lead defense attorney pointing one at the prosecution table and saying, to general amusement, “Tempting.” As things fail to go the defense’s/Murdaugh’s way, we can certainly expect some firepower to be released. Let’s consider the possibilities.
1.) The extended Murdaugh clan seems in possession of hundreds of AR-15-style score-settlers, and if the prosecution keeps sayin bad shit about their bro they might could get a court official buddy to slip in their weaponry, and then they’d kill a bunch of opposing counsel and rescue Alex and move the clan down Mexico way.
2.) Some lunatic local racist has been, let’s say, steaming bigtime about a black man, of all things, presiding over a white folks trial. Don’t make the state look good when uppity you know whats sit way up there in robes telling state senators their objections are overruled. He too smuggles in his AR-15, blows the judge away, is himself shot full of holes, and in the general pandemonium six other people, including three jurors, are killed. Mistrial!
3.) Didn’t think I’d forget the suicide scenario, did you? Alex, who has already tried something along these lines, uses his superior height/strength to overpower court security and blows his brains out. “You’ve destroyed this great and good man!” shout the defense team, initiating a riot so severe that shots must be fired to quell it. Four people die, fourteen critically wounded.
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Guns kill and we have 400 million of them and counting. Only one country in the world has constitutionally protected arms possession with minimal regulations — the United States. Not even the most primitive of societies can compete now with our new predictable savagery.
Smith&Wesson blasts back at deep state harassment over its kid-friendly/shooter game ad campaigns for human-pulverizing toys. Wee1 must also be pissed:
Not to mention BabyGun or whatever its called:
A little known fact is that rather than featuring in romper room play, most guns are simply used to kill yourself. Self-slaughter holds a vast majority over any other use. Guns are largely about blowing your brains out with one hundred percent certainty (other methods fall short of this standard), and in some states (Alaska, Wyoming, Montana) they’re scooping wildcatters and cowboys off the floor pretty much 24/7.
For instance, Utah, another gunny he-man state, boasts this remarkable statistic:
Utah has one of the highest death by suicide rates in the country, currently ranked sixth. According to the Utah Department of Health, suicide rates in the tricounty area [northeast Utah: Daggett, Uintah and Duchesne Counties] are 58% higher than the rest of the state.
Got that? The state’s already comfortably in the top ten; but the tricounty area is 58% higher than the state’s rate!
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So one thing UD has never understood is why gun makers don’t feature ease and certainty of suicide in their advertising, since this happens to be the gun’s calling card, its claim to fame, the primary reason tens of thousands of owners own guns. One obvious campaign would feature pre-death videos solicited from, say, tricounty suicides, in which they explain why choosing a gun to blow their brains out was, well, a no-brainer!
And there’s no reason consumers need to degrade their final act by choosing cheap pistols and smaller arms; in one celebrity spot, manufacturers could feature quarterback Tyler Hilinski’s use of an AR-15 in his suicide. (A Glock will only set you back $500 or so, whereas an AR-15 costs around a thousand. Tag line in this campaign: WHEN YOU CARE ENOUGH TO END THE VERY BEST.)
Guns command a vast and growing suicide market; their makers need to exploit this fact. A lot of drunk lonely cowboys are right now sitting on the fence suicide-wise; a strong ad campaign is probably all they need.
… 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.
LOL. Waaaall now I don’t know, the campus of Colorado State Pueblo is a notorious killing field, and Robert Killis (helluva name) maybe needed these weapons – and, as it turns out, many, many more – in his car and apartment to stay safe. Plus he “liked to kill people” and “wanted to kill President Biden” and thought he might use “pipe bombs … to create an explosion in the courtyard where the ROTC students ate and took breaks. Killis would also talk about setting the pipe bombs off in the courtyard so when students ran, he could shoot them as they ran.”
Funny thing is if he just kept his trap shut and kept all that shit unloaded he’d probably have been fine. Colorado and Utah are America’s most gun friendly states, and their universities reflect that. But Bob’s a people person, and he just couldn’t help sharing and someone got scared and told the cops.
