We Need To Admit What We're In Now

The anger remains potent even a day after ICE escalated the Republican War on America. (via Cheryl W. Thompson with NPR)

A man shot Saturday morning by federal immigration officers in Minneapolis has died, federal and local officials said.

The man was identified by state officials as Alex Jeffrey Pretti, a 37-year-old ICU nurse and Minneapolis resident.

The incident marks the third shooting involving federal immigration agents in Minneapolis this month.

"Today, federal agents beat and then shot multiple times and killed 37-year-old Alex Jeffrey Pretti, a U.S. citizen, a Minneapolis resident, and a V.A. nurse," U.S. Sen. Tina Smith said in a news conference this afternoon. "Eyewitness video shows, once again, reckless, violent, and dangerous federal agents taking the life of a Minnesotan."

The anger stems from the near-immediate evidence from eyewitnesses and video recordings that Pretti wasn't even resisting the agents when they ganged up on him and shot him in the back (follow-up from Jennifer Ludden and Liz Baker with NPR):

Minnesota officials are pushing to ensure they can help investigate the shocking fatal shooting of 37-year-old intensive care nurse Alex Pretti. After a late night court filing a federal judge granted them a temporary restraining order, ruling that no Homeland Security officer can destroy or alter evidence related to the death Saturday morning. Federal investigators have refused to allow access to the scene, despite the state obtaining a search warrant for public areas.

It's the second fatal shooting in Minneapolis by immigration agents this month, and once again Trump administration officials immediately defended the action as self-defense while blaming the victim — in this case claiming he was a "domestic terrorist" intending to "massacre" officers.

Multiple bystander videos and witness testimony contradict that. Pretti can be seen holding only a phone in his hand before at least six officers tackle him, pinning him face down on the ground and shooting him in the back, firing what sounds like 10 shots. One eyewitness said in a court document that Pretti was not even facing agents when they grabbed him. "It didn't look like he was trying to resist, just trying to help [a] woman up," they wrote.

Pretti was a U.S. citizen with no known criminal record. DHS says he was armed, and the city's police chief confirmed he had a lawful permit to carry. There has been no evidence that NPR has verified of Pretti brandishing his handgun at any time during the encounter with federal agents. One video appears to show an officer take away his gun just before another shoots him.

Even the so-called Second Amendment right to bear arms is meaningless against the Far Right culture war on everything America - civil rights, peace protests, protecting our communities and loved ones - ought to represent.

Even with trump's administration and every major figure in Homeland Security trying to demonize Pretti, they cannot lie their way out of this one. There's too much video evidence, and too many witnesses. And yet, they'll continue to lie and they'll continue to escalate the violence because this is what they want.

This is what decades - if not centuries when you consider this is all fallout from the first Civil War - of drum beating by the conservative wingnuts towards other Americans have led us to. Demonizing Blacks, demonizing women, demonizing Asians, demonizing gays and lesbians and trans, demonizing everyone not of "their" tribe. I keep saying this:

This Republican-pushed Culture War is one not based on facts: It is a war based on grievance of privileges lost (or about to lose), based on fear determined by racism and sexism towards ethnic minorities and women. It's a war based on fantasies derived from Atlas Shrugged and Turner Diaries, where "manly Christian men" rise up against emasculating Godless librul elites to destroy the corrupt world in order to build a new Utopia on the ashes of the old.

It's been going on since before Black Lives Matter, before Ferguson, before Obama's election triggered angry Whites, before the War on Terror, before Pat Buchanan's Culture War speech call to arms, before the Civil Rights laws of the 1960s pushed conservatism further into racist demagoguery. You can arguably trace all this rage and fear back to 1865 when the defeated Confederates refused to accept the freedom of Blacks and waged a terror campaign well through the Jim Crow Era. 

We can't hide from this fact anymore: We are at war.

We Americans are at war against each other, driven by racism, by fear, by ignorance, by the willingness of those corrupt powers in high places to turn our anxieties towards ourselves instead of them. The vast majority of Americans aren't like that, thankfully. But there are enough of them among the angry, the fear-driven, the ones who bought into the Far Right Narrative of "liberals are pinko commie traitors who aren't REAL Americans" to where violence in our own cities - not from protestors but from government thugs - is a given.

None of this needed to happen. Alas, it has. And now every American has to make the moral decision to stand with courage against the tyranny of trump and his lackeys... or let the violence drown us all.

Stay safe, America.

From Kingdom Come, illustrated by Alex Ross

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.

