Come for the politics, stay for the snark.
I was unaware he was speaking – still kind of unplugged – but I thought we should all have a listen.
This Oval Office address is so critically important.
President Biden continues to meet this extraordinarily challenging moment in time.— Jo (@JoJoFromJerz) July 15, 2024
This is a terrible idea (report on CNN):
The three states where ammo is available in vending machines are Alabama, Texas and Oklahoma. No worries, though — AI handles customer screening, so what could possibly go wrong?
Also on CNN, the FBI has identified the deceased shooter in the Trump assassination attempt: Thomas Matthew Crooks. The report says he was “a 20-year-old registered Republican who had previously made a small contribution to a Democratic-aligned group, according to public records.”
Hmmm. Open thread.
The Wall St. Journal tells a happy tale today…if you happen to have your nest egg invested in “an industry leading manufacturer of pistols, revolvers, rifles.”
That would be Smith & Wesson, whose shares are up as almost 28% since the opening today as I write this–on news that year-over-year revenue and per-share earnings are up substantially this quarter.
Well, merchants of death have to make a living too, I suppose, and a simple earnings report like this is depressing, but on its own not a major jolt to my equilibrium.
The grotesque emerges when CEO explains why he things the good times will continue to roll:
Chief Executive Mark Smith said the company believes it gained market share as shipments outpaced the overall firearm market. “We continue to expect the firearm market to experience healthy demand through the 2024 election cycle,” he said.
Let me repeat: “throughout the 2024 election cycle.” What could possibly be the connection between gun nuttery and elections?
Don’t answer that.
The Journal does slip in a hint of editorial comment with their choice of photograph; I don’t think it’s meant to give anyone (except modern Moloch worshippers) the warm and fuzzies. It’s a copyrighted image, so you’ll have to click the link to see what I mean.
But back to Mr. Smith. Does he hear himself? Do any of our “friends”* on the right have any idea how linking home arsenals and voting actually sounds?
Don’t answer that either.
I don’t have a lot more to say on this. Y’all know how I feel about American gun idolatry. Gun regulation isn’t enough. Expose the manufacturer’s to all the liability exposure. Charge a society-born cost-of-gun-violence on every firearm and each box of ammo sold. Go for any fissure or crack in the 2A regime that the Supremes have decided we must endure.
Or, more simply, intercourse them orthogonally with an oxidized farm implement.
Open threads, not fire!
*Editor: they are not our friends.”
Image: Cornelis Norbertus Gijsbrechts, Trompe l’Oeil with Pistols, 1672
Don’t want the day to go by without bearing witness to yet another tribute to Moloch demanded by the idolators of the gun.
This is a fractal tragedy. The shooter, who killed himself, was a high school student who seems to have been bullied since elementary school whose younger sister had recently been targeted as well. That was, two fellow students said,
“The last straw” for Butler.
“He was hurting. He got tired. He got tired of the bullying. He got tired of the harassment,” Yesenia Roeder Hall, 17, said. “Was it a smart idea to shoot up the school? No. God, no.”
He shot six people besides himself, including the school principal before killing himself. One of them, a sixth grader, had died.
A sixth grader. Some eleven year old who will never be twelve.
This seventeen year old boy managed to gain access to a shotgun and a hand gun. Without those weapons, whatever arms he could have mustered against his sea of troubles would almost surely have left that sixth grader alive.
Fuck guns. Fuck every enabling asshole who values the almighty firearm over children. Which is to say, fuck just about every GOP official.
I can’t even.
This thread is open. Maybe someone can go far off topic into something happier.
Image: Giuseppe Arcimboldo, Fire, 1566
ProPublica and the Texas Tribune teamed up on a multimedia report about the May 2022 Uvalde school shooting. Like every report on every school massacre, it’s heartbreaking and enraging, and everyone in this goddamn country should be required to read it.
Here’s the inescapable conclusion: The cops and kids both received active school shooter training. The kids followed their training, and the cops did not. We knew the cops bungled the response almost immediately after the incident. But the report lays out in devastating detail how the fact that the kids followed their training reinforced the cops’ impulse to ignore theirs.
The children hid. They dropped to the floor, crouching under desks and countertops, far from the windows. They lined up against the walls, avoiding the elementary school doors that separated them from a mass shooter about a decade older than them. Some held up the blunted scissors that they often used to cut shapes as they prepared to fight. A few grabbed bloodied phones and dialed 911. And as students across the country have been instructed for years, they remained quiet, impossibly quiet. At times, they hushed classmates who screamed in agony from the bullets that tore through their small bodies.
