Monthly Archives: May 2023

well, fuck, I guess it’s time for another mass murder post.

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I just checked; I’ve written 36 mass murder posts over the last 12 years. Thirty-six. And just to be clear, I’m talking about mass murders — not mass shooting events. Mass shootings are basically unsuccessful mass murders. They’re attempted mass murders, and they’re a lot more common. Also, remember that technically mass murder excludes so-called ‘domestic’ mass killings. You know, like all those cases in which a guy decides to kill his spouse and their kids, and maybe his spouse’s parents. Those aren’t included in the official ‘mass murder’ definition. Also too…gang-related mass killings. They don’t count either.

So I’ve averaged three mass murder posts per year. I’m running out of stuff to say. So I’m just going to cannibalize some of my old blog posts. Here’s part of what I wrote after the 2019 Dayton, Ohio mass murder, which took place about 13 hours after the El Paso, Texas Walmart mass murder.

Who would this guy [Connor Betts] in Dayton be without his AR15? Who would Patrick Crusius be without access to an AK-47? He’d be just another angry young white guy with a dodgy understanding of history and the influence of social forces. Just another inadequate person man who wanted so very desperately to believe he had an important part to play in some imaginary racist redemptive narrative.

Who would Stephen Paddock be? Who would Devin Kelley or James Holmes be? Adam Lanza, Nikolas Cruz, Omar Mateen, Robert Bowers — who would these guys be without easy access to guns and high capacity magazines? Without the guns, they’d be…insignificant. These guys think the guns might make them matter.

Sadly, they’re right. It’s the guns

Guns and high cap magazines, there it is. Connor Betts, the Dayton mass murderer, was killed by a police officer approximately 32 seconds after he started shooting. That’s right, thirty-two SECONDS. Now that’s a seriously rapid police response. But Betts fired 41 rounds in those 32 seconds. In that brief wink of time, he killed ten people and wounded 17 others. In contrast, it took six minutes for police to respond to the El Paso Walmart mass murder. Patrick Crusius, the shooter, had time to kill 23 people, wound another 23, get back in his car and drive away.

I also wrote this:

You want to tell me guns don’t kill people — people kill people? Fuck you. Jumping off buildings doesn’t kill people — deceleration trauma kills people. You want to tell me the majority of gun owners are law-abiding citizens and shouldn’t be punished because some asshole misuses a firearm? Fuck you in the neck, life doesn’t work that way. I’m not going to cook meth, but I still can’t buy Sudafed without a huge amount of fuss because some asshole misuses it. You want to tell me you can also kill people with a knife or a baseball bat? Fuck you, you half-witted ballbag. That’s so damned stupid it doesn’t deserve a response. You want to tell me the only way to stop a bad guy with a gun is with a good guy with a gun? Fuck you, fuck your whole family, fuck everybody you know. Texas is jammed with ‘good guys with a gun.’ But Crusius was still able to waltz through the aisles of Walmart shooting folks IN TEXAS, walk out unmolested, get in his car, and start to drive away before police officers stopped him.

Texas is a goddamn Petri dish for gun culture. It’s a shallow transparent dish used to hold growth medium in which firearm lunacy can be cultivated. After the 2018 Santa Fe, Texas high school mass murder (ten dead, thirteen wounded), Governor Greg Abbott created the Texas Safety Commission to look into ways to prevent that sort of mass murder tragedy from happening again. Here’s what Abbott said on releasing the findings of TSC report:

In the aftermath of the horrific shooting in Santa Fe, we had discussions just like what we are having today. Those discussions weren’t just for show and for people to go off into the sunset and do nothing. They led to more than 20 laws being signed by me to make sure that the state of Texas was a better, safer place, including our schools for our children.

That report was issued two days BEFORE the El Paso Walmart mass murder. And those “20 laws” intended to “make sure that the State of Texas was a better, safer place”? They generally loosened existing restrictions about where Texans could carry guns based on the astonishingly stupid theory that the only way to stop a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with gun.

This asshole is part of the problem.

If that was true, Texas would be the safest state in the nation. But it’s clearly not true; when Abbott became governor, Texas had around 3000 gun-related deaths per year. Now the state is experiencing around 4600 gun-related deaths. And we’re approaching the one year anniversary of the Uvalde school shooting (21 dead, 17 wounded).