The Cycle of Violence This Saturday Night

Christ on a bike:

Donald Trump appeared to be the target of an assassination attempt as he spoke during a rally in Pennsylvania on Saturday, two law enforcement officials said. The former president, his ear covered in blood from what he said was a gunshot, was quickly pulled away by Secret Service agents and his campaign said he was “fine.”

A local prosecutor said the suspected gunman and at least one attendee are dead. The Secret Service said two spectators were critically injured.

Posting on his Truth Social media site about two and a half hours after the shooting, Trump said a bullet “pierced the upper part of my right ear.”

“I knew immediately that something was wrong in that I heard a whizzing sound, shots, and immediately felt the bullet ripping through the skin,” he said in the post. “Much bleeding took place, so I realized then what was happening.”

The attack, by a shooter who law enforcement officials say was then killed by the Secret Service, was the first attempt to assassinate a president or presidential candidate since Ronald Reagan was shot in 1981. It comes amid a deeply polarized political atmosphere, just four months from the presidential elections and days before Trump is to be officially named the Republican nominee at his party’s convention... (via Jill Colvin, Julie Carr Smyth, Colleen Long, Eric Tucker, Michael Balsamo and Michelle L. Price at AP News)

This is all happening in the moment and it's always too early to speculate even though a number of Far Right agitators on social media are already accusing Biden and "the violent Left" of being behind this shooting.

If there's anything I agree with on social media right now, it's THIS sentiment:

Mom can you come pick me up history is happening and I’m scared

— samuel catlin (@lint_ax) July 13, 2024

Seriously, America. Make this goddamn partisan madness stop.

For all my hatred aimed at donald Shitgibbon trump, the most I want to see done is him facing justice in a jail cell for all the crimes - the tax fraud, business fraud, and sexual assault - he's committed (and the ones he's allegedly done that he still needs to face in trial). Killing trump doesn't solve the reality that a willing and angry MAGA voter base will remain - and become even more angry and violent - and will be eager to turn trump into a martyr. Violence aimed at a group doesn't make that faction change their tone or their minds: It tends to radicalize them further, feeding into a cycle of violence aimed at the ones they blame.

Any form of political violence - street riot, bombing, targeted assassination - becomes self-defeating. I just wrote about what happened at Kent State: because the ROTC building had been fire-bombed, a lot of Americans in the middle class across the political spectrum actually felt the protestors were to blame and deserved to get shot by a panicked National Guard. Violence begets - and excuses - the reactionary violence that follows. 

The idea that a Propaganda of the Deed would rally a silent hidden faithful into a mass movement justifying your planned utopia never happens. Assassinating Lincoln didn't win the Civil War for the South; shooting Garfield actually pushed the federal government into genuine civil service reforms; killing McKinley never sparked a Socialist uprising in America; what happened to JFK didn't end the Cold War or change U.S. policy towards Cuba (whatever the hell it was that motivated Oswald (maybe), we still don't know for certain); and shooting Reagan never impressed Jodie Foster (I'm not being flippant here, that's kind of what Hinckley was trying to do).

All that's going to happen now is a family will have to cope with the tragedy of losing a loved one - whoever it was that died at the rally - and the MAGA faithful are going to stir themselves into a frenzy over which conspiracy theories will make them the angriest and more eager to act out.

The political violence we've been trapped in since 2016 - with trump's demagoguery of immigrants and liberals - and accelerated in 2020 - "Stand Back and Stand By" anyone? - remains a downward spiral this 2024. History - chaotic, fear-driven, violent - is happening, and it's not going to stop until more innocent lives are taken.

The Bullets Count the Cost

Don't you shoot him down/
He's about to leave here/
Don't you shoot him down/
He's got to stay here/
He ain't going nowhere/
He's been shot down to the ground/
Oh where he can't survive no no...
-- "Machine Gun," Jimi Hendrix

The latest ruling out of this extremist, archconservative Supreme Court pretty much guarantees an increase in the national body count when it comes to gun violence. Via Amy Howe at SCOTUSblog:

The Supreme Court on Friday struck down a rule that banned bump stocks, issued by the Trump administration after a 2017 mass shooting at a concert in Las Vegas. By a vote of 6-3, the justices rejected the federal government’s argument that rifles equipped with bump stocks are machine guns, which are generally prohibited under federal law. In an opinion by Justice Clarence Thomas, the court’s conservative justices emphasized that Congress could have enacted a law that banned all weapons capable of high rates of fire, but it did not – and so the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives was wrong to interpret the federal ban on machine guns to extend to bump stocks.

Justice Sonia Sotomayor dissented, in an opinion joined by the court’s other more liberal justices, Justices Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson. She warned that the majority’s decision “will have deadly consequences.”

