Category Archives: another mass shooting

just another news item

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Here we are again. It’s been five months since I’ve I written a post about a mass murder. Oh, there have been plenty of mass murders to write about in those five months, and even more mass shootings, but how often can you repeat the same weary commentary?

Because it IS always the same. Every single fucking time, it’s the same. The names of the victims and shooters are different, the locations are different, the numbers of the dead vary, but the bodies are all dead in the same way and the guns involved are at least similar. I noted in my last mass murder post, that I’d already written 36 earlier mass murder posts. Three a year for 12 years. This will be my third in 2023. Let’s hope there won’t be another, but hey, we’ve still sixty-some days left. Plenty of time.

Hope. That’s pretty fucking useless, isn’t it. As useless as thoughts and prayers. As useless as writing blog posts. I mean, it’s true that I really do seriously hope there won’t be another major mass murder in the next two months, but it’s also true that I don’t have any hope at all. How can a person both hope and be hopeless at the same time? But here I am.

The early reports are that the butcher’s bill in Lewiston is at least 22 dead and maybe 60 wounded or injured. The actual numbers will likely change. They usually do. Over the next couple of days we’ll learn their names; we’ll see their photographs, we’ll see interviews with some of their families, we’ll see photos of the usual memorials–flowers and notes and teddy bears–at the crime scenes. We’ve seen all of this before and we’ll almost immediately forget it, because this is how we live in the United States.

We all know why this happens. We’ll ask the question, of course. Why does this keep happening? But c’mon, we know why. It’s the easy access to semi-automatic weapons and high capacity magazine and Republican lawmakers. It’s not a mystery.

Mass murder in the US isn’t really a tragedy anymore. It hasn’t been for years. It’s just another news item.

EDITORIAL NOTE: I’ve been reminded that earlier this year I won an Edgar award for Best Mystery Short Story. It was called Red Flag; it’s about a man–a survivor of a mass killing event–who moves to Lansing, Michigan, where he learns of a person talking about committing a mass murder. He tries to find some way to prevent it. It’s about Red Flag laws, the laws that some states have passed allowing the authorities to temporarily remove weapons from people believed to be a danger to themselves or others.

Michigan doesn’t have a red flag law. The day after I learned the story was going to be published, there was a mass murder event in Lansing, Michigan. How creepy is that?

The alleged shooter in Maine had apparently been committed to a mental health facility for a couple of weeks last summer. He was reportedly hearing voices and had talked about committing a mass shooting at a nearby military training base. This is precisely the sort of situation for which red flag laws are intended.

Maine doesn’t have a red flag law.

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.

a sweet savour unto the lord

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Billy B. Yeats wrote the poem in 1919, just months after the end of World War One, the bloodiest and most technologically advanced war ever fought. His young wife, Georgie Hyde-Lees, pregnant with their first child, had almost died from the global flu pandemic of 1918-1919 and was still recovering. Twenty million people died in that war, twenty-one million during the pandemic. And the Irish War of Independence was just beginning.

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer

Falcons hunt at the command of the falconer. It’s not just that the falcon has slipped free of that control, it’s not just that the falcon isn’t listening to the falconer; he can’t even hear the voice of control anymore. Control no longer exists.

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned

To Yeats, the entire world must have seemed on the verge of combustion. Everything was blowing up around him. Nobody was in charge; there was no constraint on the horror in the world, there was no legitimate authority to curb humanity’s worst impulses. One era was coming to a bloody end; a new one was being born and nobody knew whether or not it would be monstrously worse.

And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

And here we are, a century and a wink later, after another pandemic, living in a nation we hardly recognize during an era of increasing hate and horror. It feels like our world is at a horrific tipping point. Firearms have become the leading cause of death for children under 18 years of age. Not disease, not accidents, not any natural or organic issue, but a device. A tool, an implement, a thing we deliberately manufacture and freely sell almost without control. The leading cause of death among children is a mechanical apparatus, and one political party celebrates it.