Then, they waited. Waited for the adults, whom they could hear in the hallway. If they were just patient, those adults would save them.
Hundreds of law enforcement officers descended on Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas, that day in May 2022. They, too, waited. They waited for someone, anyone, to tell them what to do. They waited for the right keys and specialized equipment to open doors. They waited out of fear that the lack of ballistic shields and flash-bangs would leave them vulnerable against the power of an AR-15-style rifle. Most astonishingly, they waited for the children’s cries to confirm that people were still alive inside the classrooms.
The kids had been told repeatedly to be quiet, and they were. The cops had been told repeatedly to immediately confront an active shooter, and they waited instead.
One Uvalde police officer told investigators two kids in his family died in the shooting but he didn’t attend their funerals because “some of his relatives ‘think that we fucking let ’em die.'”
The initial probe by the Texas Rangers, the DPS’ investigative arm, is complete but has not been made public. Of the hundreds of officers who responded that day, less than a handful have been fired, including Arredondo. An attorney representing Arredondo released a statement before he was terminated, saying that his client was being used as a “fall guy.” Several officers from various agencies either resigned, were reassigned or retired.
The relatives’ response is understandable, but I’ve got some sympathy for those cops too. I can tell you from experience that the overwhelming human impulse when someone starts firing a gun in your presence is to run away like a scared fucking bunny. But I’m not a cop whose job it is to confront active shooters.
The thing is, we’re not going to address the root cause of our mass shooting problem in America — that we’re ass-deep in battlefield-grade weapons — anytime soon. So it’s therefore our obligation as a society to develop the capacity to respond in ways that minimize the death and destruction to innocent bystanders.
The kids are doing their part. One girl in Uvalde was telling her classmates “just be as quiet as a mouse,” and they were. Now the grownups in law enforcement need to step up their training too and be fully prepared to hurl themselves at madmen firing 100 rounds a minute. If doing so makes all the participants realize how fucking insane this entire situation is, so much the better.
Open thread.
ETA: Scout211 in comments below shared a link to a trailer for a documentary the PBS series FRONTLINE produced while working with ProPublica and the Texas Tribune on this story. It airs today. Scout also shared a link to statement from the news organizations on why they’re publishing details that haven’t been officially released by the state investigators. Thanks, Scout!
I found this vehicle parked next to mine when I was done grocery shopping a while back:
In addition to exalting the Second Amendment as the supreme and only law, this person scoffs at the notion that there should be restrictions on owning venomous snakes, which led me to believe the cargo area might well have been a writhing pit of rattlers, copperheads, moccasins, etc.
Did I mention this kook-mobile was right next to my vehicle?
Friends, I channeled Wonder Woman, seized 10 tote bag handles with two fists, transferred that load of groceries into my car and got the hell out of that parking lot with supernatural swiftness!
That said, I also brake for snakes.
Open thread!
About 10 days ago in Dunedin, Florida, a couple was watching TV in their home when the woman heard a noise outside on the pool deck, peeked through the blinds and saw a man she didn’t recognize a few feet away from the sliding glass door. She called 911. (Source: Tampa Bay Times)
Meanwhile, her husband armed himself and yelled at the dude to go away, but the “intruder” had gone to his truck for a flashlight and didn’t hear the order to leave. When the man who had been poolside came back into the yard with a flashlight, the husband, 57-year-old Bradley Hocevar, opened fire through his own sliding glass door with an AR-15.
It turns out the person he shot at was a pool cleaner whom the idiotic gunowners had hired. Luckily for everyone, Hocevar is a really terrible shot and didn’t hit the pool guy, even though he emptied the 30-round clip or magazine or whatever the fuck that fucking thing is called. The pool guy was hit with shrapnel and flying glass but no bullets. Fortunately, none of the 30 rounds fired hit anyone else either, which might be kind of a miracle in a densely populated area.
It was all perfectly legal. The local sheriff said, “There was no crime committed. This is one of those situations we call lawful but awful.” The sheriff also said the pool guy should have alerted the couple that he would be swinging by after dark.
Well, yeah, he definitely should have done that. Jesus. I hope the sheriff also told that goddamn trigger-happy moron homeowner not to reenact the cinematic climax of fucking Scarface if he sees someone in his yard with a flashlight.
This state has gone absolutely fucking crazy. The end.
Open thread.