The bump stock is an attachment that transforms a semiautomatic rifle into a weapon that can discharge at a rate of hundreds of rounds per minute. The Trump administration issued the rule at the center of the case in 2018. It followed a mass shooting at a music festival in Las Vegas in which the gunman used semi-automatic rifles equipped with a bump-stock device to kill 60 people and injure over 500 more. The rule, which concluded that bump stocks are machine guns, was an about-face from the ATF’s previous position, which until 2018 had indicated that only some kinds of bump stocks are machine guns. Under the 2018 rule, anyone who owned a bump stock was required to destroy it or drop it at a nearby ATF office to avoid criminal penalties...

Rather than leave it up to the federal agency to determine that bump stocks turned semi-auto guns into full-auto, Thomas and the other Republican Justices decided "fuck public safety, let the gun nuts have their firepower."

Because that's what was at stake here. Not a Second Amendment matter, but a public safety matter. And the goddamn Far Right don't give a rat's ass as long as they're not the targets (you will notice that a lot of the Far Right public gatherings are "Gun Free Zones").

If you want an idea of what a bump stock can do for an assault rifle, there's a YouTube clip going around that demonstrates (try to get to the 4:42 mark):

With a bump stock, you're shooting enough bullets to wipe out an entire room of people within seconds, not minutes. The Las Vegas concert mass shooting that convinced the ATF (and even a gun-happy trump administration) to ban bump stocks? The gunman was able to get off 1,000 rounds, killing 60 and wounding over 400 people (more people were also injured during the panicked fleeing).

Goddamn this. A solid majority of Americans want assault rifles banned, and yet our legal system - and far too many politicians bought out by the goddamned NRA - refuses to consider that need.

Gun violence is already a serious epidemic in our nation. Mass shootings are now so common that we don't even notice them unless the body count goes into double digits. By giving these gunmen the ability to do that, we are guaranteeing that the blood in our streets will not stop flowing. Not until every gun-loving politicians (mostly Republicans) are voted out of office, not until every gun-loving judges are forced to retire, not until we can do something about the twisted side of the American debate on guns that turned the Second Amendment from granting states the power to well-regulate their militias into a mindless license for gun nuts to shoot anybody they want.

The violence is going to get worse. Especially when the Far Right gun nuts get convinced the upcoming election isn't going their way...

Time to Break the NRA, Now That It's Financially Broke

I hadn't talked about it much, but the National Rifle Body County Association had been facing civil lawsuits in the state of New York - where their organization had been incorporated - and the State AG Letitia James delivered for justice and sanity (again) when the jury came back this afternoon holding the NRA leaders liable for decades of embezzlement, mismanagement, and corruption (via Emma Bowman and Brian Mann at NPR):

A Manhattan jury found three top executives of the National Rifle Association liable Friday in a lengthy civil trial that focused on alleged corruption and the misspending of millions of dollars.

Longtime NRA leader Wayne LaPierre, a key architect in the nonprofit's hardline gun rights agenda who stepped down as CEO last month, was central to New York state's case.

Jurors found that LaPierre "violated his statutory obligation to discharge the duties of his position in good faith."

They concluded that he had caused roughly $5.4 million worth of harm to the nonprofit group's finances — though they also found that LaPierre had already repaid roughly $2 million.

LaPierre is the same sonofabitch who made the decision after the horrifying Sandy Hook Elementary School massacre to double down on the madness of gun proliferation that has led to more guns and more gun violence. He went out there and claimed "there was no way to end the violence" and that the best way to solve it was "good guys with guns." (Guess what, good guys with guns doesn't work) All the while raking in the profits that the NRA succored out of the gun manufacturers - who all had a part of the NRA's leadership - that he then indulged himself.

The executives were accused of misappropriating and mismanaging funds donated to the gun rights group's members. According to New York state Attorney General Letitia James, who brought the lawsuit, their actions led to "the loss of more than $64 million in just three years."

During the six-week trial, state lawyers alleged that LaPierre had spent over $11 million for private flights and approved $135 million in NRA contracts in exchange for yacht access and free trips to the Bahamas, Greece and other vacation hotspots, The Associated Press reported.

All those vacations to overseas nations that have gun control laws in place. Probably made it safe for LaPierre to walk around at night spending more blood money.

LaPierre spent three decades growing the NRA's political and lobbying influence. Even as mass shootings became commonplace, LaPierre rejected attempts to change gun policy, branding gun control proponents as enemies of freedom and using the threat of firearms regulation to fundraise.