The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

The members of the Republican Party almost universally identify themselves as Christian, and they publicly bemoan the deaths of all those thousands of children. They offer their thoughts and prayers because that’s what you do when you make a burnt sacrifice–you pray when you create a holocaust. Holocaust, from the Greek holokauston, meaning “a thing wholly burnt.” A burnt offering is the oldest form of Biblical sacrifice; a “burnt sacrifice, an offering made by fire, of a sweet savour unto the Lord,” as the King James Version has it. The sacrificed offering should be “without blemish.” Untainted, unspoiled, pure. Like children.

Republican Andrew Clyde, a gaze blank and pitiless as the sun.

Guns are the rough beast. Republicans, with a “gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,” are willingly sacrificing children to it. We have the power to stop that. We have the power to, at a bare minimum, reduce the magnitude of the holocaust of children. We have the ability to minimize the butcher’s bill.

But we won’t.

The blood-dimmed tide has corrupted the water of our political and social culture. The falcon cannot hear the falconer. It will feed where it wants.

a conversation

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Reasonable Person: Another mass murder.
MAGA Person: Thoughts and prayers.
RP: There’s so much hate in the world.
MP: Amen. Lotsa hate.
RP: So much division, so much hostility.
MP: Buttloads of hostility.
RP: The nation hasn’t been this divided since the Civil War.
MP: Can’t argue with that.
RP: Something needs to be done.
MP: Absofuckinglutely.
RP: This has to stop.
MP: Got to.
RP: Something has to change.
MP: Yep.
RP: We don’t have to live like this.
MP: No, we don’t.
RP: You know what this country needs?
MP: I surely do. Trump.
RP: …?
MP: …!
RP: Trump?
MP: Yep. And more guns.
RP: But…
MP: And Jesus. In schools.
RP: I have to disagree.
MP: STOP SHOVING YOUR BELIEFS DOWN MY THROAT!
RP: …?
MP: This is why I carry a gun. To protect myself. DON’T MAKE ME SHOOT YOU!
RP: But…
MP: pew pew pew.
RP: [bleeds all over]
MP: I felt threatened.
MP: Stop bleeding on me.
MP: …
MP: Maybe I should run for the local school board.

paint over the second amendment

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You know what? Fuck the Second Amendment. Oh, it was a perfectly fine amendment when it was written, but c’mon, it was written in 1789 (it was ratified a couple years later, in 1791). That was a long time ago. Things have changed. That’s the nature of things, isn’t it. They just change.

Look, the US Constitution has been amended 27 times. Why? Because things change. Because stuff that made sense at one point in time doesn’t necessarily make sense at another. Because even smart, reasonable, concerned people sometimes make a mistake or do something stupid. I mean, back in 1917 it must have seemed reasonable to amend the Constitution to prohibit the manufacture, sale, or transportation of intoxicating liquors. But a decade and a half later, the American people thought “Lawdy, we fucked that up” and they had to repeal the entire 18th Amendment.

We can do that again, only with the Second Amendment. We could just repeal it. Or rewrite it so it’s not so fucking stupid. The 18th Amendment probably saved a bunch of lives by making it a lot more difficult to get drunk. But we’ve been able to find a somewhat reasonable balance between saving lives and being able to have a decent merlot with our supper.

We can do the same thing with guns. We really can. We can shitcan the 2nd Amendment. Hell, Thomas Jefferson (who knew a lot about writing Constitutions) kinda thought we could scrap the whole entire Constitution every couple of decades and cobble together a new and more timely one. You know, a Constitution that met modern needs. Seriously, Jefferson said, “The earth belongs always to the living generation.” Ain’t no reason for us to be locked into something written by folks 230 plus years ago.

Here’s what Jefferson wrote to James Madison in September of 1789:

[I]t may be proved that no society can make a perpetual constitution, or even a perpetual law. The earth belongs always to the living generation. They may manage it then, & what proceeds from it, as they please, during their usufruct. They are masters too of their own persons, & consequently may govern them as they please. But persons & property make the sum of the objects of government. The constitution and the laws of their predecessors extinguished then in their natural course, with those who gave them being. This could preserve that being till it ceased to be itself, & no longer. Every constitution then, & every law, naturally expires at the end of 19 years. If it be enforced longer, it is an act of force, & not of right.

