A Tale of Two Shootings

There were two major shootings today. This one you most likely saw on the news (via Juliana Kim at NPR):

Charlie Kirk, a right-wing activist and an ally of President Trump, died after a shooting at an outdoor speaking event at Utah Valley University on Wednesday, according to Kirk's organization Turning Point USA and Trump.

At a press conference on Wednesday, Utah Governor Spencer Cox called Kirk's death a "political assassination."

"This is a dark day for our state. It's a tragic day for our nation," he said.

He added that a "person of interest" was being interviewed and it was not the same person who had been detained, then released earlier in the day. Law enforcement do not believe a second person was involved in the shooting, according to Cox.

Beau Mason, commissioner of the Utah Department of Public Safety, said a single shot was fired around 12:20 p.m. local time at the campus event featuring Kirk. Mason added that Kirk was quickly taken to a hospital, where he later died.

The suspected shooter was dressed in "all dark clothing" and fired from a long distance, potentially on a roof, according to Mason. He added that investigators are reviewing closed circuit TV footage.

I may have mentioned Kirk at this blog once or twice, noting primarily how he was an agitator calling for violence towards other Americans who leaned Left-Liberal on the political spectrum. Kirk was often defending the spread - like a plague - of guns across America as "our" price "we" have to pay for the Far Right's power to shoot anybody they want uphold a twisted understanding of the Second Amendment.

Speaking of the Far Right, they're using Kirk's assassination to paint the entire Democratic party as "the party of murder" even though far too many Republican wingnuts are killing Democrats and threatening more violence towards their objects of fear/hate on a near-daily basis.

In the meantime, here's the other major shooting you're likely not seeing on the major networks (via  Yesenia Robles and Alejandro A. Alonso Galva with Colorado Public Radio):

A shooting at Evergreen High School this afternoon hospitalized four students — three with gunshot wounds, including the suspected shooter.

The students with gunshot wounds were treated at CommonSpirit St. Anthony Hospital in Lakewood. After treatment, two of the three — one being the suspect — are still in critical condition.

The third victim has non-life-threatening injuries.

The sheriff's office confirmed in an evening update that the suspected shooter sustained a self-inflicted gunshot wound.

We as a nation are now numb to the near-constant gun violence happening at our schools, in our public places, across our communities. In any other sane nation, we'd have done something to stop the easy access of firearms, to reduce the daily count of the dying and wounded. But we're not sane, are we?

We're held hostage by an extremist ideology of the Far Right obsessing over their right - no one else's - to own enough firepower to overthrow any agency, execute any political opponent, to doom an entire nation to suffer to their hates and fears. And with this gun violence now claiming one of their own, they're bound to get worse.

The cycle of violence and stochastic terrorism being inflicted on America - and this isn't new, we've been drowning in this bloodshed since the 1850s - will spiral deeper into the pit until we are in open warfare against each other.

Gods help us. Seriously.

Blood in the Streets of Kansas City

So there was a Super Bowl recently, and the Kansas City Chiefs won a back-to-back title in overtime over the San Francisco 49ers, and as usual there was a parade in the team's honor through the streets of Kansas City, Missouri (it's not in Kansas itself just on the state border, weird I know) and even with all the police and private security forces in place to manage the parade route and celebration sites, two three gun nuts were able to open fire and give our nation yet another mass shooting (via Jaclyn Diaz at NPR):

One person was killed and up to 21 others were injured after shots were fired Wednesday afternoon outside Union Station in Kansas City, Mo., at the conclusion of a celebration for the Kansas City Chiefs' Super Bowl win, officials said.

The number of victims from this shooting is still evolving as law enforcement continues their investigation.

Officers took three individuals into custody, Kansas City Police Chief Stacey Graves said during the day's second news conference, updating the previous tally of two suspects brought in.

One suspect was captured after a foot chase with officers, she said...

In preparation for the expected crowd size, 800 law enforcement officers were on scene for the parade, Graves said. The heavy police presence helped in getting fans to safety once the shooting began and in administering life-saving aid to gunshot victims, she said...

Even with all those good guys with guns, gun violence still happened.

But KCUR reported that Children's Mercy Hospital received 12 patients from the rally, 11 of them children and nine of those with gunshot wounds. Fire Chief Ross Grundyson couldn't immediately confirm the ages of the victims.

Children.

The gunmen FIRED AT CHILDREN.

It is too early to speculate what the motive of the gunmen were, but the fact they opened fire with children present spells out that these sons of bitches didn't give a damn who they were hurting.

And there's one more event in public that we can't dare attend without risk of getting shot at.

We can't go to open-air music concerts.

We can't go to movie theaters.

We can't go to food festivals.

We can't go to our city halls.

We can't go to grocery stores. Or Wal-Marts.

We can't go to malls (TOO MANY TO LINK HERE).

We sure as hell can't send our kids to schools - we haven't been able to for decades since Columbine in 1999 - without the risk of them never coming back.

We as a nation cannot peaceably assemble - we cannot celebrate, we cannot convocate, we cannot be a community - because the ongoing threat by the National Rifle Body Count Association's public demands that their rights to carry murder weapons everywhere at all times shall not be infringed.

It's just that the gun nuts' right to carry assault rifles and semi-automatic handguns stocked with high-capacity magazines requires the rest of us to pay in our blood.

We in the majority are dying so that the paranoid, armed-to-the-teeth minority can fantasize to their Turner Diaries cosplay bullshit.

Goddamn the NRA. Goddamn the politicians who let them rack up these body counts.

We need gun reform NOW, before every street in America drowns in the blood of our children.

Blood on the Streets of Lewiston Maine

It's been a while since I'd written about a mass shooting, even though there's been over 500 mass shootings in America this year - and the year's not even finished.

The media hasn't fully paid attention to the gun violence unless the body count is in double digits anymore. Goddamn us, but that's where we're at this week as another angry gun with a military-grade assault rifle attacked multiple places in a small Maine city (via David Sharp, Robert Bumsted, Holly Ramer, and Michael Balsamo at AP News):

Authorities searched forests, waterways and small towns Thursday for a U.S. Army reservist who they say killed 18 people and wounded 13 in a mass shooting at a bowling alley and a bar that sent panicked patrons scrambling under tables and behind bowling pins and gripped the entire state of Maine in fear.

Schools, doctor’s offices and grocery stores closed and people stayed behind locked doors in cities as far away as 50 miles (80 kilometers) from the scenes of Wednesday night’s shootings in Lewiston...

The gunman apparently planned out an elaborate escape route that involved fleeing by boat using nearby rivers, which expanded the range of the search and the need to lock down nearby communities out of fear he was still well-armed and willing to kill again.

We don't know exactly what triggered the angry guy, but he had been placed under medical observation months earlier by reservist officers who noticed troubling behavior out of him and ordered him to a mental treatment facility.

That he was still able to gain access to an assault rifle with his mental issues speaks more to a nation dominated by fringe gun-worshipping sociopaths who scream "SHALL NOT BE INFRINGED" as a mantra. The United States is being held hostage by a National Rifle Body Count Association that profits from every massacre and propagates an ad campaign of fear and rage, convincing their fellow gun worshippers that the Second Amendment isn't about regulating militias it's a license to shoot anybody they want.

The gun nuts "right" to own firearms that most militaries think are too dangerous has overwhelmed our First Amendment right to peaceably assemble. We can't go to schools anymore without gun violence. We can't go to movie theaters or music concerts without gun violence. We can't go to grocery stores or churches anymore without gun violence. We can't go to our own homes without fearing gun violence by our own relatives or by some angry ex-husband unwilling to let a bad relationship go.

There's blood on the streets everywhere. I've been yelling and screaming and crying over that for the last 25 years. 

