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.
I mean, look at Miami Beach! Just look!
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.
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?
Babe, this is America.
“If you take away those two shootings, which of course are major, then it [is so far] vastly improved over 2021,” said resident-activist Matthew Gultanoff…
Police chased and caught a man who they said threw a 9 mm handgun into some shrubbery. The man told police he fired in self-defense. Video surveillance seemed to support his claim and Derrick Antonio Mitchell, 19, was charged only with three weapons violations, carrying a concealed firearm, tampering with physical evidence and possession of an altered firearm.
The “only” is priceless. Miami Beach has declared martial law. I mean a state of emergency/curfew.
“It was like a moment of humanity because you’re there and you just were holding your heart to them, and they would come up to you. It was a human moment.”
… 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.”
… 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.
With high-profile calls for university students to boycott the state of Florida for this year’s upcoming Spring Break, a fascinating situation is developing, which we will follow here on University Diaries.
Panama City is by far the most popular Florida spring break destination, boasting open-air gang rapes, up to seven shootings a night, and so massive and sudden an influx of drug dealers that from March 10 – 18 the earth is knocked off its axis.
PCB’s sheriff sets up a spring break jail on the beach. Panama City Beach wears its perennial Trashiest Place in the World crown proudly.
So assume the Panama City Beach boycott – a protest against legislative inaction on guns in that state – succeeds. The gunniest NRA gunnies are going to stage a backlash (they’re already striking back at commercial boycotts of the NRA) which will certainly involve many of them choosing desperately gun-friendly Panama City Beach for their spring break.
This will mean that despite PCB’s post-2015 (year of the biggest atrocities) efforts to sanitize itself (no liquor on the beach; closing hours for bars), and despite confident statements that “Panama City Beach will never be what it was during those times,” that city now faces a kind of ethnic cleansing situation: Everyone who doesn’t conceal carry has been purged, and everyone who does carry is on their way to PCB as we speak. Given all the post-Parkland unpleasantness, the carriers are in a foul mood, and they plan to drink their sorrows away.
All in all, a fraught moment for Panama City Beach. Expect the National Guard to be out in force.
We’ll keep an eye on it.
Latest headline:
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.
Or you could skip the long trip and just attend Coastal Carolina University.
**********************
“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.
“[A] multitude of ads [in Myrtle Beach] tout the excitement of shooting machine guns in nearby Conway…”
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.
After last year’s broad daylight beach rapes, confiscation of huge numbers of illegal fire arms, and mass shootings, Panama City Beach was finally shamed into enacting some liquor and crowd control laws.
“People are falling off balconies, going home dead, going home paraplegic. Is that the community we want to be?” [one resident] asked. “Panama City Beach had depended for decades on this revenue, and to [enact new laws] overnight, that’s a big thing to do. But how do you continue when people are getting raped, shot, killed?”
The obvious answer was for Panama City Beach to think of spring break in a new way… To think of it as like a demolition derby or like the climbing of Mount Everest: Of course there will be … some… unpleasantnesss… but no great and noble enterprise is without its risks.
******************
But no. PCB went ahead and outlawed drinking on the beach and lots of other stuff that makes crowds of people murderous. And this year spring break at PCB barely exists. Everyone’s gone somewhere else.
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And that’s the ecstasy part! If you’re Daytona Beach, take a bow!
It’s all over but the rhetoric.
Unfortunately, hosting families there is also over, at least for awhile. There’s something about mass shootings, rapes on the beach, and the confiscation of large numbers of fire arms that seems to put families off.
I hate it, but I’ll say it. It’s time for us to bring the madness of Panama City Spring Break to a halt by staying away. Parents, if you allow your children to go into that snake pit then you are simply contributing to the problem.
*******************
“Shame on Panama City Beach for letting itself devolve into what it has become,” said Nicki E. Grossman, now president of the Greater Fort Lauderdale Convention & Visitors Bureau.
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“We’re in chaos right now,” says resident Wes Pittman. “This Spring Break and the way it has evolved over the last couple years has become a blight on the entire community.”
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UD finds it fascinating in a Lord of the Flies way. Allow certain ingredients to be put together in a concentrated way in a specific location, and you can actually destroy civilized life.
… in Panama City Beach.
Next spring: Open-air beheadings.
And bury the brass knuckles.
There’s a crackdown on beach toys this year.
Hey – you’re not gonna fuck with our gun rights, are you? Guns and spring break go together like lilacs and crocuses.
****************
Panama City Beach Mayor Gayle Oberst said business owners informed the council that banning alcohol from the beach, where tens of thousands of revelers gather, would devastate business.
****************
Having multiple college student gunshot victims in your town can make the locals petulant. Panama City, site of the latest mass shooting, called an emergency town council session.
The meeting was contentious almost from the beginning, with [one council member] asking [another] what was the purpose of an emergency meeting and [getting the reply], “We have blood on our hands, and so do you….”
Later, after [a council member] said he didn’t want to see knee-jerk reactions to a shooting that “surprised” everyone, [another] challenged that statement.
“The shooting last night was a surprise to you, sir? … Can you honestly say that?”
“Of course it was a surprise; I was not aware of it until this morning,” [he] answered.
…. “We’re dealing with some of the worst of the worst of the worst [elements] in all of the U.S.,” [one townsperson] said. Some of it can be fixed, but the difficulty in solving the problem is “amplified by the fact that y’all hate each other.”
Here’s the deal, Panama City Beach-wise: What’s good for getting kids shot up is also, as it happens, good for business. You take the good with the bad in life.
********************
Shoot and the world shoots with you.
Saturday’s shooting was the sixth firearm-related call of the night, authorities said.
At the Café Maure de la Mosquée.
With friends. She’s the one with
blond hair and glasses.
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