And yes, usufruct is an actual word. It refers to the temporary legal right to use and enjoy the fruits or profits of something belonging to another. It’s from the Latin usus (meaning ‘use’) and fructus (meaning ‘fruit’). Let’s say your daddy dies and leaves you everything, including the house you grew up in, BUT because your daddy is a complete asshole, he stipulates the woman he divorced your momma for can continue to live in the house as long as she wants. It’s legally your house now, but your asshole dad’s girlfriend still gets to enjoy it. If she wants to paint the walls red, she damned well can, even if you think it’s a bad idea. Usufruct.

What Jefferson is saying is that the next generation can enjoy the Constitution their parents left for them but they’re not locked into it forever. When your asshole dad’s girlfriend dies (yeah, this is a metaphor), you get control of the house and you can repaint the walls.

What Jefferson was saying is this: we can paint over the 2nd Amendment. We can and we should. Because the walls have been red way too long.

EDITORIAL NOTE: Five people were killed and at least 18 were wounded/injured last night during a drag show at Club Q in Colorado Springs. Today is Transgender Day of Remembrance, the annual event honoring the memory of transgender people killed by acts of anti-transgender violence.

We shouldn’t have to live like this.

a regular intruder drill

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“We thought it was just a regular intruder drill. But when we started hearing sirens outside and the teachers started to even get scared, then we knew that this wasn’t just a regular drill and it was real.”

A regular intruder drill. Three people, including the shooter, are dead. But students thought it was just one of their regular intruder drills. At least eight people have been transported to local hospitals. So, NOT just a regular intruder drill.

The fact that a high school in St. Louis, Missouri even HAS regular intruder drills is an indictment of US politics. It’s an indictment of the Republican Party. It’s an indictment of American gun culture. But given the horrific reality that there have been at least 545 mass shootings THIS YEAR in the US, then yeah, regular intruder drills are probably needed. Because the GOP is sure as fuck not going to let anybody do anything about the guns.

The GOP and the NRA will argue we need to arm teachers. The St. Louis school had SEVEN security officers INSIDE the school, but some 20-year-old asshole still managed to wander in toting some sort of long gun (and will anybody be surprised if we learn it was some AR-15 variant?). But hey, most of the 545 mass shootings this year DID NOT take place at schools. Maybe we also need to arm cashiers at the supermarkets. Maybe we need to arm receptionists and the kid who puts your burrito together and the person who passes the collection plate at church. Because guns make us safe?

Following the shooting, the mayor, Tishaura Jones, texted “Help us, Jesus.” Jesus ain’t gonna help us. You might as well call on Thor to help us. Prayer doesn’t do shit to stop a bullet. But you can be assured the GOP will be calling for thoughts and prayers, and holding out their hands for the NRA to donate to their campaigns.

You know what would help? Making it harder to buy guns. That would help. Making it illegal to wander around the streets openly carrying a rifle or shotgun, that would help. Open carry of long guns in public is completely unregulated in Missouri. This shooter would have been legally able to walk right up the school doors openly toting his gun, and that would be just fine with the GOP. That’s just fucking crazy, right there.

Even if the US Congress passed some minimal firearm legislation (which, hey, they did), it wouldn’t help. Why? Because in 2021 the Missouri GOP passed what they called the Second Amendment Preservation Act (SAPA). This specifically prohibits state and local law enforcement officials from enforcing federal gun policies. Hell, SAPA even punishes state and local police officers for trying to enforce federal gun laws.

In fact, more than 1,200 jurisdictions (state, county, municipal) in 37 states have adopted some form of resolution or law restricting local law enforcement from enforcing federal laws IF they feel those laws violate the Second Amendment. Want to guess which political party pushed for that?

Republicans are simply willing to sacrifice children to protect the gun lobby’s shaky interpretation of an amendment written 230 years ago. An amendment written at a time when there were no police and no standing army in the US. A time when there was open conflict between settlers and the native peoples whose territory they were intruding upon. A time when the most common firearms were muskets capable of firing a single round (maybe three rounds per minute) and with a maximum accuracy range of around 50 yards.

If the St. Louis shooter had an AR-15 variant, even without any training, he could easily fire at least 30 rounds per minute, probably closer to 60, with a lot more accuracy. The Second Amendment, as it was written in 1791, simply doesn’t address modern killing tech.