GODDAMMIT, WHEN ARE WE GOING TO TELL THE GUN NUTS THEY HAVE NO RIGHT TO KILL US, AND DO SOMETHING TO STOP THIS ONGOING CYCLE OF VIOLENCE.

Blood on the Streets of Monterey Park

I woke up this morning to news about an Asian holiday - the Lunar New Year - getting disrupted by a gunman in Monterey Park, California overnight. Another goddamned mass shooting. At least 10 people dead (multiple wounded, so the numbers could get worse). Via NPR: 

A shooting in the city of Monterey Park, just outside of Los Angeles, has left 10 people dead and at least 10 others wounded. The attack came at the end of a day of celebration in the predominantly Asian American community in observance of the Lunar New Year. Authorities said the shooter remains at large.

Here's what we know:

The attack was at least the 33rd mass shooting in the U.S. this year — and the second in California in less than a week.

About 60,000 people — 65% of whom are of Asian descent — call Monterey Park home, according to Census estimates.

President Biden has been briefed on the shooting.

Authorities are investigating another scene in the nearby city of Alhambra.

Take a moment to look at that first stat: This is the 33rd mass shooting in the United States this year. WE ARE ONLY 22 DAYS INTO THE WESTERN CALENDAR. We are up to almost TWO MASS SHOOTINGS A DAY. We have become so jaded and worn down from gun-related deaths that we're utterly numb as a nation to this shit.

The attack focused on a large Asian community, signaling that this was racially motivated by Far Right factions hating on foreigners as part of their overall anti-immigrant mindset.

And given the high body count in just one setting, I'm willing to bet the weapon used was a military-grade assault rifle like the AR-15 (the chosen rifle for mass shooters across the USA). It is not a firearm meant for hunting wildlife, it is not a firearm meant for personal home defense. It is a firearm meant for war zones. Which is what the American landscape has turned into thanks to the Angry Guys With Guns community.

And again, nothing will get done.

There will be more mass shootings, because we're up to one per day, getting closer to doubling up, because this is how the goddamned National Rifle Body Count Association makes their money. 

And in the future, nothing will get done.

There will be more mass shootings, because we're up to one per day, getting closer to doubling up, because this is how the goddamned National Rifle Body Count Association makes their money. 

And another mass shooting, and another and another, and nothing will get done.

There will be more mass shootings, because we're up to one per day, getting closer to doubling up, because this is how the goddamned National Rifle Body Count Association makes their money.

And another... AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA

...

When are we going to have political leadership in the United States willing to step up and abolish the goddamned Second Amendment? We don't need militias anymore, and we've proven the PAST 40 YEARS THAT WE ARE NOT REGULATING FIREARMS IN ANY WAY. The Second Amendment has devolved from being "Empowerment for states to form and well-regulate their own militias" to "A goddamned license to kill anybody the Angry Guys want to kill."

There is blood on every American street, rising up on a tide of unrelenting hate and violence, and it is going to drown us all until we tell the goddamned gun nuts NO MORE.

Blood On the Streets of Highland Park

Just as I was writing my second "Four For the Fourth" blog article today, news popped up that - in honor of our nation's independence from British tyranny - a goddamned gun nut showed up at a 4th of July parade in a Chicago suburb and opened fire (via Michael Tarm and Roger Schneider at AP News):

At least six people died and 24 were wounded in a shooting at a July Fourth parade in the Chicago suburb of Highland Park, and officers are searching for a suspect who likely fired on the festivities from a rooftop, police said Monday.

Highland Park Police Commander Chris O’Neill, the incident commander on scene, urged people to shelter in place as authorities search for the suspect, described as a white male wearing a white or blue T-shirt.

Lake County Major Crime Task Force spokesman Christopher Covelli said at a news conference that the gunman apparently opened fire on parade-goers from a rooftop using a rifle that was recovered at the scene. He didn’t know which building.

Covelli said police believe there was only one shooter and warned that he should still be considered armed and dangerous. He and O’Neill described the shooting as random...

It doesn't matter if it was random. It matters that the mass shooter had easy access to an assault rifle and an angry desire to use it on innocent people.

These gun nuts, these mass buyers of AR-15s, these worshipers of murdersticks, you ask a lot of them "Why" they are so desperate to own weapons of mass death, and they usually answer the same: "It's to defend ourselves against the tyranny of the evil librul government that's gonna take our rights" - namely, the very guns they're stockpiling - "from us!"

These goddamn gun nuts don't care about the reality that "More guns = more gun deaths" all because it doesn't fit their fantasy worldview of being racially pure heroes of some twisted Turner Diaries fanfic. Some of them even celebrate these mass shootings, because then they'll scream "you see? gun laws don't make you safe!" even as they're prepping themselves for the Second Civil War in their bomb shelters.

Tyranny of the British Crown? Gone, old news.

Tyranny of the gun? Thank you, National Rifle Body Count Association, our nation's citizenry is still not free from your ongoing threat of mass shootings that your golden calf the assault rifle affirms every day.

Where We Stand, Where We Fall

You can stand where I stand, but you will not see what I see.

You would think, year after year of constant mass shootings numbing the national psyche, that Americans would cheer on the simplest solution towards ending gun violence: By getting rid of the goddamned guns.

After all, every other nation struck by a mass shooting tragedy went on to pass harsh laws restricting ownership, banning certain types of firearms, and limiting the lethality of both gun and bullet.

Mass shooting at Ecole Polytechnique in Canada back in 1989?  Canada required gun safety classes, 28-day waiting periods, universal gun registration, and magazine clip capacity limits. After a mass shooting in Nova Scotia in 2020, they're trying to ban 1,500 (!) models of military-style assault rifles as well.

Mass shooting in Port Arthur, Tasmania back in 1996? Australia banned all semi-auto rifles and pump-action shotguns, and pulled off a gun amnesty and buyback program that took 250,000 guns off their streets.

Mass shooting at Dunblane Primary School in Scotland back in 1996 with semi-auto handguns using high-capacity cartridges? British Parliament passed legislation banning those types of handguns, and they maintain strict laws about the types of assault rifles allowed along with registration and certification for gun owners.  

Mass shooting in Christchurch, New Zealand in 2019? New Zealand banned semi-auto rifles, limited magazine clip sizes, and made modifications illegal. Like Australia, they hosted a buyback program to get as many of those guns off their streets.

Mass shooting in Ohio, Texas, Florida, Georgia, and any other Red State (or states compromised by Far Right / NRA lobbyist control) across the United States? Watch the Republicans in power pass new laws making it easier to get assault rifles and even worse avoid any certification or license.

What's maddening is how the Far Right, pro-gun politicians and pundits all proclaim how "if we ban guns, all it will do is make it so only criminals have guns." With the implication that we would see an increase of crime and gun violence because of it. However here in the United States, we get the inverse: Making it easier to get guns makes it easier for the angry guys who conform to the mass shooter profile means we still get the high body counts.

Note this: Nearly every mass shooting in the United States has been from someone who made legal purchases (or got the guns from someone who did) of those firearms. It's the legality of the process that horrifies along with the death of so many innocent lives.

Note this: We had an assault rifle ban in the United States for ten years - 1994 to 2004 - which wasn't renewed under Republican George W. Bush's administration (and maddeningly enough we never got it reinstated under Obama when we had a chance between 2009-10). It shouldn't surprise anyone that once the ban lifted, assault rifle sales went up and so did the body count (chart via Financial Times article by Justin Jacobs):

Everything from 2005 rightward to 2022. Those dots
multiply... and get bigger...

This shouldn't surprise us due to one thing: Most other nations do not have a Constitutional Amendment codifying the existence of firearms and what restrictions the states (and Congress) could impose on them. The Second Amendment is a very big reason why the U.S. can't just ban every firearm, as the Supreme Court spelled out with their Heller ruling back in 2008.

