I used to comment fairly often on the various mass shootings in the US. In fact, I actually started to count the number of posts I’ve written with the tag ‘another mass shooting’ but once I hit 30 posts, I gave it up. I did notice that the last time I commented on a mass shooting was almost a year ago. I wrote this:
[H]ow 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.
So here’s me, once again, writing the same essential goddamn post. Winder, Georgia. Apalachee High School. Your basic AR-15 platform weapon. A 14-year-old shooter. Fourteen, for fuck’s sake. FOURTEEN! We’re talking late puberty, here. This a period when boys begin to get some sense of who they are…and this kid?
People…everybody…always ask this question after a mass shooting: why? As WaPo writes this morning:
“…the shooter’s motives remain unknown. In a news conference Wednesday, Smith said investigators from the sheriff’s office and GBI had interviewed Gray [the shooter]. The investigators do not yet know why the shooting occurred, Smith said, adding that “We may not ever know.”
Nobody knows why 14-year-old boys do anything. And frankly, what does it matter? Maybe he’s pissed off at his parents, maybe he’s been bullied at school, maybe he’s decided to join Hamas, maybe he thinks he’s being controlled by the Jews of the Nine Universes, maybe he kept losing a particular ‘boss’ fight in Dark Souls, maybe he just wondered what it would be like to wander through the halls of Apalachee High shooting people. What difference does it make?
Let’s face it, this kid’s motives are a distraction from what everybody—and I do mean everybody—knows is the real problem. Easy access to firearms. Even if the kid (and lawdy, he’s just a kid) was bullied—even if he did want to join Hamas—none of this would have happened without access to (what I assume is his daddy’s) semi-automatic rifle. Take the gun out of the equation and the butcher’s bill drops.
But we won’t do that. Because this is America and in America we…well, in America kids are disposable.
Fuck it. Go Wildcats. Go, run for your lives. Ain’t nobody going to help you.
We knew there was going to be violence, didn’t we. I mean, the threat of violence has been a constant theme in the MAGAverse. Just a few days ago, Kevin Roberts, the president of the Heritage Foundation, announced, “[W]e are in the process of the second American Revolution, which will remain bloodless if the left allows it to be.” Hell, Trump his ownself, during the George Floyd protests, asked his Sec. of Defense, “Can’t you just shoot them?Just shoot them in the legs or something?”
Of course there was going to be violence. We just didn’t expect the violence would be directed at Trump. It’s always been MAGA that’s been doing the threatening. They’re the ones with all the guns. Democrats and the left have all been threatening to…you know, vote. We’ve been threatening to…you know, hold criminal investigations and give Trump and his MAGA fuckwits a chance to defend themselves in court. We’ve been threatening them with the Constitution of the United States. Or the tattered shreds of the Constitution after SCOTUS ripped it up.
And MAGA? This is their approach:
A pickup tailgate with the image of a kidnapped President Biden.
We post images of Trump in an orange jumpsuit on social media. They celebrate the imagined kidnapping of Joe Biden. And let’s not forget, just four years ago 13 men were arrested by the FBI and charged in a plot to kidnap Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer and ‘try’ her for the crime of…you know, implementing Covid public health restrictions.
But the MAGAverse is trying, once again, to turn reality on its head. Here’s one of the headlines in the morning’s Washington Post.
Trump allies immediately blame Biden, Democrats for their rhetoric
There are LOTS of examples of GOP politicians and supporters blaming Democrats. I’ll just mention one. Senator Tim Scott, once a hopeful VP candidate, said “This was an assassination attempt aided and abetted by the radical Left and corporate media incessantly calling Trump a threat to democracy, fascists, or worse.” Scott ignores the fact that Trump actually IS a threat to democracy.
At this point, we know very little about what happened yesterday. We know the shooter was a 20-year-old registered Republican armed with an AR-15 style rifle. That’s about it; that’s about all we actually know at the moment. We’ll know more by the end of the day. We’ll also be inundated by a cascade of conspiracy theories, misinformation, disinformation, and outright bullshit. It’ll be hard to separate what we know from the bullshit. Hell, a lot of folks won’t even try to separate it. MAGA won’t.