What happened in St. Louis today wasn’t a regular intruder drill. Sadly, it was just a regular school shooting, around the 40th school shooting this year (we average about one a week–and let me just say that again, this year we averaged about one school shooting every fucking week). Unless a couple more people die, it’s not even a mass murder.

It’s just another day in America.

the gop is okay with occasional mass murder

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I just counted. Since I started writing this blog, I’ve written 31 posts about mass shootings and murders. This will be the 32nd. It won’t be the last. Hell, there were so many blog posts on mass shootings I had to create a tag for it; another mass shooting.

The first was in August of 2012, the Sikh temple mass murder in Oak Creek, Wisconsin. Remember that one? Probably not. Seven dead; eight counting the shooter. The shooter generally isn’t included in the butcher’s bill, because he’s not an innocent victim.

You know who else isn’t innocent? Republicans. Republican governors, Republican state legislators, Republicans in Congress. They may not be actively guilty, but they sure as fuck aren’t innocent. Now, I’m not saying these people are okay with routine sporadic mass murders, I’m saying…

Wait. No, I AM saying Republican lawmakers are okay with routine sporadic mass murders. And hey, let’s also include Democrats Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema as being okay with routine sporadic mass murders. If these people weren’t okay with it, they’d have done something to prevent it. At the very least, if they weren’t okay will mass shootings, they’d have done something to reduce the body count.

But they haven’t. They haven’t done a goddamned thing. And they won’t. We know they won’t. So yeah, Republican lawmakers (and a pair of asshole Democrats) are okay with routine sporadic mass murders. They won’t admit that, of course. Because that would make them sociopathic monsters.

Wait. They ARE sociopathic. They may not be actual monsters, but clearly they meet the diagnostic criteria for being sociopaths. They have a weak and limited capacity to feel empathy and remorse. Some of them may, it’s true, be sincere when they mouth the phrase ‘thoughts and prayers’. But they don’t feel enough empathy or remorse to actually do anything constructive about it. So fuck them and their thoughts and prayers.

I don’t know how many people have died in Uvalde, Texas. First they reported it was two kids. Then ten. Now I think the butcher’s bill is 21, mostly kids. Oh, and the shooter shot his grammy too, though she didn’t die. Well, not yet. The body count may go up; it so often does. Second grade, third grade, fourth grade kids. Eight, nine, ten-year-old kids. Shot dead.

Here’s another horrible thing: we’re not hearing about wounded kids. We’re not seeing pictures of ambulances pulling up to hospital trauma centers. We’re not hearing about kids in surgery. That suggests the victims weren’t just shot, but were shot to a degree that there was no point in transporting them to an emergency room.

There are…wait. There were just under 600 kids enrolled in that school. So about 3% of the student body were killed today.

=====

I wrote that last night. Couldn’t finish it. Didn’t want to finish it.

This morning we’re learning the names of the victims. Last night they were just generic victims. Today we’ll find out more about them. We’ll see photos of them, we’ll hear from their friends and family members and teachers. Politicians (including Republicans) will mourn them in public. They’ll offer the usual thoughts, the usual prayers, and they’ll say we must never forget them.

But we will. Oh, their families will remember them. So will their friends. And the kids who saw them gunned down, they’ll never be able to escape those memories. But for the rest of us, in a few days they’ll just be included in the roll call of generic mass murder victims.

It’s tragic. It really is gut-shattering massively fucking tragic. And the tragedy will be compounded by the fact that nothing will change. Nothing will chance because Republican lawmakers (and a couple of asshole Democrats) are okay with routine sporadic mass murder. They’re basically okay with a few hundred kids being shot to death every year.

So are the people who vote for them.

Yesterday was the 144th day of the year. There have been at least 212 mass shootings in 2022 so far. Republicans and Republican voters are okay with that.

EDITORIAL NOTE: By the way, SCOTUS will be handing down a ruling on gun rights in the next few weeks. It’s almost certain they’ll make it easier for more people to carry more guns in more places. We can thank Republicans for that too.

folks buying groceries refreshing the tree of liberty

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As Thomas Jefferson famously wrote, “The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants. Oh, and kids in school. And folks shopping for groceries, if they’re not white.” Yesterday, while I was enjoying a pleasant…what?