But that Second Amendment is a bit of a problem. When you read it - A well regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed - you'll notice the first half of the deal involves the regulation of state militias. The pro-gun forces tend to ignore that half, obsessing over the second half saying the right of people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed.

They treat that "right" as an absolute, avoiding the whole part of "well-regulated" that could be used by Congress and our states into passing firearm regulations. You'll see them on social media insisting on SHALL NOT BE INFRINGED - all caps, for emphasis - as though it's a mantra, no worse dogma.

Because that dogma creates the very huge problem we have now in the United States: We have a very dedicated, very insistent, and potentially very violent minority of Americans - not even every gun owner is this paranoid and devout about the SHALL NOT BE INFRINGED dogma - who believe so much in their absolute right to own firearms that they will NEVER give them up or even allow any restriction on gun purchases to hinder their quest to buy even more weapons to an arsenal already filling up their gun sheds.

Search social media for families happily posing in their houses, driveways, back porches with every rifle and handgun they own. You will see them with hundreds of firearms they cannot possibly need. It's like an addiction, a craving to buy more weapons as though they'll be going out of fashion next week.

They buy that many because a lot of them do fear that sooner or later the federal government is going to get frustrated by all the mass shootings, and that a permanent assault rifle ban will finally get passed (and even a conservative Far Right SCOTUS would have to uphold).

And a good number of these gun worshippers buy up all these guns because they genuinely believe they will be in a shooting war - if they're not already - to overthrow what they view is a corrupt, demonic federal government.

Look at every "Come and take them," "Pry them from my cold dead hands," "Second Amendment solution" threat the gun nuts toss out there on social media. They genuinely believe they can take on a massive federal government - not just the agencies like the FBI or DEA or ATF, but the U.S. military both National Guard and standing armies if called upon to fight an insurrection - and win a "new revolution" for a truer, purer (Whiter) US of A.

These gun-worshipping acolytes can't stop because they dare not. And they're convinced a majority of "True" Americans - not the 65 percent who want a ban on all assault rifles, not the 80 percent who want universal background checks - will fight with them.

The gun nuts of America are convinced they are standing for their grand, godly cause of murdering everyone they view as a threat.

The rest of us are going to fall to their guns because of that.

This was never going to end well.

And the trigger moment - when we're no longer on the knife's edge of the Far Right's Culture War, falling into the blood-pits of insurrection and chaos - is closing in.

The Madness of Gun Worship

There's a statistical chart going around on social media about the uptick in gun violence in the United States:

It's from this source:

The surge in firearms homicides that began in 2015 has an important feature not highlighted in the recent CDC report.

Prior to 2015, nonfirearm homicides and firearm homicides tracked each other well (figure shows raw CDC data).

In 2015, these trends diverged. https://t.co/bf3bgcQf1L pic.twitter.com/2MtLr0YU8N

— Andrew Morral (@AndrewMorral) May 16, 2022

And it's horrifying to watch that "Firearm Homicides" number spike upward like it's the Himalayas. The only time the Non-Firearms chart spikes that high was 2001, when Bin Laden sent his peeps to attack the United States on Sept. 11. 

How telling is it that the NRA is building up a body count equal to America's deadliest terrorist.

There's been some talk that the uptick of gun violence is due to the COVID-19 Pandemic, which forced a lot of people into their homes during the early quarantine months... and which triggered an uptick in domestic violence cases. That alone is a horrifying reality, where the "safety" of home gets subverted by the easy access to a gun amid abusive relationships. But that sharp increase in the charts seems to start before 2020 and the pandemic (with a noticeable bump around 2016), which points to another culprit causing that spike.

If there were anything happening in 2018 and 2019 to affect firearm usage in the United States, I would point to these two possibilities:

1) In response to the mass shootings going on during and after the 2016 election cycle - especially the Orlando Pulse Nightclub shooting in 2016 and the Parkland High shooting in 2018 - a lot of Republican-controlled states were passing laws by 2019 towards easier access to firearms, arguing that "more guns = more safety".

Of course, the chart below proves the lie to that belief. The reality is that "more guns = more gun deaths" and it's more than just anecdotal (via German Lopez back in April 2021 at Vox.com)

Using data from a 2016 study in Injury Prevention and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Mother Jones put together the chart above that shows states with more guns tend to have far more gun deaths, including homicides and suicides. This has been found across the empirical research: “Within the United States, a wide array of empirical evidence indicates that more guns in a community leads to more homicide,” David Hemenway, the Harvard Injury Control Research Center’s director, wrote in Private Guns, Public Health...

And of course the gun cult that makes up the Far Right will never accept this truth. They would rather keep making it easier and easier for themselves to own guns - some states are getting rid of regulating and registering gun licenses altogether! - rather than respect the supermajority of Americans who want stricter gun safety laws.

2) The gun violence is ticking upwards as the extremist elements of the Far Right - emboldened by trump's "Make American Great White Again" and the normalization of the "Great Replacement" fearmongering - act out their racism and rage.

We've seen that in Buffalo and we've been seeing more extremist violence since the January 6th Insurrection. The Anti-Defamation League tracked cases up to 2021 and found that three-quarters (roughly 75 percent) of the violent acts nationwide were perpetrated by Right-Wing extremism. By comparison Left-Wing extremism accounted for 4 percent, while Islamic (domestic) extremism counted for 20 percent (there was 1 percent left over for Other). Odds favor you getting killed by a Proud Boy / Oath Keeper before getting killed by a jihadist.

It doesn't help that in the past decade - as the Far Right became enraged by an Obama presidency and stoked by a Fox Not-News media that kept feeding them fearmongering about dirty brown immigrants raiding our borders - our nation has suffered a low-burning civil war of sorts. A culture war between racist sexist angry Whites and the rest of the United States that's pro-choice, pro-immigrant, and more progressive than the mainstream media gives credit to.

For all their public demonstrations of being "Christian" and holy and whatnot, these wingnuts keep proving that they worship the idolatry of the blood-soaked AR-15. The hypocrisy of them proclaiming a holy victory over the rest of us while they shoot up every Black, Hispanic, Jewish, and LGBTQ+ community center they can. 

The fever of gun worship will not end until these wingnuts fall completely out of power, and saner heads passing safety laws prevail.

Get the damn vote out, Americans. We're at war. They got the guns but we got the numbers.

Blood on the Streets of Buffalo

Welcome to America, where every public place - our schools, our churches, our movie theaters, our music concerts, our city halls, our grocery stores - are just wonderful targets for the gun nut mass shooters who want to rack up a body count. Yesterday, Buffalo joined the list of cities that have suffered gun violence by an AR-15 wielding asshole (per Carolyn Thompson, John Wawrow, Michael Balsamo, and Dave Collins with AP News):

A white 18-year-old wearing military gear and livestreaming with a helmet camera opened fire with a rifle at a supermarket in Buffalo, killing 10 people and wounding three others Saturday in what authorities described as “racially motivated violent extremism.”

Police said he shot 11 Black and two white victims before surrendering to authorities in a rampage he broadcast live on the streaming platform Twitch...

One of the things these mass shooters love to do, they love to show off how easy it is for them to kill others.

The massacre sent shockwaves through an unsettled nation gripped with racial tensions, gun violence and a spate of hate crimes. In the day prior to the shooting, Dallas police said they were investigating a series of shootings in Koreatown as hate crimes. The Buffalo attack came just one month after another mass shooting on a Brooklyn subway train wounded 10 people...

The article didn't mention the shootings in Milwaukee the night before, or the number of domestic violence shootings that happen pretty much every day, but we've become so overwhelmed by gun violence the past 20 years it's all a blur now.

The suspected gunman in Saturday’s attack on Tops Friendly Market was identified as (name redacted because the SOB wants to be famous), of Conklin, New York, about 200 miles (320 kilometers) southeast of Buffalo.