But we can count on this: Democrats and folks on the left will be held to a higher standard of behavior than Republicans and other MAGA fuckwits.
Keene, Texas. It’s a small town about 30 minutes south of Fort Worth. The population is around 6500, about half of whom identify as white and a third are Latino. Maybe the only surprising thing about Keene is that the town has a semi-pro soccer team. According to the local Chamber of Commerce, Keene “offers residents and visitors the charm and warm hospitality of small-town life at its best.”
That might actually be true. If you first accept the fact that in modern America, small town life includes occasional gun violence. Last Saturday, at Keene’s Sonic Drive-thru burger joint, a 12-year-old boy shot and killed a 33-year-old man with an AR-15 semi-auto rifle.
Sonic, 301 South Old Betsy Road, Keene, TX
Sonic is an old school drive-in restaurant chain, with over 3500 locations in the US. You want to eat a burger or hot dog without having to leave your car? Sonic is for you. You literally drive into a parking bay, order your meal over an intercom, and a carhop will fetch it for you. On roller skates. I am NOT making that up. Sonic is very determinedly 1950s.
There’s a problem with this sort of car-centric dining, though. Bathrooms. Sonic restaurants have bathrooms for their employees, but whether those bathrooms are also available to Sonic customers depends on the individual location. Some Sonic bathrooms are open to the public, some aren’t.
I don’t know the actual policy of the Sonic in Keene, Texas. However, when Angel Gomez of Fort Worth arrived with a full bladder, he chose to relieve himself in the back parking lot.
Yeah, that’s tacky. But if you’ve got to go, you’ve got to go. There’s no reporting about whether or not he tried to use Sonic’s bathroom. Maybe he did and was told it was for employees only. Maybe there was an ‘Employees Only’ sign on the bathroom door. Maybe Gomez simply didn’t care and decided to take a leak outside because fuck you, this is America. We don’t know.
What we do know is this: Sonic employee Matt Davis went to Gomez and spoke to him about the propriety of publicly pissing in the parking lot. Apparently, this started an argument. Again, we don’t know the nature of the argument. Maybe Davis interrupted Gomez mid-micturition, which Gomez resented. Maybe Gomez expressed an opinion that Keene, Texas isn’t communist Russia and he had a Constitutional right to piss wherever he wanted. Maybe Davis was unfamiliar with Sonic’s bathroom regulations; he’d only moved to Keene and started working at that Sonic only a couple of weeks earlier. Maybe Davis was rude, maybe Gomez was rude, maybe both were rude. We don’t know.
All we know is that they argued. And that argument upset the 12-year-old boy who’d accompanied Gomez to the Sonic. So he decided to interfere in an effort to stop it.
There are lots of mature ways to interrupt and end an argument. You can suggest each party step back and take a deep breath. You can find areas of agreement between the two parties, and emphasize those. You can encourage both parties to communicate respectfully with each other, and avoid using personal attacks or derogatory language.
But that’s asking a lot of a 12-year-old kid. In this case, the boy took a more direct approach. He chose to interrupt the argument by shooting Davis. Multiple times. With an AR-15. Because this is Texas and in Texas people routinely drive around with unsecured, fully loaded semi-auto assault-style firearms.
Gomez and the boy fled the scene after the shooting, but eventually returned and surrendered themselves to police. Gomez has been charged with tampering with evidence (by fleeing the scene with the AR-15); that charge may be amended later. The boy is being held in a local juvenile facility. Who knows what the fuck will happen to him. Since this is Texas, they may decide to charge him as an adult.
First responders called for a Care Flight helo to tranport Davis to a nearby hospital. But the characteristic wound ballistics of an AR-15 aren’t always amenable to treatment. Davis died. He had a son two years younger than the boy who killed him.