His resignation was announced just days before the trial began, with the NRA instead citing health as the reason for his departure.

The NRA's grip on politics has weakened in recent years as it's faced declining membership and revenue, and concerns within the group over leadership's direction and misuse of funds...

There was a moment, years ago, when ties to Russian intelligence exposed the dire financial straits that the organization found itself (It doesn't look like that investigation went far). There had also been power struggles both behind the doors and on the public stage that exposed how corrupt LaPierre had made himself and the NRA. There'd been complaints the organization had been rigging their internal elections for decades.

With any luck, this court ruling breaks all of that. This jury decision will block some of the more corrupt NRA leaders from holding office, hopefully leaving room for reformers to gain meaningful footholds. AG James is looking to install an independent court monitor to oversee the financials, which would go a long way towards clearing out any of the other org leaders unable to bribe or bully their way back into power.

While I am hopeful of all that, whether this will lead to any sanity on the political stage remains unknown. Far too many politicians - cough Far Right Republicans cough - have built their "brands" on being "gun-toting, 2nd Amendment Loving" psychopaths, and they're not going to change their public image any time soon.

It's up to the voters - now without the NRA funneling their blood money into the electoral process - to hear the calls for gun reforms more clearly, and to vote appropriately for the federal and state officials who will do something - banning the assault rifles that make up most of our mass shootings; reinstating gun safety regulations like waiting periods, registration and training; and stopping the intentional market glut of cheap guns; things like that - to stop our streets - and our schools, and our stores, and our churches, and our movie theaters, and our concerts - filling with innocent blood.

Hope you go to Hell broke, Wayne. You earned that.

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.

Angry Guy Violence at Christmastime

Just a quick observation or three about a tragedy that happened in Pinellas County on Christmas, where two brothers shot at each other arguing over which had the bigger Christmas and in the process killed their older sister (via Jack Prator at the Tampa Bay Times).

• This shooting happened because two people - young men with anger and envy driving them - had incredibly easy access to firearms, and had prodded each other to levels of rage that guaranteed someone was going to end up dead.
• None of this would have happened if either the family didn't make it so easy to access weapons, or if the young men involved had better opportunities to learn ways to avoid that anger, to avoid the rage that always leads to tragedy of some kind.
• You could wonder about the stress, anxiety, and emotional mix-ups that come about whenever Christmas rolls around, but I get the sense the filial feuding had been brewing for some time, and that anything else - a birthday, a family celebration, someone having a bad day - would have triggered the same response.

And you want to know the horrifying observation about this? There were multiple shootings across the United States on both Christmas Eve and Christmas Day. Much like there have been multiple shootings across the United States throughout all of 2023. We are now averaging two mass shootings per day, and nothing being done to reduce the easy access of guns to angry guys across nation.

Not the greatest way to celebrate what's supposed to be a day of peace and goodwill.

Gods help us.

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.

Just a Few Things To Note this February 2023

Still working on the -Isms book at the moment, but I needed to take care of a few items.

The big story - almost literally - over the past week or two has been the Chinese spy balloons flying over North American airspace. The developments getting out are that 1) this has apparently been going on for years, 2) our NORAD alert system has only recently been able to target these balloons more effectively, and 3) our habit of calling these balloons "unidentified" are mixing them up with actual non-terrestrial UFOs flown by innocent aliens looking for a concert hall to play in.

via GIPHY

A lot of this is playing out in the national media as yet-another-attempt by the Far Right to embarrass President Biden for cheap political points. It didn't matter what Biden did or didn't do to respond the minute it got out we had a big-ass balloon floating over Montana. At first the wingnut Republicans were screaming Biden was weak towards China for not shooting down the balloon. Then when the balloon flew over the safety of the Atlantic Ocean and Biden ordered the balloon shot down, those same wingnut critics started screaming about the balloon being a Chinese bioweapon and Biden was foolish for exposing us all to COVID death. /headdesk

As for other things that really matter, donald trump is facing growing pressure in Georgia's grand jury looking into his electoral interference as well as the likelihood of facing criminal charges in New York over the Stormy Daniels bribery affair. This weekend however revealed more damaging revelations that one of trump's PAC workers had a laptop with classified documents saved to files, hinting at the possibility that trump did share Top Secret materials in violation of espionage laws and increasing the odds that trump will face federal charges soon (HURRY IT UP, SPECIAL COUNSEL).

And for personal consideration, Infidel753 blogged an insightful article about "the exhausted majority" which may help with my -Isms book when I get to writing about the Moderate factions within American political dynamics. 