It wasn’t immediately clear why (redacted) had traveled to Buffalo and that particular grocery store. A clip apparently from his Twitch feed, posted on social media, showed (redacted) arriving at the supermarket in his car.

The gunman shot four people outside the store, three fatally, said Buffalo Police Commissioner Joseph Gramaglia. Inside the store, security guard Aaron Salter, a retired Buffalo police officer, fired multiple shots. A bullet hit the gunman’s bulletproof armor but had no effect, Gramaglia said.

The gunman then killed the guard, the commissioner said, then stalked through the store shooting other victims...

There was a "good guy with a gun" at the store, just as the pro-gun advocates say we need to really stop gun violence, but guess what? The mass shooters have access to body armor too, and they plan ahead for that shit. The "good guy with a gun" excuse doesn't work, it never really did. All we have now are just more and more heavily armed people believing they have license to shoot anybody they want.

The shooter also drove over 200 miles, literally going out of his way to find a place where he could find enough targets for his rage to shoot at. This is similar to the shooter who drove eight hours across Texas to attack a Wal-Mart in El Paso.

And much like the mass killer in El Paso, the mass killer in Buffalo was driven by racism, programmed with hateful ideology based on a "Replacement Theory" lie that "Jews and Blacks are going to replace Whites in a massive genocide." Photos of the gunman's assault rifle highlighted the number "14", which refers to the word count of the wingnut motto. Witnesses noticed the N-word painted on the rifle as well. There shouldn't be any confusion about what motivated the mass murderer. Back to the AP article:

A law enforcement official told The Associated Press that investigators were looking into whether he had posted a manifesto online. The official was not permitted to speak publicly on the matter and did so on the condition of anonymity.

Buffalo police declined to comment on the document, circulated widely online, that purports to outline the attacker’s racist, anti-immigrant and anti-Semitic beliefs, including a desire to drive all people not of European descent from the U.S. It said he drew inspiration the man who killed 51 people at two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand, in 2019...

Each of these mass shooters do not work in a vacuum. They watch others who share the same rage and who share the same bullshit White Power lies. If it's not Christchurch it's getting inspired by the murderer in Norway, or the church shooter in Charleston, or the synagogue shooter in Pittsburgh. These aren't lone wolves: They are part of a global violent movement, raging against the world, feeding off of each other's ill-formed conspiracy junk.

Only it gets worse here in America, because the goddamned Second Amendment is - thanks to an increasingly wingnut Supreme Court - no longer an amendment allowing states to well-regulate their militias, it's become a license for death-worshipping gun nuts to shoot anybody they hate.

And it's worse here in America where we have a Far Right media environment that pumps out that "Replacement Theory" bullshit on a daily basis to where it's programmed White extremists into a conniptic rage. This is an article from last week about Fox Not-News pundit Tucker Carlson (via Cynthia Miller-Idriss at MSNBC):

Before he was indicted on charges of killing 22 people and injuring 26 others in an El Paso, Texas, Walmart in 2019, the identified gunman had been linked to a document posted online that referred to a “Hispanic invasion of Texas.” The motivation behind that horrific incident — that there is an intentional, global plan orchestrated by national and global elites to replace white, Christian, European populations with nonwhite, non-Christian ones — gets at the core of a recent three-part New York Times series on the rise and ideology of Fox News’ Tucker Carlson.

In part one of the series, journalist Nicholas Confessore describes Carlson’s efforts to stoke “white fear” of immigrants and changing U.S. demographics as “recasting American racism to present white Americans as an oppressed caste.” In so doing, Confessore shows, Carlson has drawn repeatedly on the leading far-right conspiracy theory of demographic change, known as the “great replacement.”

Coined by a French scholar more than a decade ago, the term was quickly taken up globally by white supremacists, for whom the theory now provides a single, overarching framework for ideas that had already been percolating for years. Last September, Media Matters reported that Carlson spent a year embarking on a “dedicated campaign to insert the ‘great replacement’ conspiracy theory … into mainstream Republican discourse.” Carlson has repeatedly used the language of replacement to suggest or directly argue that Democrats are orchestrating “demographic replacement” to gain political power. The day before the September Media Matters report, Carlson told his viewers that President Joe Biden aimed to “replace ‘legacy Americans’” and “change the racial mix of the country” for political gain... 

It's not just Carlson and Fox Not-News (via a report from the Anti-Defamation League):

One of the most visible Great Replacement propagandists is Fox media personality Tucker Carlson, who claimed during a September 22 broadcast of “Tucker Carlson Tonight” that the point of Biden’s immigration policy is “to reduce the political power of the people whose ancestors live here, and dramatically increase the proportion of Americans newly-arrived from the third world.” He went on to refer to the policy as “The Great Replacement” which he explained is “the replacement of legacy Americans with more obedient people from far-away countries.”

Carlson’s rhetoric was immediately echoed by U.S. Rep Brian Babin (R-TX-36) in a September 23 Newsmax interview, when he said that Biden and the Democrats are using immigration to "replace the American electorate with a third world electorate."

One day later, Charlie Kirk of the far-right student group Turning Point USA said on his show that Texas should “deputize a citizen force and put them on the border” to protect “white demographics in America.” He added that the left is focused on “bringing in voters that they want, and they like, and honestly, diminishing and decreasing white demographics in America.”

The same day, during an appearance on the Megyn Kelly Show, Tucker Carlson criticized the ADL for calling out his Great Replacement comments and reiterated his view that the Democrats are “going to change the composition of the population and bring in people who will vote for” them.

On September 25, U.S. Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-FL-1) voiced his support for Tucker Carlson and The Great Replacement theory, tweeting, “@TuckerCarlson is CORRECT about Replacement Theory as he explains what is happening to America. The ADL is a racist organization.”

White supremacists celebrate: “We are mainstreaming now...”

All of this talk isn't just talk. It builds up an environment that encourages believers to act out, commit violence towards their targets, justified in their fear and hate that the ones they're killing "deserved" to die. It's known as the George Tiller Effect, where Far Right pundit Bill O'Reilly openly named an abortion doctor often as a threat to the unborn, driving a gunman to kill Tiller in Tiller's own church.

What's happened here - like in El Paso and Charleston and a hundred other racially-motivated mass shootings - is formally known as Stochastic Terrorism: Using a constant barrage of rhetoric and accusations to encourage others to commit violence for your cause. It's stochastic because there's no one specific target named, just a general population to pick and choose, making it "random" enough that the demagogues fueling the rage can claim they weren't responsible. But it's not random, when you look at the bigger picture.

It's still Terrorism: These Far Right White Power wingnuts are convinced they need to kill ethnic minorities, and that they've been given license to do so.

This is the war the Far Right wants: The wingnut pundits and politicians who stoke their audiences to commit acts of insurrection and public displays of violence, they love this shit because they will go onto those Far Right media outlets and actually flip the narrative around to make themselves still be the victims of our outrage while dead bodies pile up in our streets.

They're not even hiding their glee for it anymore.

Goddamn them all.

When, for the Love of God, is someone in our federal government going to recognize these mass shootings are not isolated, they are all part of the same terrorist movement of White Separatist bullshitters, and we need to officially declare them a domestic threat under the Patriot Act? When are we going to admit we're in an actual shooting war with extremists who want to destroy everything a free and diverse America represents?

The Divider In Chief Goes Rabid

Whatever I posted earlier on the protests in Portland, it's gotten worse. Via Kanishka Singh at Reuters:

One person was shot dead in Portland late on Saturday as protesters from rival groups clashed in the northwest U.S. city, which has seen frequent demonstrations for months that have at times turned violent...

Sounds of gunfire were heard in the area of Southeast 3rd Avenue and Southwest Alder Street, according to the spokesman’s statement.

The police said they were not currently releasing suspect information.

When asked by Reuters if the shooting was related to clashes between rival protesters in the same area, the spokesman said "it is too early in the investigation to draw those kinds of conclusions..."