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This blog has covered quite a few Killises – wee lads who come to college outfitted à la Stephen Paddock because they want to kill everybody. Only a matter of time before one of them gets his wish.
A security expert goes to the precise analogy: ISIS. Think ISIS and you can begin to think clearly about how to end our national nightmare. Make our native ISIS undergo decline.
Trump’s insistence that, despite all evidence, he won the election helped Democrats win both Georgia seats. Not even his followers can depend on him: Under pressure, he essentially conceded the election on Thursday, which meant either that he is unreliable or that he was lying to them the whole time. He has limited access to effective communication forums, most notably Twitter and Facebook. The platforms’ decision to suspend his accounts was controversial, but deplatforming is a successful counterterrorism technique that, although it may galvanize diehards, impedes a movement leader’s ability to reach new members. The MAGA-world leadership team is in disarray; Pence plans to attend Biden’s inauguration. In welcoming Pence to the event—“I’d be honored to have him there,” the president-elect said—Biden is replicating a common divide-and-conquer counterterrorism strategy that amplifies distrust and leads to paranoia among those who remain inside an extremist group. Companies such as American Express are pulling support for members of Congress who went along with Trump’s effort to block the certification of the electoral vote.
… The United States is a divided nation, but only a tiny fraction of Trump’s more than 74 million voters showed up in Washington, D.C., eager to fight. The way to unite this country is to isolate acts of violence—and a leader who incites it—from legitimate expression. Trump was a north star for a certain kind of radical. Americans will be safer the more that star loses its shine.
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The particular analogy for the terrorists’ House and Senate enthusiasts is the mentally challenged young women from European cities who flew off to Syria and fucked one ISIS terrorist after another in order to push out squads of ISIS babies. As these moronic post-ISIS degenerates try to crawl back to England without the citizenship papers that they – whoops! – gleefully burned in YouTubes declaring their new citizenship in a caliphate dedicated to the torture and death of all Britons, they find that they are encountering… oddly… a little trouble being welcomed back.
No self-respecting democratic governing body should ever welcome back the Hawleys and Cruzes and all the others in both houses who revealed their depravity by fucking with domestic terrorism.
Most will, I believe, be voted out in the next cycle; meanwhile, enjoy the manifold forms of shunning — withdrawal of various forms of corporate support; demands for return of donations; rejection of awards, removal of honorary degrees; disbarment; expulsion from a wide variety of civic and private groups, etc., etc. — which all of the elected insurrectionists are currently experiencing. It is a small but important part of what this security expert is talking about – the degradation of the Trump brand.
You got that right. After their thirteen year old son repeatedly threatened to shoot up his school, his mother insisted there were “no weapons in the home.” A search revealed that she and the kid’s father
owned several illegal firearms and kept loaded guns out in the open…
[The father was charged] with two felony counts of prohibited possession of machine guns and short-barreled shotguns and one count of gross misdemeanor negligent storage of firearms where a child can access them.
Authorities on Friday seized a cache of firearms, ammunition and at least two explosive devices… Some of the firearms were unsecured, and a ballistic vest was also recovered…
“Law enforcement officers also recovered several trigger kits hidden in the ceiling of the residence,” said the charges … “They appeared to be conversion kits for converting weapons to automatic weapons. Deputies also discovered literature on how to convert a semi-automatic weapon to a fully automatic weapon.”
America’s family.
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[O]nly about one-quarter of [US] gun owners think it essential to alert visitors with children that guns may be present in the home. (Twice as many non-gun-owners think so.) Only 66 percent of gun owners think it essential to keep guns locked up when not in use. (Ninety percent of non-gun-owners think so.) Only 45 percent of them actually do it.
With Spring Break just on its way, and with fond memories of Spring Breaks past (oh wait: that was Father’s Day), it’s downright ominous that yet anothermerchant is restricting our right to bear arms.
The only way to stop a bad baby with a gun is with a good baby with a gun, and they’re taking guns out of the hands of our babies.
Freedom’s Safest Place right now lies at the frontline of the battle against collectivism: America’s mentally ill babies.