Oh, and I woke up this morning to yet another goddamn mass shooting, this time on the Michigan State University campus. Three dead so far, more wounded. Goddamn this nation for our Angry Guy With Guns bloodlust.

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.

Uvalde Followup: The Sound of Shameless Cowards (w/ Update)

The ongoing terror and ongoing shame in our nation regarding the plague of mass shootings and widespread sorrow of gun violence just keeps getting worse.

Back in late May, the community of Uvalde Texas suffered the unimaginable loss of 19 children and 2 teachers killed by a gun-wielding angry guy. Ever since then, there had been questions about how the school security and later how the local police mishandled the situation. For months, stories kept dribbling out about how the police waited for minutes during the most critical moments; how the police detained mothers who heard the screams and wanted to rush in to save their babies; how the local police chief failed to understand the severity of the situation to the point of criminal negligence; and even how one of the cops at the scene had to be restrained because he was getting text messages from his dying wife who was one of the teachers killed.

Well, this past week, a video recording from security cameras inside the school leaked out. And while the mayor began screaming about going after the leaker(s), everyone else was horrified by the visual evidence that police did nothing (via Justin Peters at Slate (paywall)):

Though the video does not include any gory footage, and though we do not see inside the classrooms in which Ramos shot and killed 21 people, it is nevertheless hard to watch. (You can hear a lot of gunshots in the video; an “editor’s note” appears periodically informing viewers that “The sound of children screaming has been removed.”) Almost exactly three minutes after Ramos enters the school, three police officers enter and head down the hallway toward him. A minute later, after receiving fire, they retreat. More and more police officers show up. For over 40 minutes, as the video makes irrefutably clear, they more or less just stand there...

The one thing every viewer and pundit focused on when the video got out: The inhuman line "The sound of children screaming has been removed." Stephen King could never write a line more horrifying than that.

On Wednesday in Slate, my colleague Rebecca Onion nicely captured the excruciating experience of watching over an hour’s worth of footage of officers sanitizing their hands, checking their phones, standing around, and doing pretty much everything but intervening to stop the shooter...

It’s one thing to read about the police inaction at Robb Elementary; it’s another, much more viscerally maddening thing to see it with your own eyes. The written accounts that I’ve read of the police response have contained excuses and rationales and official statements; they’ve left room for doubt over what happened and why, and for the prospect that the police on the scene actually acted heroically after all. But the video has no bandwidth for  such shades of gray. It is an indelible partial record of what happened that afternoon. It sticks in a way that the stories I’ve read did not...

And when the video leaked, what was the official response from Uvalde officials like the city mayor?

On Tuesday, Uvalde Mayor Don McLaughlin announced that the news outlets were “chicken” for publishing the video before the victims’ families had had a chance to see it...

The mayor’s response, in which he appealed to emotion in order to criticize the media for doing their jobs, is worth analyzing. On its face it sounds reasonable, even humane. The victims’ families have indeed been through enough, and it’s natural to want to spare them additional gratuitous trauma. But this plea to consider the families’ emotional welfare reads as smarmy and self-serving when uttered by the mayor of a town whose first responders failed the students and teachers of Robb Elementary on the day of the shooting, and whose authorities have been trying to duck responsibility for their own behavior ever since then...

More than an hour elapsed between when the first police officers arrived on the scene at Robb Elementary and when the police finally confronted and killed Ramos. This gap was not initially public knowledge, and in the aftermath of the shooting, Texas Department of Public Safety director Steve McCraw announced that “the bottom line is that law enforcement was there, they did engage immediately, they did contain him in the classroom.” Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, meanwhile, praised the police on the scene for showing “amazing courage by running toward gunfire..

The video proves that Abbott's praise is absolute bullshit. Even when the cops had body armor, helmets, even those bulletproof shields clearly visible on camera, they waited like chickens for the gunman to finish his bloody agenda.

Every goddamned Uvalde and Texas law officer who failed to act on that day, and every goddamned Uvalde and Texas elected official all the way up to the goddamned Governor who tried to cover up this shame, should have the phrase "The sound of children screaming" tattooed to their foreheads for the rest of their gutless miserable lives.

This is, by the by, absolute proof that the Far Right wingnut fantasy of "Good guys with guns" is a goddamned lie. We had a platoon, nay an entire police force of "good guys with guns" and even they were too terrified to go after a lone gun nut who just happened to carry assault weapons with enough firepower to scare them.