A whole lot of lives were massively fucked up in Keene last Saturday. Some folks will blame it on a lack of civility or respect–if Gomez hadn’t decided to take a leak in public, this never would have happened. Some will blame it on the lack of public restrooms–if Sonic (or the town of Keene) had provided adequate bathroom facilities, this never would have happened.
And some will acknowledge the obvious and blame it on the simple fact that there was a loaded AR-15 lying about unsecured in a vehicle where a 12-year-old boy could grab it and shoot the shit out of somebody over an argument about pissing in public.
Somebody had to hose off the mess in the parking lot before the carhops could safely resume roller skating meals to Sonic customers. You don’t want to get blood and bits of bone in your polyurethane wheels. It gums them up.
It’s all part of the charm and warm hospitality of small-town life at its best.
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.
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.
Two separate incidents in different states, each of which reveals a different facet of how massively fucked up our firearm legislation is.
First — Back in December of 2020 and January of 2021, Zackey Rahimi of Texas was, according to court documents, “involved in five shootings in and around Arlington, Texas.” Five shootings in as many weeks. First, there was the time he “fired multiple shots” into somebody’s house after selling narcotics to the person who lived there. Then there was the car accident. Rahimi “exited his vehicle, shot at the other driver, and fled the scene.” A short time later, he returned to the scene of the accident and fired a few more shots. That’s three shooting incidents. The fourth time, he “shot at a constable’s vehicle.” The circumstances behind that aren’t discussed in the court’s order. Finally, Rahimi “fired multiple shots in the air after his friend’s credit card was declined at a Whataburger restaurant.”
About a year earlier, Rahimi had been subject to a civil protective order after he’d assaulted his girlfriend (and the mother of his child). The court order “restrained him from harassing, stalking, or threatening his ex-girlfriend and their child. The order also expressly prohibited Rahimi from possessing a firearm.”
Clearly, given five shootings in five weeks, Rahimi hadn’t paid much attention to the restraining order. But at least he was eventually indicted for possessing a firearm while under a domestic violence restraining order. Rahimi’s lawyers moved to dismiss the indictment on the ground that the law in question (18 U.S.C. § 922(g)(8)) was unconstitutional. The federal district court told him to fuck right off, so Rahimi pleaded guilty.
Later Rahimi appealed his guilty plea. A three-judge panel of the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals also told him to fuck right off.
Zackey Rahimi can have his guns
But then SCOTUS decided the case of New York State Rifle & Pistol Association, Inc. v. Bruen, which (in my opinion) was a bugfuck insane decision. The court decided (6-3) that in lawsuits involving federal and states’ gun regulations, courts need to evaluate the regulation not in consideration of the public good, but in light of the “historical tradition of firearm regulation”.
Let me just repeat that. The court should NOT consider the public good, but instead should consider the historical tradition of firearm regulation. So the Fifth Circuit Court took another look at Rahimi’s argument, taking the SCOTUS approach that “greater weight attaches to laws nearer in time to the Second Amendment’s ratification.”
Again, let me repeat that. Courts are now supposed to give more weight to laws written around the end of the 18th century than to modern laws. And guess what. Both Massachusetts and New Hampshire had written laws closer in time to the drafting of the 2nd Amendment, laws that were virtually identical, and those laws stated:
[N]o man . . . [shall] go or ride armed by night or by day, in fairs or markets, or in other places, in terror of the country, upon pain of being arrested and committed to prison by any justice on his view, or proof of others, there to a time for so long a time as a jury, to be sworn for that purpose by the said justice, shall direct, and in like manner to forfeit his armour to the Commonwealth.
Armor includes weapons. You’ll notice something else in that law. Ain’t nothing there about protecting ex-girfriends. And even though the Fifth Circuit agreed that the modern law “embodies salutary policy goals meant to protect vulnerable people in our society…Bruen forecloses any such analysis in favor of a historical analogical inquiry into the scope of the allowable burden on the Second Amendment right.”