But I have to admit, I was wrong, sort of. For years I’ve been saying it’s the guns. The guns and high capacity magazines. And that’s absolutely true, as far as it goes. But it doesn’t go far enough. I’ve omitted one variable in the calculus of mass murder.

It’s the guns, it’s the high cap magazines, and it’s Republicans. Without that last variable, we could fix the first two.

iowa kids are okay

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Right, background information first. The Iowa High School Athletic Association and the Iowa Farm Bureau coordinate with the office of the Governor of Iowa to create the Iowa Governor’s Scholar program. It’s designed to honor the highest-achieving students from each of Iowa’s high schools. It seems to be largely a ceremonial thing–the students get some sort of certificate of recognition and get a chance to be photographed standing next to the governor. The governor has to sacrifice a chunk of time standing still while kids rotate in and out for their photos, but she gets some free good publicity. Everybody wins, right?

That’s what normally happens. This year, not so much. This year Gov. Kim Reynolds and the GOP-controlled legislation have enacted a number of awful MAGA-inspired laws. This year, some of the kids being honored felt compelled to speak out in protest to the Iowa GOP’s repeated attempts to turn this state in the Florida of the Midwest.

For example, this year the Iowa GOP passed a wide-ranging education bill that includes a ban of public school books that include descriptions of sex acts, It also makes it easier to remove challenged books from school libraries. The law could include everything from Catcher in the Rye to Twilight to What’s Eating Gilbert Grape to And Tango Makes Three (which is a children’s book about two bonded male penguins in the Central Park Zoo who raised a penguin chick). It’s a truly reprehensible law.

Newton HS senior Leo Friedman believes books have value.

This year, the GOP-controlled legislature also passed legislation creating what they call “education savings accounts.” This new law allows the state to use funds marked for public education to be spent instead on private education. It provides families with US$7,600 per student in public education funds which can now be used to cover private school tuition and fees. Most of those private schools, of course, are religious schools and religious schools are almost universally conservative Christian schools. This law not only undermines the purpose of secular public education, it also creates the conditions for religious/political indoctrination.

Newton HS senior Merin Pettigrew feels public funds should be used in public schools.

Also this year, Gov. Reynolds and the Iowa GOP have passed a number of anti-trans legislation. This includes barring transgender girls and women from participating in girls and women’s sports, a ban on students (and adults) using public school bathrooms and locker rooms that don’t align with their gender assigned at birth, and prohibiting minors from receiving gender-affirming care even with a parent’s or guardian’s permission. These laws not only discriminate against trans kids, it publicly marks them as dangerous, thereby putting trans kids at emotional and physical risk.

Davenport West HS senior Clementine Springsteen believes trans rights are human rights.

Springsteen wore pins stating “Trans Rights Are Human Rights” and “She Her” and as she left the stages loudly proclaimed, “Trans rights are human rights.” 

These were deliberate, thoughtful acts of civil protest against the sort of hyper-partisan political legislative movements we’re seeing in several ‘red’ states. They were acts of individual courage and integrity, done with as much respect as possible under the circumstances. Friedman said,

“I intend no disrespect to any other of the students (or attendees) there for sure. But if the governor feels disrespected, that is the purpose of the protest. Because we don’t respect what she has done recently with the laws that have been passed and the ideologies that she instilled into the government in our state.”

Springsteen, who is trans, explained why it’s critically important for trans kids to be able to affirm themselves while still in school. She came out as trans to her classmates during a speech class.

“I was terrified, obviously. But my teacher has always been really supportive. She’s always been really supportive, and there for me. As far as the class goes, there were a few there who I was really terrified of how they’d react. But I think within my speech, I’m hopeful that I managed to change their minds about the issue. I didn’t have any issues with them after that point. “

And that’s it, isn’t it. This is one of the unspoken benefits of public education. School is where kids learn how to get along with other kids, even those who are different in some way. School is where kids get exposed to new ideas, it’s where kids learn other kids can hold different views, believe different things, have different backgrounds, have different types of parents, exist in different ways, and yet can still get along with each other. School is where we begin to learn how to behave as adults.

Gov. Reynolds and the Iowa GOP need to go back to school. These kids could teach them a lot about modern life.