The widespread availability of military-grade assault rifles - thanks to the blind and inhuman misreading of the goddamned Second Amendment by conservative wingnut justices and politicians - is a serious problem for law enforcement across the United States. You wanna know the excuse for why every police department is stocked with riot gear and firepower that even our own military thinks is excessive? The excuse is that the cops want to be "prepared" to face off against any large-scale riot where the rioters may have these AR-15s and similar semi-auto (and illegally converted full auto) firearms.

But even that excuse is a lie. Watch how the cops behaved at Uvalde - when there was just one gunman - and how they cowered behind their shields for a full hour. Then watch how these cops behaved at Black Lives Matters protests: Where most of the protestors were waving signs and carrying water bottles, and where the cops responded with rubber (and real) bullets, smashing in heads with batons and the butt of their own rifles because the cops fucking knew they held all the firepower on those streets.

If our nation's law enforcement were truly honestly serious about protecting themselves in dangerous situations, if they truly wanted to live with the belief that they should "go home to their families at the end of every shift," you'd think every sheriff's department and police union out there would be fighting tooth-and-nail to pass assault weapon bans to make their lives easier. 

But they don't. You barely hear a peep from police unions when it comes to debate for assault weapon bans or any other gun safety option.

Part of cop rationale is that they want that excuse of mad gunmen running around so they can play soldier with overpowered gear of their own. Part of it is that the cops are on the same page with the National Rifle Body Count Association when it comes to ensuring the goddamned White Nationalist Christianist "Rapture Is Coming" Gun-Worshipping wingnuts are locked and loaded for the Second Civil War vs. bleeding heart liberals.

The anxiety cops have with every traffic stop could easily go away when the open-carry prevalence of guns go away. But no: they would rather live with the fear, all because it lets them impose their fear and firepower on the ethnic minorities they deem to punish and harass.

In the meantime, the shameless cowards in Texas will keep bleating the same excuses and the same lies until they are held accountable. Until each and every cop who failed in their duty, each and every official who failed to be honest and upfront, each and every demagoguing politician who blustered and lied are either in jail or out of office.

The sound of children screaming should haunt them forever.

Update 7/18: Am waking up this morning to reports that there were 376 officers that eventually showed up at Uvalde. All those cops, and they STILL could not work up the nerve to apprehend a single gunman. All because the gunman had AR-15 murdersticks with him. /rage 

IT'S THE GUNS

IT'S THE GUNS

IT'S THE GODDAMNED GUNS.

Get rid of the assault rifles and maybe just maybe the cops will stop being cowards and bullies.

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.

Get The Damn Vote Out for Dems In 2022 Or Suffer Forever

So of course the week I decided I need a break from blogging was also the week this nation's ultraconservative Supreme Court decided to drop all the bombs on America.

In one ruling, the Far Right-dominated Court decided to gut Separation of Church And State by making it legal for religious private schools to take public funds without restriction.

In another ruling, the Far Right-dominated Court decided to gut our Miranda Rights, making it easier for cops to refuse to tell people they're dragging in for interrogation that they have rights to remain silent and have their lawyer present, and making it more likely the cops will force people to endure unwarranted interrogations until they confess to shit they didn't do.

In another ruling, the Far Right-dominated Court decided to overrule a New York firearm concealed-carry law, by arguing that the individual right to carry weapons is guaranteed in the Second Amendment (the overriding "Shall Not Be Infringed" phrase) and Fourteenth Amendment (which other legal experts are saying is a misreading of what the 14th stands for).

And of course, what we've all dreaded since someone leaked the first draft of Alito's Dobbs ruling, the Far Right-dominated Court today nuked abortion rights by overturning the Casey and Roe decisions.

It should be noted that a majority of Americans support Separation of Church And State, they support Miranda Rights against an aggressive police force, they support gun safety laws, and they support a woman's right to decide her own health and well-being in case they need an abortion.

Of course, with all of these decisions going AGAINST what a majority of Americans support, the public opinion against the Supreme Court is at an all-time low (dropping to 25 percent and looking to crater from there). 

But the Far Right Minority basically running our country doesn't give a fuck, does it? All they care about is their Culture War, their religious fervor to rule or ruin, and the willingness of an emboldened Far Right judiciary to dig even deeper into madness by going after our rights to marry, our rights to birth control, our rights to privacy, our rights to even vote...

I warned about the sins of Minority Party Rule years ago, before Senators like Mitch McConnell and Susan Collins and before demagogues like trump kicked our nation into the pits of Hell.