The New York Times and the Oregonian newspapers reported that a large group of supporters of President Donald Trump had traveled in a caravan through downtown Portland, with a pro-Trump gathering drawing hundreds of trucks full of supporters into the city.

The Times cited two unidentified witnesses as saying a small group of people got into an argument with other people in a vehicle and someone opened fire.

The man who was shot and killed was wearing a hat with the insignia of Patriot Prayer, a far-right group based in Portland that has clashed with protesters in the past, according to the New York Times. Reuters could not independently verify this...

The New York Times reported that Trump supporters and counter-protesters clashed on the streets, with people shooting paint ball guns from the beds of pickup trucks and protesters throwing objects back at them...

trump is tweeting out praise to the shooter(s) who went in that pro-trump caravan with paintballs and then real guns. he's been attacking the Portland, OR mayor for being weak and allowing the violence to continue in order to make trump "look bad" (when it's trump's own people making things worse). trump hasn't said much about the teen shooter in Kenosha but trump's media allies sure have.

trump has been bashing Black Lives Matter protesters and praising Far Right militias with equal fervor, pushing for division and making calls to violence more frequently, especially as the 2020 election campaigning enters the final round toward November.

What trump is doing is horrifying. In my lifetime, I cannot recall any of our Presidents actively sowing dissension in our own streets (worse, doing so for political points with his rabid base). Whenever there were protests going on, be it under Bush the Elder, Clinton, Bush the Lesser, Obama, the White House message was usually along the lines of "we do not agree with what the protesters are claiming but we respect their right to march as long as they're respectful of the public peace" (There were protests during Reagan's tenure I recall but usually about apartheid and divesting from South Africa and usually too small to make the headlines, I can't recall anything more large-scale). Under trump, every BLM protest is a violent riot and every White Pride riot is a protest.

One of the job duties of a President - along with Commander-in-Chief and Chief of State - is being a Uniter figure, a Mourner-in-Chief in moments of great tragedy (like Reagan with the Challenger disaster) and a Rallier-in-Chief in moments of dark times (when Dubya offered words of condolence and strength - genuine or not - after 9/11).

It is telling that trump has failed since DAY ONE in the White House in the duty of being a Uniter. It requires traits - empathy above all - that trump never had in his soul.

trump can only appeal to the emotional states of greed, rage, and cruelty. Those are the only tools he really has when it comes time to stand at a podium and speak to the nation at large. And it's why when given the chance, trump will always fail to speak to the nation and speak instead to his base of angry voters who care not for empathy, sharing, or compassion.

For all that trump tries to compare himself to Lincoln, trump is actually the polar opposite. Where Lincoln - even in the throes of the civil war where our nation was at its most divided - spoke to the better angels of our nature, trump instead wants that civil war in order to maintain his corrupt hold on power and thus speaks to the worst demons of our nature.

Let me refer to David Frum at the Atlantic, who also got to the same point of realization about trump's crossing of the moral event horizon:

...The Trump campaign probably broke the law—and certainly trashed norms of republican constitutionalism dating to the very origins of the United States—when it made a campaign prop of the White House. But was Trump troubled? Absolutely not. He basked in the moment. He invited his supporters to bask with him. Bask they did.

Donald Trump is a dreadful public speaker, but a master communicator.

When he chooses to deliver a formal oration, as he chose to do on the fourth night of the convention, he visibly bores himself. He comes alive only when he can free-associate onstage about his grievances, bigotries, and hatreds. And while those speeches may seethe with dark energy, they are hemmed in by his shrinking vocabulary and egocentric content...

Mid-speech, Trump expatiated on the greatness of the American past. “Our American ancestors sailed across the perilous ocean to build a new life on a new continent,” he began. Almost any other candidate, even any other Republican, would feel some need to acknowledge the experience of Native Americans and enslaved Africans, to place a question mark over the concept of wild frontier and open range—the literal phrases in his text. But Trump knows that millions of his fellow Americans are sick and tired of having to pretend to care about Black and Indigenous people. He wants them to know that he doesn’t care either. That’s what they love about him.

The night before Trump’s acceptance address, a Trump supporter shot three people, killing two, in Kenosha, Wisconsin. The 17-year-old crossed state lines to carry his AR-15-style rifle to a scene of confrontation that ended in death. Some presidential nominees might have felt obliged to say something about that. Again: not Trump. “In the strongest possible terms, the Republican Party condemns the rioting, looting, arson and violence we have seen in Democrat-run cities like Kenosha, Minneapolis, Portland, Chicago, and New York,” he said. Trump spoke not a word to his followers urging them to put down their guns and quit the provocateur tactics that have so often accelerated disorder into violence. He knows that millions of his fellow Americans regard an armed white vigilante as an honorary law-enforcement officer. He wants them to know that he agrees. That’s something else they love about him...

Trump is a secessionist from the top. As my colleague Ron Brownstein often observes, Trump regards himself as a wartime president of Red America against Blue America. That’s how he can describe riot and disorder as happening in “Biden’s America,” even when it happens under his presidency. In his mind, the majority of the country is already “Biden’s America,” even before Biden enters office—and the remainder of it will continue to be “Trump’s America,” even should Trump leave office.

Since we are two countries, we can have two sets of laws and rules: one for friends, another for enemies. That’s why so many prominent Trump supporters can look at the shooting in Kenosha and perceive the gunman, who went to a city where he did not live with an AR-15-style rifle in hand, as acting in self-defense. The gunman had legitimate rights that must be respected. The dead men did not, and neither did all the many victims this year of police shootings. If those victims had criminal records, then they were criminals—unlike, say, Michael Flynn, who remains a rights-bearing American despite his criminal record. Two countries, two classes of citizen, two systems of law...

One of the points about America is that we're supposed to be The United States of America. Under trump, we are no longer united. As Divider-in-Chief, trump has separated us into a Red America and a Blue America, and he's given the okay to Red America to open fire on the Blue America.

We're in the middle of the Second Civil War, not the beginning. It's just that now we don't have a President in the White House working to save us, it's a Loser of the Popular Vote fighting hard to keep us divided so he can stay in power.

Gods help us.

This Should Be a Martin Luther King Birthday To Honor Peace and Justice

Instead today we got a bunch of gun nuts holding a rally in Richmond VA to try and intimidate the state government into not passing stronger gun safety laws.

This is an intentional insult towards a man who won a Nobel Peace Prize for promoting non-violence protesting, and a sharp reminder that Reverend King was gunned down because of his civil rights and anti-poverty campaigns. Yes, for a time King owned guns during the early days of the Civil Rights efforts - when his house was attacked and threats on Black lives very real - but by the 1960s he gave them up because they conflicted with his message of nonviolent protest and a realization that justice should not have to rely on violence.

But tell that to to mostly White and mostly racist Second Amendment Cosplayers taking over the streets of Richmond today.

The turnout is expected to be just the goddamn gun worshipers: the Far Left and the Gun Reform groups had declined to counter-protest to avoid triggering any violence in the streets... which is something the Far Right Gun Violence groups are eager to provide today.

This is sad. We should be focusing on what Martin Luther King Jr would be focusing on: affordable housing, better jobs, safer streets and not just for Blacks or minorities but for all the poor.

So what would Martin Luther King say about all this? From the "Drum Major" speech in 1968:

...And the other thing is that it causes one to engage ultimately in activities that are merely used to get attention. Criminologists tell us that some people are driven to crime because of this drum major instinct. They don't feel that they are getting enough attention through the normal channels of social behavior, and so they turn to anti-social behavior in order to get attention, in order to feel important. And so they get that gun, and before they know it they robbed a bank in a quest for recognition, in a quest for importance.