The court concluded the law protecting Rahimi’s ex-girlfriend–or anybody seeking a civil protection decree–by removing a violent offender’s firearms was “an outlier that our ancestors would never have accepted.” They overturned Rahimi’s conviction.
Five shooting incidents in five weeks, and the court said the motherfucker shouldn’t be prohibited from owning a gun.
Second — Last Tuesday (2-23-23) in Silver Creek, Indiana (a suburb of Louisville, KY) 23-year-old Devon Lyons was seen running along Highway 31 (a main thoroughfare in town) carrying a rifle. Two nearby schools were put on lockdown.
However, it’s perfectly legal in Indiana for folks to run around with a loaded rifle. The state doesn’t require a permit to carry a long gun. So nothing was done.
Devon Lyons can have his rifle.
It happened again the following day. The Clark County Sheriff sent deputies to monitor Lyons as he ran down the street carrying his rifle. When Lyons got into his car to drive away, he was taken into custody for driving while his license was under suspension.
You can’t operate a car without a license. Guns? Who needs a license for that?
Scottie Maples, the Clark Coutny Sheriff, said this:
“I got a job to do as Sheriff to protect people’s constitutional rights. My daughter goes to that school, a couple of my deputies’ daughters go to these schools so we’re going to take these things seriously but we’re also not going to break anybody’s Constitutional rights.”
We’re not going to break anybody’s Constitutional rights. Children? Battered women? Sorry, very sorry, oh so very sorry, but you’ll just have to take your chances. Because that’s how we do it in these United States.
EDITORIAL NOTE: We must burn the patriarchy. Burn it to the ground, gather the ashes, piss on them, then set them on fire again. Burn the patriarchy, then drive a stake directly through the ashes where its heart used to be, and then set fire to the stake. Burn the fucker one more time. And keep burning it, over and over. Burn it for generations. Then nuke it from orbit. Then have tea.
Okay, good news. This morning I learned I’ve been nominated for an Edgar. The Mystery Writers of America have been handing out Edgar Allan Poe awards for short fiction since 1951. The nominations are announced on Poe’s birthday, which is today. Getting nominated is a pretty big deal in the mystery and detective fiction biz.
The nomination is for a short story called Red Flag, which deals with red flag laws (hence the clever title). It’s a story about a man whose career was ended by a mass shooting. He returns to his home state of Michigan, tries to live a quiet life, but gets reluctantly drawn into a situation. A mother is concerned about her son–an alienated young man she’s afraid is thinking about committing a mass murder. Because the young man has broken no law, local law enforcement can’t do anything. So the protagonist cobbles together a sort of plan in the hope of disrupting what he sees as the inevitable mass murder attempt.
It’s an odd story. I was having lunch in a brew pub in a small Iowa town when I learned Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine was going to publish it. I was delighted. The very next morning, there was a high publicity mass shooting in a Michigan high school; four students were killed and seven wounded. Lots of people were aware of the shooter’s emotional problems–his parents, school officials, other students. They all knew he’d made vague threats about a mass murder. They knew he had access to a firearm. A red flag law would have allowed the police to remove that firearm, which might have prevented the tragedy.
The coincidence of selling a story about a potential mass murder in Michigan and an actual mass murder in Michigan less than 24 hours later was weirdly discomfiting. Obviously, there was no connection. And yet, it bothered me. Still does, in fact.
So I have mixed emotions about the story, about its publication, and about this nomination. I’m obviously chuffed about it. But I can’t entirely enjoy it. I’ll always associate this story with tragic events. And since I live in the United States, there’ll always be another tragic event.
Today is January 19th. So far this year there have been at least 33 mass shooting incidents in the US, resulting 48 deaths and 128 wounded. There’ll almost certainly be another one today.
I’m incredibly pleased to have been nominated for the Edgar. But I sort of hope I don’t win. I hope more people will read the story. I hope we can change our culture. I have hope.
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.
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