...When you look at the current leadership in DC, you'll see a Republican Party led by the likes of (then Speaker) Ryan, McConnell and trump who all know they do NOT need to answer to the majority - they need to placate their minority base - and so they govern as they please, even in the face of polling numbers that mark them as some of the most unpopular life forms in modern memory. All they have to do is stoke their base to turnout for the midterms, all they have to do is keep their deep-pocket funders rolling in their tax-free profits, and let gerrymandering and voter suppression do the rest.

The only thing holding a Minority Rule Party like that accountable is The Reality-Based World. Bad governance leads to mistakes, which leads to disasters, which leads to outrage and angry majority voters who finally get sick of it all and try their best to flip the bad actors out of power...

It would be pretty to think that all of those millions of American citizens (around 100 million last we checked) able to vote but had refused for some reason or another - apathy worse above all - will now realize what the hell is at stake here and turn up to register to vote now, and better yet show up in November in the midterms to vote heavily in favor of Democrats to throw every lying unethical crooked Republican out of power.

Right now, voter turnout is the only realistic plausible way to end Minority Party Rule, to end the death grip Republicans have on our nation's well-being, to counter every wingnut legal decision that this skewed Supreme Court is going to hit us with for the next 10-20 years until we can clear that bench and replace with jurists who recognize what our rights - our right to choose our health, our right to be free of religious domination by zealots, our right to be safe from a violent police state, our right to assemble freely in public without fear of gun nuts, our right to live - truly are.

FOR THE LOVE OF GOD, AMERICA, STOP VOTING REPUBLICAN. Save our nation, save our legal system, save each other.

Blood On the Streets of Tulsa (w/ Updates)

(Update: Thanks again to Batocchio for linking me to Crooks&Liars' Mike's Blog Round-Up!)

Because the National Rifle Body Count Association wants its blood money (via Rina Torchinsky with NPR): 

Police in Tulsa, Okla., say the shooter's doctor was among those killed Wednesday during a mass shooting at a medical building. The shooter had complained multiple times about pain following back surgery and sought additional treatment in the days prior to the attack, police said.

The shooting on the campus of Saint Francis Health System left five people dead, including the gunman, according to police. Two doctors, Preston Phillips — who had treated the gunman — and Stephanie Husen, were killed as was Amanda Glenn, an employee, and William Love, a patient, according to The Associated Press...

The gunman apparently felt ongoing back pain that the treatment didn't correct, and became angry at the doctor and the office that treated him. Driven by that anger, the gunman did this:

At 2 p.m. Wednesday — hours before the shooting — the gunman purchased an AR-15-style rifle from a local gun shop, Franklin said. The shooter also purchased a semiautomatic handgun on May 29 from a pawn shop.

Do you understand? As soon as the angry guy got his AR-15 murderstick (it's not so funny how THAT weapon is the preferred assault rifle for these mass shootings), he went on his shooting spree killing "everyone who got in his way" on his path of vengeance. No sign of a background check done, no waiting period, no cool-down, no training period, no mental health check, nothing.

He got his assault rifle and immediately became a murderer. Killing doctors, killing a staffer, killing a patient who had nothing to do with his treatment. And then killing himself knowing he was fucked forever.

One of the frustrating realizations about all of these mass shootings criss-crossing our nation is the repeating patterns to them all. It's like there's a script to this:

Step One: A guy - and it's usually a guy, often White but sometimes Black/Latino/Asian/Arab - gets pissed off about a personal injustice or perceived slight. It may involve his job, it may involve a legal dispute, but nine times out of ten it'll involve women.

Step Two: The guy comes to believe he has no legal recourse to respond to the slight, or else believes the legal system is already conspiring against him. He also refuses to seek mental help support, because he's been raised to think that's for pussies.

Step Three: The guy, getting angrier, buys a gun or twelve. If he's REALLY angry or his anger is focusing on a large group of people, he will buy an ArmaLite Rifle aka the AR-15 (the Murderstick of CHAMPIONS). This is a major problem: Nearly every firearm used in the mass shootings we keep witnessing were purchased legally or acquired legally by an ally/friend/family member, oft-times within days of the shooting events.

Step Four: A moment will trigger the angry guy into picking up his weapons - and all the ammo clips he can carry - and heading out to a place that is either the source of his woes or a place where his preferred target "audience" can be found.

Step Five: Mass shooting gets reported on the major networks. More money for the NRA!

These ongoing acts of gun violence keep involving the same three things: The number of angry guys walking among us; The relative ease to purchase and employ firearms powerful enough to kill tens of people in mere seconds; And our nation's inability to push legal reforms or public aid to solve those first two problems.