And then the final great tragedy of the distorted personality is the fact that when one fails to harness this instinct, he ends up trying to push others down in order to push himself up. And whenever you do that, you engage in some of the most vicious activities. You will spread evil, vicious, lying gossip on people, because you are trying to pull them down in order to push yourself up...

We are watching tiny souls give themselves over to the worship of a weapon, a machinery of death, on the one day we should be respecting life and peace. All so they can push themselves up at the expense of instilling fear in everybody else.

On a day where we shouldn't have weapons.

Happy birthday to Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. We should be honoring you better.

Blood on the Streets of Dayton Ohio

Jesus GODDAMNED Christ. We can't go to sleep without bloodshed in our country. Woke up this morning to news about Dayton, Ohio (via Chas Danner at New York):

Nine people were killed and 26 injured after a gunman opened fire in Dayton, Ohio’s nightlife district early morning Sunday. It was the second deadly mass shooting in America in less than a day, and third in less than a week.

Dayton Police officials announced that an as of yet unidentified gunman opened fire on bystanders just after 1 a.m. outside of Ned Peppers Bar in the city’s historic and popular Oregon District. The gunman was wearing body armor and came armed with a .223-caliber “long gun,” high capacity magazines, and extra ammunition. Police officers already present in the area immediately responded to the attack and fired on the shooter, killing him at the entrance to the bar. The attack seems to have lasted only about a minute, but that was more than enough time for the well-armed gunman to exact a heavy toll.

At this point, SYRIA or YEMEN are safer places to live. Our national body count is exceeding that of HONEST TO GOD WAR ZONES.

And to all the sonsofbitches out there who fantasize about "Good Guys With Guns" being present to stop the "Bad Guys With Guns," you got your wish: Police were in the area and responded as quick as possible. IT STILL WAS NOT FAST ENOUGH TO SAVE NINE PEOPLE. The gunman was still prepared with body armor, high-capacity magazines (which means less effort to reload), and extra ammo.

It is still too early to report on what motivated the murderer besides 1) anger and 2) easy access to military-grade firepower. No idea if Ned Peppers was specifically targeted or just the first one the sonofabitch wanted to shoot up.

But we're now at the point in the escalation of mass shootings in the United States to where these mass shootings are overlapping.

Used to be a mass shooting every year.

Then it got to be a mass shooting every month.

Then we got normalized to the reality of a mass shooting every week.

Here we are today, where the mass shooting of one day hasn't even been cleaned up before the next day's mass shooting hits the news channels.

All this in a world where any other sane nation would have passed strict gun regulations for public safety after the FIRST mass shooting. But this is not a sane nation, is it?

In retrospect Sandy Hook marked the end of the US gun control debate. Once America decided killing children was bearable, it was over. - Dan Hodges, reporter

We live through one mass shooting after another and muddle on through our lives just praying we don't get stuck in one ourselves. And we can't avoid that anymore: We're getting reports about survivors from last week's Gilroy Garlic Festival having survived the mass shooting of a Country music concert in Las Vegas a few years ago. This is now getting so common that survivors should be issued discount cards for each incident they get through. And this is NOT the first time I'm making this observation!

JESUS.

Welcome to the NRA's wet dream: non-stop mass shootings that are certain to keep gun and ammo sales ongoing for the rest of our nation's short-lived future.

We need to pass a law requiring the board of the National Body Count Association to dig the graves of every victim of a mass shooting, for two reasons: First, if the shedding of OUR blood is the price WE have to pay for the gun nuts to own their murder-sticks, then digging our graves is the least THEY can do for us; and Second, at this rate the NRA needs to learn how to work at graveyards because at this rate they will be the only ones left to bury the rest of us.

Goddammit, America.

We are killing ourselves one shooting at a time.

At What Point Does Trump Become a Clear And Present Danger to EVERYONE'S Lives? (w/ Updates)

Did he just say what I think he just said?

Per Esme Cribb at Talking Points Memo:

Donald Trump suggested at a Tuesday rally that "the Second Amendment people" might be the only ones who can take action against a Clinton presidency.

In a speech at the University of North Carolina, Trump suggested gun owners could take Clinton out in order to prevent her appointing judges to the Supreme Court.

"If she gets to pick her judges," Trump said, "nothing you can do, folks. Although the Second Amendment people, maybe there is."

This is essentially Trump calling out for that "Second Amendment Remedy," a phrase that's been floating out there among the Far Right every time they get angry or antsy about something Obama or the Democrats are about to win. The shorthand - the not-so-hidden message - is that the gun-nuts who believe the Second Amendment is "their" right to arm themselves against the government will rise up and "solve" the problem.

And this shit is NOT FUNNY. Trump and his cronies may try to pass this off as a joke, but violence in the real world with serious consequences is NOT a GODDAMN JOKE.

And this isn't imaginary or fake or a pipe dream. We've seen these Second Amendment fetishists commit these acts of gun violence again and again. Remember Oregon earlier this year? Remember the Planned Parenthood shooting?

There are genuine crazy people out there with easy access to firearms who only need the incentive to go and make themselves into "heroes" by shooting the hell out of everybody else.

And Trump right now just egged them on.

It doesn't matter if Trump was suggesting an act of violence towards Hillary, or if Trump was suggesting acts of violence towards any Justices Hillary would nominate. The key thing here is TRUMP WAS SUGGESTING AN ACT OF VIOLENCE, PERIOD.

He called on a group of people who have been pumped up with anger and outrage for DECADES to take to "their" Second Amendment and create a solution. One that speaks of gun violence and death.

At what point does verbal threats like what Trump just did cross a legal threshold? Nobody has the right to go around making death threats, this is not protected speech here. HE IS CALLING ON ACTS OF VIOLENCE.

Someone better fucking arrest him.

Note: follow here to Tom Levenson and Betty Cracker at Balloon Juice, and Charlie Pierce at Esquire, just to get a sense of how maddening this whole thing has become.

Update: I should include Comrade Misfit here. This is someone who, although I agree with a sizable amount of her policy views, is still someone pro-gun ownership and pro-2nd Amendment and I would probably argue over the merits of "well-regulated" vs. "shall not be infringed" with her well into Judgment Day. And even she knows Trump just went Full Batshit Cray-Cray here.

Further: Emily L. Hauser on Twitter is remembering her years in Israel listening to all the violent rhetoric towards Rabin.

And don't forget what happened to Gabby Giffords.

This shit is NOT a joke.

There's Something Happening Here

...What it is involves the Democratic Party stepping up in a public way to call for votes on gun safety.

Earlier this week, the Senate Democrats forced a filibuster to get the Republicans in that side of Congress to hold floor votes on bills to restrict gun sales at least to those who were on DHS "watch lists". Granted, the votes all failed as the Republicans - and a handful of Democrats in pro-NRA states - denied any semblance of sanity over publicly-supported gun laws. And we're not talking about things like universal background checks getting a vote, even though that has an 86 percent approval from a majority of Americans (including enough gun owners to make a dent in the NRA arguments).

Tonight, when the Republican-controlled House tried to finish up their session before the extra-long summer recess - having failed to consider a ton of much-needed action on, well, EVERYTHING - the Democrats stood up and challenged the Republicans to at least hold up-or-down votes on two gun regulation bills in their wing of Congress.

Speaker Paul Ryan and the rest of his buddies pretty much closed up the session and walked away.

The Democratic Congresspersons stayed.

Led by John Lewis, one of the civil rights giants of our era, over 100 make that 189 Democrats are staging a sit-in to call attention to the need to vote on the matter. It doesn't matter if they'll lose - and they would lose the vote as the Republicans are firmly pro-gun-worship - what the Dems want is an official record of it.

What the Democrats are doing are making a public display of who is on which side of the gun debate. And that the Democrats are the ones who are on the side of a majority of Americans who want sensible gun control laws.

Of course, the Republicans are dismissing the sit-in. They dare not engage otherwise, lest they point up how their Congress is unresponsive to the very American people they're supposed to serve.

