Killed five people and injured six in midtown Manhattan.

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“[E]very country contains mentally ill and potentially violent people. Only America arms them.”

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.”

I suppose we should be grateful America’s latest obviously demented gun-bearer only killed two.

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[E]very country contains mentally ill and potentially violent people. Only America arms them.

Whether it’s the real game, at a high school, or the virtual game, at an entertainment complex, football and Florida go together like Smith and Wesson.

Put America’s most violent game together with virtually universal gun ownership, throw in an open public venue, and POOOOOF! Mass shooting.

The shots and shrieks are recorded by all the dying people, so the soundtrack of America writes itself: Concussive hits from the game; RATATATATATATATATA; fuck they’re shooting run; bodies running; grunts; bodies falling.

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And Parkland’s only four hours away! The Sunshine State’s full of opportunities – at many of the same locations! – to get killed in a large-scale event.

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Their flagship university.

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[E]very country contains mentally ill and potentially violent people. Only America arms them.

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SEVENTEEN TRILLION

“How many mass shootings in your state will it take for you to do something?” David Hogg tweeted to U.S. Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.).

UD‘s beloved DeLillo stars in the New Yorker’s account of the YouTube killings.

There will be a temptation to read the attack as a dark parable of the attention economy — the story of someone so hungry for views that she took a handgun to those who, in her belief, had limited them. But the truer story is that going berserk with guns has become a way of American life.

Correct. Guns are now the way America’s berserk turn down the bed and turn out the lights.

[E]very country contains mentally ill and potentially violent people. Only America arms them.

Just another day at an American mall.

[In his second road rage shooting incident,] Joe Harvey fired off at least nine bullets in the busy shopping area around 11:30 a.m. … With the two vehicles just 10 to 15 feet apart, he stepped onto the running board outside his door and started shooting.

I wondered what those running boards were for. Good place to get your footing and stabilize yourself before emptying your weapon. Maybe provides some protection from incoming/being seen. Maybe he practiced this maneuver in his first road rage shooting.

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That was Georgia. Just down the road in Florida:

Candace Marie Naughton told police

she was involved in a road rage incident with the occupants of the victims’ vehicle. [Four people reported she pointed a gun at them.] She said she had two guns in her car, but they were both in holsters under the front passenger seat. When the GPD officer asked how the victims knew she had a gun if both guns were under the seat, Naughton said, “They must have seen it on my dashboard,” but she was reportedly unable to explain how the gun was moved from under the passenger seat to the dashboard, since she was the only person in her vehicle. She reportedly changed her statement and said she “always drives with firearms on her dashboard.”

The officer reportedly saw two 9mm magazines in plain view in the center console of Naughton’s vehicle and a live round on the floorboard.

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I could go on. Oh, I could go on. We’ve covered on this blog mainly school shootings, threatened shootings, loaded guns brought in by elementary school students, blahblah. It’s getting dull cuz twenty of these a day. Haven’t done much road rage with brandished gun cuz… I don’t know why. They make better stories than the gunny kids and their gunny parents who put Glocks in their lunch boxes. TOO common. Yawn.

Gunny road ragers are even more common, but their stories are often better cuz like this woman they be real dumb and they lie real bad.

Welp, the last of her kids that Tranyelle Harshman shot in the head (after which Harshman killed herself) has now, after suffering for a few days, died.

Tranyelle, notoriously mentally unbalanced, killed all four of them pointblank with a handy household gun that her family saw no reason to take out of the house despite her madness. “Though his wife had been undergoing treatment for her fragile mental state for several years, she hadn’t been able to move past it, [her husband] said.”

*********************

No, hubby up and took a temporary job in California, leaving Tranyelle alone in their rather isolated Wyoming house – just her, her insanity, four little kids, and a Glock.

A Glock? Whatever. Maybe she used an AK-47 and really blasted the babies’ brains out. Why haven’t the authorities identified the firearm?

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Welp again: This is BIG news, and outlets all over the country have what to say about it, but virtually no one – and absolutely no one in gunny, astoundingly suicidal, Wyoming, has anything to say about a quadruple familicide made easy peasy with unlocked loaded guns fully available to a maniac.

Let us look at how our fellow Americans are rendering this event. “Olivia gained her angel wings yesterday,” announced the family at number four’s demise and OH MY. There are easy and hard ways to gain them, I guess, and God decided Olivia would do it the hard way, absorbing an agonizing slug from her own mother, and then laboring under a swollen bloody brain for days until her heart collapsed.