If we're going to resolve the ongoing gun violence crisis in the United States, we're going to have to come to terms with this fact: Either we get rid of the Angry Guys threatening acts of violence against us, or we get rid of the Assault Rifles that make it too damned easy for them to kill.

It's honestly impossible to get rid of Angry Guys. That would involve passing laws mandating every hot-tempered person out there check in with a psychologist or health care worker to talk them down from their rage, and that would go against a lot of privacy laws (you'll definitely get a lot of lawsuits from guys angrily disbelieving they have anger issues in the first place).

Also, to you people who would argue "Oh let CHRIST'S LOVE into your hearts" as a cure for Angry Guy Syndrome, that's a load of shit. Half these mass shooters claim to be loving Christians already when they pick up their murder weapons to kill those they deem unworthy of God's grace (just look at the so-called Christians shooting up synagogues and grocery stores). Mandatory Religion is not the solution you want it to be.

And thanks to the Second Amendment and a Supreme Court skewing to an extreme Far Right agenda, it's gotten harder to get rid of the assault weapons. Even though we've had a history of banning the AR-15s and their copycats for ten years rather effectively until 2004.

The United States is a toxic brew of fear, hate, rage, and easy access to military-grade firepower.

The shootings will continue until morale improves, or until there's no one left as target practice for the NRA to profit from.

P.S. As I type this, there's reports of a mass shooting in Racine, Wisconsin. It's at a funeral service for a Black man who was shot and killed by cops. ARE YOU FUCKING KIDDING ME.

P.S.S. Following the Racine shooting, there was a shooting at a church in Ames, IA. The killer turned out to be an Angry Guy ex-boyfriend of one of the two killed college women. For the LOVE OF ACTUAL GOD, PEOPLE...

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.

Blood on the Streets of Uvalde

No other country outside of an actual goddamned war zone has to go through this shit.

YET ANOTHER SCHOOL SHOOTING.

This time in Uvalde, Texas. This time with 19 elementary schoolkids and 2 adults shot to death by another angry guy with fucking guns (via Vanessa Romo at NPR): 

The number of people confirmed killed in a school shooting in Uvalde, Texas, has risen to 20, according to Sgt. Erick Estrada of the Texas Department of Public Safety.

Estrada told CNN that 18 children and two adults are among the dead... (Note: death toll updated to 19 children by 10:47 PM)

The suspect allegedly shot his grandmother before he entered the school. Thursday was meant to be the last day of the school year, according to the school's website.

In a brief news conference hours after the shooting, Uvalde Consolidated Independent School District Police Chief Pete Arredondo confirmed some of the details offered by Abbott. Arredondo called the bloodshed a "mass casualty incident" but did not specify the number of dead. The chief also told reporters that the gunman acted alone and is deceased...

The school year for those kids was going to end this Thursday. Now for 18 families those kids will never come home. All because of an angry guy who, when he recently turned 18, went and bought military-grade firearms and decided to use them on children.

ON CHILDREN. 

WHO NEVER HARMED ANOTHER SOUL. WHO NEVER GOT THE CHANCE TO LIVE, TO BREATHE, TO GROW UP AND GROW OLD.

GODDAMN THE SHOOTER WHO KILLED THEM.

AND GODDAMN THE SONS-OF-BITCHES WHO MANUFACTURED THE WEAPONS, AND SOLD THEM TO HIM AND HUNDREDS OF OTHER ANGRY GUYS WHO GO ON SHOOTING SPREES.

You know something? This is a goddamned rigged game. This is a goddamned setup. The National Rifle Body Count Association has its hands all over the gun-making industry, and so they make money off of every gun sale, and every mass shooting is like an advertisement to the gun nuts to go and buy more guns which is more money to the NRA National Body Count Association.

It's a hell of a racket. Even organized crime mobs aren't this evil. At least the Gambinos and the other Families don't make money off of school massacres.

I swear, we need to go after the NRA National Body Count Association for Racketeering, for criminal conspiracy to commit murder, because these motherfuckers KNOW that every gun - especially the assault rifles - they're selling there's a decent chance it'll get used in a mass shooting.

THEY ARE MAKING MONEY OFF OF MURDER, FOR THE LOVE OF GOD.

THIS WILL NOT STOP UNTIL THE GUNMAKERS CAN'T MAKE MONEY OFF OF OUR DEATHS ANYMORE.

Voting out the pro-gun politicians won't be enough (although that needs to happen too). These sons-of-bitches need to pay for all the blood spilt in the glory of their rich lives while they mock our existence.

Goddamn them. Every dead child not just in Uvalde but all across America, all across the last 30 years of their fanatical worship of their God of Death, is on them.

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?