Rather than vote, Ryan would rather call the sit-in a "publicity stunt" as though unworthy of our attention. But Cole over at Balloon Juice is right: it IS exactly a publicity stunt because THAT'S HOW YOU DRAW ATTENTION TO THE ISSUES THAT NEED SOLUTIONS.

Ryan ordered the cameras turned off for the House floor to avoid the bad optics that could get loose on cable channels - CSPAN! - but he failed to take away smartphones that the Democratic Congresspersons are using to share snaps and video feed to social media sites. (I'm not sure how to embed into the blog at the moment, but the Internet should provide)

Follow the Twitter hashtag #NoBillNoBreak

This is something that's been long overdue: pushing back against the political indifference of the Republicans when it comes to gun violence and public safety.

This is something happening in Congress. At long fucking last.

Gun Safety Will Not Happen In the US Until There Is a Tragedy Far More Powerful Than The NRA Fearmongering

This week, President Obama is trying to do what he can about reducing the horrifying number of gun deaths we have in this nation. But it won't be enough.

For all of Obama's efforts to use Executive Orders to tighten regulations on gun sales, it won't be enough.

There are still too many ways for angry, frustrated people (mostly men) to purchase firearms at will, too many ways for them to express that rage in the worst ways with guns in hand and souls long gone.

Minor tweaks in how those guns get into people's hands - force all licensed gun sellers to perform background checks on all purchasers (trying to close the "hobbyist" loophole), add more staff to the FBI and ATF to monitor gun sales and traffic (trying to reduce the black market practice of buying guns cheap in a loose-restriction state and shipping them to places like Chicago where sales are tightly restricted), and have states submit mental-health records to the background system (to reduce the risk of angered, unstable people from having guns) - will still carry enough wriggle room for gun nuts to slip through the net and proceed to their targets (families, ex-lovers, those they hate) with the lethal power to end lives.

It's been noted before, by too many others. After the Newtown Massacre, when we had a school devastated and classrooms wiped out by a single gunman, when it seemed most likely the nation was poised to enact stronger regulations like they do in every other First World nation... we did nothing.

The NRA set their Fear Machine in motion and scared Congress into doing nothing. The NRA set their worshipers in motion to buy up even more guns and start strutting in public to intimidate entire communities into silence.

The results have been the increasing awareness that the United States suffers from a wave of mass shootings that happen on a daily basis... and an increasing despair that this is the New Normal, that the body count is The Price We Pay For Our Freedoms The NRA's Profit Margin.

That power of the NRA extends to the gun manufacturers themselves, to the point the two groups are intertwined now. As pointed out by Adam L over on Balloon Juice:

Your idea will not happen. Not because its not a good idea, but because the gun manufacturers have been punished for previous baby steps. Bill Ruger, the eponymous head of Ruger firearms, made some overtures about banning high capacity magazines. Twelve years after his death and there are commenters all over the firearms websites that won’t buy a Ruger - one of the few companies where all of their guns are made in the US - because of this betrayal...

...Smith and Wesson leadership was briefly aligned with the Clinton Administration on gun control and safety measures. The backlash almost put them out of business. They had badly misread what the response would be. Those in support of the Clinton Administration’s efforts and Smith and Wesson’s willingness to go along don’t buy guns. Those that do almost drove the company into bankruptcy by boycotting their products...

No one is going to risk their business. They know they’ll be punished...

As long as the NRA gets their money, they will feed that Fear. That Fear Machine will trump every law, every form of common sense and common decency in our nation. We've allowed that fear to excuse away shooting politicians, and churches, and movie theaters, and shopping malls, and schools. All our schools.

This form of absolutism in the real world is unsustainable. The pressure by the pro-gun crowd to keep buying more, keep exposing more people to the risks of gun violence, is going to build because no one will put the brakes on it lest the NRA throw a conniption. The odds of another Newtown, another Virginia Tech, another San Bernardino (where the threat of Islamic terrorism got trumped by the NRA Fear Machine, for God's sake) keeps going up with the likelihood of ever greater body counts occurring.

Until the undeniable happens, a tragedy so large that the blood spilled from it drowns us in horror. But by then it will be too late for those killed, for those who have been killed the last 10 20 40 years we've let the gun nuts reign over all.

We are not safe at all.

Man Shoots First Amendment to Prove Second Amendment Is Flawed

We've bumped into Erick Erickson before. The fear-monger threw a conniption back in 2010 over the "invasive" nature of the U.S. Census - despite the fact we're required to have one every ten years and that it's never destroyed lives before - and threatened back then to greet any Census taker with a loaded firearm.

So here he is this weekend throwing another conniption, this time over the New York Times' front-page editorial over gun safety laws. For the first time in over 90 years, the paper of record put an opinion piece on its front page, highlighting the seriousness of the matter: End the Gun Epidemic In America.

But motives do not matter to the dead in California, nor did they in Colorado, Oregon, South Carolina, Virginia, Connecticut and far too many other places. The attention and anger of Americans should also be directed at the elected leaders whose job is to keep us safe but who place a higher premium on the money and political power of an industry dedicated to profiting from the unfettered spread of ever more powerful firearms.

It is a moral outrage and a national disgrace that civilians can legally purchase weapons designed specifically to kill people with brutal speed and efficiency. These are weapons of war, barely modified and deliberately marketed as tools of macho vigilantism and even insurrection. America’s elected leaders offer prayers for gun victims and then, callously and without fear of consequence, reject the most basic restrictions on weapons of mass killing, as they did on Thursday. They distract us with arguments about the word terrorism. Let’s be clear: These spree killings are all, in their own ways, acts of terrorism...

...It is not necessary to debate the peculiar wording of the Second Amendment. No right is unlimited and immune from reasonable regulation.

So what is Erickson's response to this? A blistering counterpoint? A debate on the merits of the Times' position?

Nope. He shoots the newspaper itself as though he's Standing His Ground:

The paranoid gun fetishist seems to be one of the people who SHOULDN’T own a gun. He clearly does not operate it properly with only the righteous intent of protecting himself. Instead, he is using it to shoot up a newspaper, and in essence, trying to silence the freedom of the press and freedom of speech by use of deadly force. Wouldn’t that be considered a terrorist act? After all, terrorism is defined as “the use of violence and intimidation in the pursuit of political aims.”

This seems to be Erickson's standard response: in the face of a moral quandary or something that annoys his political sensibilities, pull out his phallic replacement and act like he's a manly man deploying the most gross exaggeration of manly American stereotype. "If I don't likes it, I shoots it."

In the process he proves Junius correct one more time, and proves himself an Imposter instead of an Honest Man:

An honest man, like the true religion, appeals to the understanding, or modestly confides in the internal evidence of his conscience. The imposter employs force instead of argument, imposes silence where he cannot convince, and propagates his character by the sword.

See how Erickson propagates his (lack of) character by the sword, going for the gun as his answer to every argument he CAN'T win. And look at his audience, the ones who eat this all up like his act is the sweetest of cupcakes instead of the poison to the Body Republic that it is.

This is a major problem out of many that our nation is facing heading into a winter of discontent and divisiveness. Actually, it's reflective of several: not only the need for gun safety laws in the face of increased mass shootings, but also the need to repair the public forum that's fallen into toxic posturing, bullying, outright lies, and epistemic closures.

And Erickson's act proves one other thing: the Second Amendment can no longer co-exist with the rights and protections established by the First Amendment. The NRA's obsession of turning the Second Amendment from "well-regulated militias" into a license to shoot anybody they don't like now conflicts with the First Amendment's protection for Americans to peaceably assemble in public. How can we, when angry (mostly) men are able to legally purchase weapons of war they can then use in our workplaces, our churches, our schools, our shops and movie theaters?