Okay, some of you are saying, “Greg, old sock, I don’t think you’ve accurately quoted our boy TJ.” Maybe you’re right; this may not be an exact quote, but it’s close enough to the way it’s interpreted by a lot of people who identify as right-wing lunatic gun nuts. Okay, okay, maybe they don’t actually identify themselves that way, but stop calling me old sock.

I mean, sure, TJ was talking about Daniel Shays, a farmhand in western Massachusetts who was having trouble paying his taxes, partly because he was also having trouble collecting the pay he was supposed to have received as a grunt in the Continental Army during the American Revolution. There’s still a lot of debate about what TJ meant by that tree of liberty bullshit, but the right-wing lunatic gun nuts take it as an article of faith that TJ was suggesting folks need to periodically have a good old fashioned bloody war of rebellion against the legitimate government. This is exactly WHY the term lunatic is included in the name of ‘right-wing lunatic gun nuts’.

But even right-wing lunatic gun nuts have trouble explaining how mass murder events at schools, mall, movie theaters, and grocery stores fit into that ‘blood of patriots and tyrants’ business. Especially when…oh yeah, and churches, I forgot to include churches. And temples and mosques. Anyway, right-wing lunatic gun nuts have trouble explaining how that blood of patriots stuff fits with those mass murders committed by white men specifically against victims who aren’t white. Or men. Or people who don’t quite fit into the right-wing lunatic gun nut definition of ‘men’.

So the right-wing lunatic gun nuts have developed a pair of sure-fire (get it? Sure-fire? See what I did there? I’m a hoot) responses to those events. First, they…well, wait. I say ‘first’ as if this is the preferred response, which would be inaccurate on account of these two responses are pretty much equally relied on. So when I say ‘first’ I’m just admitting that I can’t share two responses at the same time. These responses are numerical, not sequential. Or the other way around, maybe? Doesn’t matter.

First, they blame the mass murder on emotional health. As in “This kid who shot up the supermarket in Buffalo must be CRAZY because, yeah sure, he says he was motivated by hate and he says white folks are being replaced by non-white folks who breed faster and yeah sure, that’s exactly what Tucker Carlson says on FoxNEWS every night, but c’mon, you’d have to be CRAZY to believe that, so there, it’s a mental health issue.”

Second, they claim the mass murder is a false flag event perpetrated by Democrats or Jews or some other Satanist-pedophile group in order to TAKE OUR GUNS, or at least distract us from Hunter Biden’s laptop. They seem to think this is a perfectly reasonable thing to believe.

Sometimes they combine the two responses, suggesting Democrats and Jews and other Satanist-pedophile groups convince mentally ill white folks to commit mass murders to distract the population from some vague but really awful thing that Democrats, Jews, and other Satanist-pedophile groups really enjoy.

But as I was saying (you may have to refer back to the beginning of this blog), yesterday, while I was enjoying a pleasant 30-mile bike ride from one bike pub to another bike pub, some white kid went to a supermarket in a predominantly black community and killed a whole bunch of folks who were just buying groceries.

Mentally ill (probably) white kid led astray (probably) by Democrats, Jews, of some other Satanist-pedophile group (probably), but clearly guns aren’t the problem.

Right now on television (I don’t actually know this, but I know this) some conservative is on a national news Sunday program explaining that the mass murder in Buffalo would never have happened if we had better mental health programs, which we can’t afford to make free because that would raise taxes, but maybe for-profit insurance companies could include mental health anti-mass murder options for people who can afford it, but guns don’t kill people, mentally ill people kill people and if they didn’t have guns, they’d do it with axes, do you really want to ban axes, and besides guns are good because an armed patriot inside the store could have returned fire and prevented more needless death, and sure there was a security guard who did return fire and hit the killer, but the shooter was wearing tactical body armor which is protected by the Second Amendment, however a highly trained patriot could have shot him in the head–or at least the part of his head that wasn’t covered by his tactical helmet–and that would have ended the tragic situation, but there’s nothing in the Second Amendment that says private citizens should have to undergo training to carry a weapon, and did I mention the kid was mentally ill, because that’s the problem. Unless if was a false flag event.

So it turns out TJ, whatever he actually meant, was right about the blood and the tree of liberty. We are refreshing the fuck out of that tree.