God wanted you for an angel. You, your sister, your other sister, and your other sister. And your mother?

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It’s the Godswerve. A lunatic with a gun bloodies up the house and — cue angels.

Exactly like gun-fanatic madman Olin Johnson, who took one of his billion household firearms and blew his wife and himself away.

Immediately after the bloodbath, his Mormon community invited everyone to a celebration of his life, asking that they bring “goodies to share” and “warm memories.”

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Or think of Andrew Humiston, 15 year old massacrist – killed 5! family members and only missed a sixth because she played dead – who took one of his father’s conveniently located guns to kill everybody. What was God on about, letting Andrew stalk and slay one screaming pleading family member after another? Why did the rest of the Humiston family lovingly note, in everybody’s obit, that they are survived by their murderer?

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All of these atrocity-reactions are best seen as bizarre subcultural self-comfortings, communities of people absolutely insistent on looking away from the carnage and swerving pronto to the angelic order. UD doesn’t begrudge them whatever all is forgiven God works in mysterious ways thing gets them through it; but how can the rest of us, how can a whole country bleeding from guns, play along? The focus has to be on the idiocy and negligence that put those death-dealers in the hands of maniacs.

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Update: So many other examples.

“Going berserk with guns has become an American way of life.”

They keep updating as reams of evidence that this madman should never have been in a public school come in. At 13, he’d already threatened to shoot up a school; at 14, he did it. His father kept multiple huge guns in the home, and UD is pretty confident that one of his ARs – easily accessible to his mentally ill son? – did the deed.

So… we’ve already corralled three probable enablers – negligent parent, indifferent school administrators, and inept law enforcement. Mes petites – you’d think in a country with 450 million or so guns, and routine mass killings, some effort would be made to identify likely mass killers. But guns are considered beautiful here; a 14 year old handling an AR is a beautiful thing. His classmates report he never spoke – completely alienated, it seems. Completely out of it. Rarely attended. Pity the teachers compelled by idiot administrators to harbor a student who probably frightened them.

The local county is Trumpian. God forbid you’d vote for anyone who talks about any form of gun legislation. The county got what it wished for: virtually no control of weapons. Check it out. Scroll and keep scrolling until you get to Georgia.

Every country has mentally ill people. Only America arms them, Adam Gopnik writes.

UPDATE: Oh – and get ready for the lawsuits. Abigail Zwerner’s forty million dollar suit against the Newport News Public Schools is humming along.

ANOTHER UPDATE: As with so many other school shooters, blatant mental health problems, fucked up parent, fucked up school administrators, fucked up law enforcement, guns all over the place. Dad let this child – at age 13, and probably before – handle all the weapons.

A perfect storm here, and a perfect idiot could have seen this before it broke. It’s very easy to see the father in court, and it’s even easier to see the school district sued for tens of millions of dollars. The monster the father made (it’s not clear the mother is at all involved – the parents are divorced, and it looks as though the shooter lived with his gun-totin’ pa) will never get out of prison. Might even get the death penalty.

AGAIN AN UPDATE: Mother a career criminal. Howdy.

La Dee Dah.

Wotta shocker. Daddy’s been arrested. Let’s see…

[F]our counts of involuntary manslaughter, two of second degree murder and eight counts of cruelty to children.

The Crumbleys also got involuntary manslaughter. They’re both serving ten year sentences.

America now suffers from a mismatch between the lethal weaponry which is currently endemic in its public schools, and the level of intelligence among some of the people who run the public schools. I mean to say that the level of intelligence is not adequate to deal with the lethality.

Compounding the insufficient intelligence problem are three further problems:

1. School leaders are incentivized to retain students.
2. School leaders are often ideologically twisted in ways that make them not want to “give up” on vicious, mentally ill, people.
3. Some school leaders are themselves in various ways violence-friendly or at least violence-tolerant. America is a violent country. It has a lot of violent people in it. Some of them are running our schools.

Schools are all about putting happy faces on everything. While superintendents and principals sit in their offices sketching school spirit happy faces, students and parents are out front in the parking lot sobbing in each other’s arms as police shut down their killing field for the rest of the week. It’s a strange duality, but one that won’t change, because of hardwired truths about some of the people who become public school administrators. Everyone can read the guns on campus numbers, the shootings/killings on campus numbers, all the way down to the elementary schools. (“The [Denver] shooting is the 83rd shooting on a K-12 school campus this calendar year, according to the K-12 School Shooting Database.”)  UD assures you that, given the situation on the ground, they will only grow.