How can we uphold the First Amendment's protections of a free press - where public opinion and reporting can be published - when Erickson seeks to intimidate that free press by using it for target practice, with direct implication to threaten that action on the people expressing that opinion?

The United States is now caught between two constitutional interpretations. We as a nation need to uphold the one that best serves the public trust - our rights to be at peace with each other, to assemble as citizens, to speak our minds without threat - and we need to reform if not remove the second position that seeks to grant the angriest and most violent of ourselves the power to shoot us all.

And to Erick Erickson: your gun does not protect you from your own flaws and failures. Remember that as you cower in fear, because that's all you've proven this day.

Yet Another Shooting Because an Insane Gun-Worship Faction Are Killing Us One Mass Murder At a Time

Yet another shooting.

The facts are these:

Three assholes armed to the teeth and reportedly wearing masks and body armor strolled into a community center in San Bernardino California, opened fire with their guns, killing up to 14 people at the moment with more wounded, and drove off with intent to get away with it. The local police were able to locate where they tried to hide and they were caught in a shootout, with about two of the gunmen dead and one fleeing on foot. This situation is not over.

The location targeted is the Inland Regional Center, a community agency that teaches and cares for people and children with disabilities. This is akin to a school, a college campus, a church, a place of selfless activity filled with people WHO DID NOT DESERVE TO GET SHOT AT.

This is essentially the 355th mass shooting (where four or more people are shot at one time) we've had in the United States. We had another mass shooting in Savannah Georgia and the nation hasn't even paid attention to THAT because the body count's too low.

Our body count from mass shootings rivals that of nations caught in civil wars.

Mass number of guns DO NOT MAKE US SAFER. We've got the highest gun-to-resident ratio on the planet, and having all these guns have not made us safe. All these guns have made us easier targets.

The common links between all these shootings are simple to identify.

We make it too goddamned easy for assholes to buy/procure guns.

Nearly every mass shooting involved at least one man - more often than not white - with anger management issues.

To quote Rude Pundit:

The Rude Pundit has said before and he'll say again: It's never just the assailants. It's always the guns. Already, we're seeing the appalling piglets of the right tell anyone who dares to insist that it's the guns to sit down and shut up and not "politicize" this latest float in our unending parade of horrors. As if silence isn't a political act. As if the very people who called for banning Syrian refugees before the bodies were cold in Paris have any goddamned right to tell anyone to not talk politics. As if the NRA, which makes money on the corpses of the victims of mass shootings, deserves anything more than being spit on. They fear politicizing because policy may come from it...

...This country has allowed ludicrous and evil and demonstrably wrong people and ideas to be passed off as legitimate. We give people a forum to say unbelievable bullshit, like that expanded background checks will lead to tyranny and gun confiscation. At some point, we are allowed to assert that some things are not worthy of discussion and that some people and organizations deserve only contempt, derision, and isolation. We can turn people into pariahs. We are allowed to do that. The CNN anchor, reacting to the shooting a few minutes ago, kept saying, over and over, that it was sad and "ridiculous." She's right. Now, how about the next time some Republican politician talks about how we need to do more about the "mentally-ill" (which is something they won't do) and not limit gun purchases, she shuts them down and throws them off the show? What if she says that it's an unacceptable position to not do anything about guns?

We do not have to tolerate the intolerable. We have chosen to tolerate it. We have chosen to pretend as if the extremists who demand no regulation of guns have a valid point of view. We should be politicizing every shooting even more. We should be asking our politicians how they can dare not do something to help a nation afflicted with bullets.

If there will ever be a tipping point on guns, it will only happen when we say that disgusting acts are aided and abetted by disgusting people with disgusting beliefs. It will only happen when we treat the disgusting people with the disgust they deserve.

He's right.

The NRA should not be treated as a legitimate organization. They are not speaking to the facts NOR the truth. They have a financial incentive - many NRA leaders OWN companies that manufacture firearms - to promote fear-mongering and frenzied ammo stockpiling. The NRA and other gun-worship enablers have a political incentive to "win" the issue on guns otherwise they look weak to their followers.

The NRA are no longer about rifles. They haven't been responsible about firearms for 40 years. They are the National Murder Association now, and have been. Their organization is now about murder, and how THEY can profit from it. They are about the worship of metal pieces of weaponry that stand as their golden calf, which gives them millions of dollars while thousands of US die for their un-Christian sacrifice.

To hell with the NRA and their fear-mongering allies. THEY ARE AT WAR WITH THE REST OF THE UNITED STATES and we need to recognize that fact.

Insanity Is Repeating the Same Shooting Over And Over Again and Expecting a Safer Gun-Happy Result

(Update: Thank you Batocchio for the inclusion to the 2015 Jon Swift Memorial Round-Up! If you came here from another direction, I ask you to click that link to Batocchio's site and check out the other bloggers, some of them are very good reads! Good luck to all of you, and Happy New Year to you!)

Yet another shooting in a public place.  Yet another school where a classroom becomes a war zone.  Yet another week in the United States where the body count per year for our gun deaths rivals most civil wars raging in other countries.

Yet another moment for an exasperated Obama to step before the cameras just wondering when the hell Congress - and it IS the job of Congress to pass these laws - is going to do its job to make our public places ours again by enacting gun safety laws:

A visibly frustrated President Obama delivered remarks about the shooting Thursday night. Before he walked up to the podium, CNN said this speech was the president’s 15th on mass shootings since he took office.

“As I said just a few months ago, and I said a few months before that, and I said each time we see one of these mass shootings, our thoughts and prayers are not enough,” he said. “It's not enough.”

Yet another round of distractions about gun violence in the United States.  The gun-worshipers will likely argue about the need for more guns - which doesn't keep American safe - or argue for "good guys with guns" needed in our public places - ignoring evidence that it rarely helps and that the community college was a conceal-carry location.

Yet another realization that this nation has borne the pain of a mass shooting at least once a week:

Just remember, October only started this Thursday...

Are you horrified yet that the number in each colored box isn't the number of victims, it's the number of shootings across the nation...

Another realization that we are truly an insane nation, allowing the same thing to happen over and over and over again - the ease of access to guns by angry guys who can use those guns to kill far too many people - and allowing the Republican-led and NRA-owned Congress to DO NOTHING in the face of actual preventable deaths... The insanity of pretending maybe sooner or later things will improve, that maybe next time a good guy with a gun will finally save the day, or that the guns will jam, or that we'll someday run out of angry guys.

And while we're crying over the shooting in Oregon, there's been a mass shooting in Inglis Florida with three dead and one wounded... there's been other shootings across the nation in our cities and our towns...  All of which we could work to prevent if we had safety laws and better regulation of firearms.  But oh damn, we dare not say the dread phrase "well-regulated" because we'll hurt the NRA's collective feelings, and have them screaming "shall not infringe" as those words are the only ones that matter in that damned Second Amendment.

If you're calling me crazy about claiming the Second Amendment has been turned into a license to kill, you're ignoring the fact that for 180 years our nation did just fine following that amendment with harsh gun permit laws and regulations of use, with a focus on it honestly geared towards that concept of state militias.  But the NRA went batsh-t crazy in 1977 (wonder why) and their arguments about unregulated gun ownership dominates our nation and destroys basic common sense.

And now we're at the point where the Second Amendment is infringing on an even greater right: the First Amendment right to peaceably assemble.  We can't anymore: not at our schools, not at our churches, not at shopping malls or movie theaters, not at the parks, not in our own damn homes.

I may not claim to be sane, but I am not crazy when it comes to wanting our nation and our communities to be safer.  More guns doesn't make us safe.  The Second Amendment no longer makes us safe.  Common sense regulations on gun ownership and sales do make us safe.

Every other nation on the planet that allow gun ownership have common sense regulations in place.  Their streets and schools do not run red with blood.

Ours do.  Is the United States as a whole that mad, that blind about guns?