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That’s why UD (and his outraged lawyers) is so bummed that a judge refuses to let Alwin Chen out of jail before his trial. Who’s going to protect Clarksburg High School (not far from UD‘s house) now that wee Alwin – just eighteen years old and knee-high to a grasshopper, bless him! – isn’t, every day of the school year, bringing his loaded Glock (and a knife) to school?
Alwin’s dad is a YUUUUGE gun (and larger weaponry) lover (they even live – I kid you not – on Gunner’s Lane) and has passed down his vast arsenal to his bouncing baby boy, who wants to kill people just the way his comic book heroes do (read Alwin’s journals).
The only comfort UD takes in our local children’s protector being (temporarily) out of commission is her confidence that there are a dozen or more lads at Clarksburg High just like him.
What with a drunken lacrosse guy at U Va just convicted of beating his girlfriend to death, you’ve now got a lot of people looking at the lovely culture of many university sports and noticing that even if this culture doesn’t produce a lot of murders, it certainly produces a whole lotta off-field violence.
So much that, as UD has noted on this blog before, a certain overly-familiar dance is danced by coaches and universities post-DUI, assault, rape, riot, etc. Boston University, whose hockey story has just jumped to the New York Times, is currently doing the rape two-step, what with two members of that team recently arrested for sexual assault.
This dance excludes the following:
An acknowledgment that enormous numbers of fans love hyper-violent sports, the more violent the better, and players are richly rewarded for being violent. And, uh, like, you don’t have to be a university graduate to grasp that some hyper-violent players are going to be violent in general.
An acknowledgment that many of the players don’t belong in college (see this post’s headline), that many won’t graduate – won’t really take courses in any legitimate way at all – and, as the person quoted in the headline says, are not college kids as we know them. Now a college president might try a new step and say In the name of diversity, we’ve decided to accept a cohort of violent flunkies. We think our students can learn a lot from them. But le président is likely to stay with the trusted routine in which Our quest for well-rounded individuals with special skills drew us toward this athletic prodigy and we’re stunned and disappointed that he has made some bad decisions.
An acknowledgment that a university can shut down a sports program. Usually, of course, sports programs get shut down when they’re so unmitigatedly vile that even the NCAA wants them to take a breather. But on occasion the campus itself will demonstrate enough integrity to turn off one of its assault-machines long enough to try to regroup (but regrouping is a bitch because it means fielding a new, non-competitive team).
An acknowledgment that the crucial fault lies in the university’s cynical recruitment strategy, which overlooks massive red flags for many players because all it cares about is how tough they are. Why are these guys at Boston University? Who let them in?
Here’s what the dance includes:
A sudden rhetoric of crisis from the president, as if no one had heard of America’s violent sports culture before.
A hastily assembled faculty review board, rather like the pointless Knight Commission, which will grind out more crisis-rhetoric.
A hasty dismissal of the bad boys from the team because their behavior has nothing to do with our values at BU even though we not only accepted them but have been treating them like royalty.
1.) A dismissed faculty member has had a psychotic break and has issued death threats against faculty, students, the whole school really. How well has the campus responded in terms of security?
2.) When did the school become aware (through student complaints, his Rate My Professor page, his social media, etc.) that Harris is a violent, mentally ill person? Did it act quickly, or did it drag its feet?
3.) How well has the administration kept students and faculty informed about the ongoing threat, and what people should do about it?
4.) The acutely psychotic condition of Harris makes me suspect that his madness was visible long before he began ranting about mass murder. Did anyone warn the philosophy department about him before they hired him? Did the department have reservations about hiring him which they decided to overlook?
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Oh. And don’t forget. 5.) “Every country contains mentally ill and potentially violent people. Only America arms them.” UCLA must certainly proceed on the assumption that Harris enjoys a massive violent arsenal to match his massive violent mental illness.
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UPDATE: “[A] former instructor in a philosophy department is alleged to have sent members of the department threatening messages and was revealed to possibly have a history of problematic interactions with students, and possibly was observed in the past as problematic by superiors at institutions which (for reasons unknown) do not appear to have effectively responded to the situation or informed relevant others of it.”