And no, UD is not picking on administrators. They are only part – though a crucial part – of the witches’ brew. Depraved parents whose children have easy access to AR-15s? Check. Fragile mental health plus growing up in a violent country? Check. Inept local police forces? Check. School districts that haven’t gotten the message that in a country with four hundred million guns their buildings have become armed camps and have to start looking like them? Check. There’s lots of stuff we could talk about. But the person in charge of keeping the schools safe holds ultimate responsibility.

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Read this background. The multiply-shot-up school at issue is simply a dumping ground. Disgusting.

Every country has mentally ill people. Only America arms them, as Adam Gopnik writes.

The father of the UVa killer knew his son was ‘really paranoid’; he almost certainly also knew he had guns. (How many guns does the father own?) How many other people knew the killer was going nuts? UVa knew he told people he had guns on campus; the school knew as well that he’d been arrested for gun violations. No one did shit as an armed paranoid stalked the campus, and now a significant portion of the school’s football team is dead, in critical condition, or in recovery.

Here’s a close parallel: The sister of Phillip Adams knew he was, in her words, “aggressively” mentally ill – paranoid. He also had shitloads of guns.

Pretty much everyone knew Adams was right round the bend, but no one did shit.

“Going berserk with guns has become an American way of life,” writes Nathan Heller.

Like the UVa killer, Adams had been a college football player — at South Carolina State, which even after his mass murder of an entire family, including toddlers, maintains his hero page. Good ol’ Phil! He did it his way.

Another country might look at CTE ravaged paranoids with guns and restrict their access to weapons. Another country might find a way to commit them to long-term hospital care. America looks at them and says BRING ON MORE GUNS.

UD is intrigued by the upcoming special event, to be held on the evening of November 24 (Thanksgiving), in Roberts County, Texas (in 2017, Roberts voted 95.7% – more than any American county – for Trump). The RNC will reportedly bring together on the same stage, for one night only, its two most inspirational speakers, Kimberly Guilfoyle and Viktor Orban, to offer thanks for Donald Trump, and to instill enthusiasm in a declining-morale political movement.

The party’s leader will likely be indicted, and his theft of sensitive political documents has shocked many former supporters; its congressional prospects dim by the moment; and its full-throated endorsement of attacks on the rights of girls and women has fired up Democratic voters like never before. To counter all of this, the RNC will stage a kind of song and dance between these two veteran crowd-pleasers, in which (if I’m reading advance materials correctly) they will burst out of either stage wing and lock arms center stage while calling each other “Zsa Zsa” and “Dolphie.”

The orchestra will then accompany them in a hilarious version of “You Say Tomato I Say Tomahto,” after which, once the audience settles down, things will take a more serious turn, with reminders from Orban and Guilfoyle that race mixing, homosexuality, and abortion await a nation run by Democrats.

Hey Zsa Zsa want to date?

Let me give you a hand with

Your Replacement Rate!

As Orban sings this next number, Guilfoyle will look confused. Regarding her accusingly, he will pick up the song:

Three ex-husbands, tons of ex-beaus

And Kimberly’s had only one kid!

You’re keeping the white birth rate low!

Aryan Nation’s on a skid!

Kimberly giggles, and coos: “You’re saying you want to do something about it?”

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Apparently there’s a lot more where that came from, but I’ve only been able to get hold of the two opening numbers.

Farhad Manjoo frets over the power of the reactionary paranoid media and how it’s leading our people astray, but it ain’t that. That’s a symptom. That’s merely their reading material.

There are two primary causes of violent insurrection in today’s America:

1. Arsenal Sadness: Most people solve the problem of arsenal sadness by unlocking their arsenal and killing themselves, or their wife, or both, with a selected weapon from it. They are sad because they have spent decades, and tens of thousands of dollars they don’t have, amassing a world-class armory, and have been unable to use it. It sits, a seething reproach to their promise to themselves that someday they would spray some setting with bullets and everyone would pay attention to them. These people have what used to be called an itchy trigger finger. They are actively looking for occasions to pop someone; they open carry in desperate hopes that in the course of this or that ordinary day they can whip out their semi-automatic and do a wee-wee on the Waffle House lawn. Scaring people with their AWS-16 Beowulf just doesn’t do the trick anymore; they’re still sad. What better target than the national leadership of American democracy? It’s cathartic; it’s a culmination; it’s a hoot. If Stephen Paddock hadn’t prematurely shot his wad in Las Vegas, he’d have been blasting his way into the Pence family secure location on January 6. Ditto Adam Lanza.
2. Stupidity: This is the most thoughtful analysis of American stupidity UD has found. Yes, it is a long read; yes, it is somewhat pedantic. But the author captures better than anyone I know the roots and significance of the globally recognized idiocy of many Americans, their hatred of intellectuals, and their love of Louie Gohmert, Sarah Palin, and Tommy Tuberville. Like the almost seventy percent of Americans who cannot name our three branches of government, Senator Tuberville, pride of Bama, cannot … name our three branches of government. I would not be surprised if Senator Tuberville thinks he sits on the Supreme Court. The archē-idiot, the person who took the ultimate, most powerful, opportunity to do good in the nation and the world and turned it into the foulest, most degenerate, most pointless killing field this country has ever seen, directs these people in their political activity. He shows them where to point their Beowulfs.

Oh solutions. Solutions. Yes, yes, solutions!

Fuck if I know.

… who, as the debate on rematriation and repatriation rages, go by so many different names…

One otherwise sophisticated writer makes the kind of weird atavistic argument about both male and female ISIS you’d expect from Mussolini.

[Their] indelible marks of national origin tell us that the foreign fighters are, in the end, products of our own societies, and no more capable of being disowned than any other villains we produce, either for domestic mayhem or for export. They are Japanese and American and British. We inflicted them on the world. They are our responsibility, and we have to punish them …

Two problems here: The writer seems to have missed the last eighty years of thought about nationalism, cosmopolitanism, and postmodernism, and settled back comfortably into the most reactionary notions of … well, add ‘German’ to his curiously selective list of countries of origin and see how that feels…

And second – even if we could agree with the absurd proposition that breathing this or that air uncontrollably infuses one with originary territorial belonging, nothing in this position precludes disownership. Parents disown children; nations disown citizens. All those ISIS self-inductees who as their first revolutionary gesture burnt their passports disowned their countries. It’s hardly common, but it happens and isn’t that shattering a scandal. It merely means that free people realize they retain the right to expel others or to expel themselves from familial or political collectivities.

As Christian Barry and Luara Ferracioli write:

[Those] who have engaged in [certain extreme] forms of political violence … have themselves strongly communicated their disassociation from [any particular political] community through their actions. And if they are prepared to carry out such acts of serious political violence then they have no grounds for complaints if the community chooses to banish them. They have already, in effect, self-excluded.

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Come back! All will eventually be forgiven. is neither a rational nor dignified stance for a self-respecting country to take in regard to people who act assiduously to destroy not only it but the entire world. To hold that cultists who regard every manifestation of culture as a Semtex site should be acknowledged as our own is bizarre. If the legal and moral act of disownership means anything, it means we disown these people. And keep in mind that provisions for appeal exist: “U.S. law provides [Hoda] Muthana a mechanism to challenge the secretary of state’s conclusion that she is not a citizen, even from outside the United States.”

I think best practice would be our establishing, with other countries, in-place international tribunals to try these people, whose crimes after all are against humanity, not particular countries. As to where they’d serve their sentences: Some people argue that international prisons radicalize their prisoners yet more; but when we house these people in our own prisons, we make ourselves vulnerable to radicalization. “Even if convicted, they would threaten to radicalise others in prison.” “Convicted IS fighters will occupy a laudatory position within the prison estate, particularly among those convicted for domestic terrorism offences. They will also have an opportunity to use their experiences to radicalise those from the general inmate population and to educate them in any firearms or explosives proficiencies they may have acquired.”

And as to where these people would go once they served their sentence: I’m sure some version of ISIS will still be in place for them to join up with; or, if they want to assume citizenship of a country, they can make a case for their rehabilitation and therefore possibly be able to return to their erstwhile home country; or they can apply for citizenship elsewhere. (Hello, Macedonia!)

… these are among the universities near last night’s mass shooting at a college night in a bar in Thousand Oaks.

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“[E]very country contains mentally ill and potentially violent people. Only America arms them.”

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Also Pepperdine, Moorpark…

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“[S]ome [of the victims] were survivors of the massacre at the Route 91 Harvest Festival in Las Vegas that left 58 dead last year.”

“[E]very country contains mentally ill and potentially violent people. Only America arms them.“