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The downtown Louisville bank slaughter yesterday is the 150th mass shooting in the USA so far this year.
Mass shootings are no super big deal in the USA anymore. They've been normalized, like high gas prices. Just part of US life now. I half expect to learn about a new mass shooting somwwhere in the USA everytime I turn on cable news.
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The notion that the USA has anything to say to any other nations or people on how to organize and live their lives is laughable and not just because of the insane level of gun violence.
I predicted one mass shooting and 28 shootings in the US on Easter Sunday. I was borne-out on the first prediction and fell absurdly short on the second prediction: there were 90 shootings. Not sure what I was thinking with just 28! A quick glance at the Gun Violence Archives shows that would have been very far below the norm.
The Easter mass shooting came late in the day, in Orlando, Florida.
Louisville followed the next morning.
I get tired of the guns vs. mental health debate on gun violence. Of course it’s insane that we have 125 firearms for every 100 people in the United States. The next closest ratio is The Falkland Islands at 74 per 100! And yes, many other countries have mental health problems that don’t turn into mass homicidal gun slaughter. But, actually, it's kinda mentally ill to take an AR-15 and or any other weapon to livestream your slaughter of a bunch of your fellow human beings in bars, schools, banks, concerts, movie theaters, and the like.
Isn't the real problem that this completely sick, demented, savagely unequal, atomizing and violence-worshipping capitalist-imperialist society and culture have produced intersecting and overlapping, mutually reinforcing crises of over-arming and mental and moral madness leading to a frankly predictable consequence --- recurrent epic mass shootings?
11 AM, Central Time: today: The Louisville mayor just said that his city's recent mass shooting is "inexplicable." It isn't. It's entirely predicable in this insane society. He is inviting people to a vigil and .....get this.....to DONATE BLOOD.
Sorry, Mayor, I’m not going to pray. It doesn’t do shit.
11:14 AM: The murdered CEO was the mayor’s close friend (of course). Now he is begging the reigning Republi-fascists in the Kentucky state government to let Louisville implement sane gun policies. Not gonna happen. They are NRA. A Dem Congressman from Louisville will now perform the same futile ritual vis a vis the federal government. Oh, he’s also a good friend of the deceased CEO.
Let’s acknowledge something unpleasant about why the Republi-fascists steadfastly oppose gun control. Let’s get real here. Let’s just say what we know or ought to know out loud: the nation’s rightmost major party is now a socially, racially, and politically eliminationist and neofascist formation that embraces the rule of men over the rule of law. It channels and contains definite white-supremacist genocidal tendencies and sensibilities. As such, it leaders are happy about the fact that its adherents possess a wildly disproportionate share of the insane number of firearms and especially of the military style weaponry that is out and about in the US-American Armed Madhouse. It is pleased with the private arms status quo as it applauds demented politicos including a putschist ex-president who fascistically and absurdly call their corporate Democratic opponents “radical Left animals” and who speak in open terms about bloody “retribution” and “Civil War.”
Last week, as the vicious Christian white nationalists in charge of the Tennessee House of Representatives prepared to expel two young Black state legislators for breaking “decorum” rules by joining protests for gun reform in the wake of a Nashville school shooting, young people in the gallery above the legislative chamber started chanting “fascists, fascists!” And why not? The Tennessee Republicans’ move to cancel democratically elected Black legislators, cancelling the votes of those representatives’ predominantly Black constituents in Memphis and Nashville, was chillingly racist and richly authoritarian. It was a brazen act of racial and political eliminationism.
If it walks like a duck and sounds like a duck….
Speaking of which, remember when then US president Trump decided to go on the very last night of the 2020 presidential campaign to Kenosha, Wisconsin, the town where the teen fascist Kyle Rittenhouse had killed two Black Lives Matter (BLM)/George Floyd protesters with an AR-15 in August of 2020? One year later, Donald “Take Down the Metal Detectors Cuz the Guys with the AR-15 Don’t Want to Hurt Me” Trump invited the freshly and absurdly exonerated Rittenhouse for a sit down at Mar-a-Lago, proclaiming the adolescent slayer “ a nice young man” who shouldn’t have had to go through a trial for, you know, using an illegally owned assault weapon to kill two people at a march against racist police brutality.
So check this out now a year and a half after Rittenhouse walked. We learned recently that Texas’ Republi-fascist governor Greg Abbott intends to pardon a fascist killer named Daniel Perry within days of Perry’s jury conviction for having shot to death a BLM protester in Austin, Texas in July of 2020. As the Austin-American Statesman reports:
“Perry, an Army sergeant, was working as an Uber driver in Austin on the night of July 25, 2020, when he ran a red light at the intersection of Fourth Street and Congress Avenue and drove into a Black Lives Matter march before stopping....Prosecutors [successfully] contended that Perry instigated what happened. They highlighted a series of social media posts and Facebook messages in which Perry made statements that they said indicated his state of mind, such as he might ‘kill a few people on my way to work. They are rioting outside my apartment complex.’ A friend responded, ‘Can you legally do so?’ Perry replied, ‘If they attack me or try to pull me out of my car then yes.’ …A jury Friday unanimously convicted Perry. State District Judge Clifford Brown is set to sentence him to prison in the coming days. He faces up to life in prison…David Wahlberg, a former Travis County criminal court judge, said he cannot think of another example in the state’s history when a governor sought a pardon before a verdict was formally appealed. ‘I think it’s outrageously presumptuous for someone to make a judgment about the verdict of 12 unanimous jurors without actually hearing the evidence in person,’ Wahlberg said” (emphasis added)
The Austin-American Statesman elaborates:
“Less than 24 hours after a jury in Austin found Daniel Perry guilty of shooting to death a protester, Gov. Greg Abbott announced on social media Saturday that he would pardon the convicted killer as soon as a request ‘hits my desk.’ The unprecedented effort, which Abbott announced to his 1 million followers on Twitter, came as Abbott faced growing calls from national conservative figures such as Fox News host Tucker Carlson and Kyle Rittenhouse, who was acquitted in the shooting deaths of two Wisconsin protesters in 2020, to act to urgently undo the conviction” (emphasis added).
How despicable. It’s not just the pardon itself. It’s the advance promise of a pardon before the killer’s lawyers even appealed – a pledge to pardon as soon as possible without even reviewing the evidence.
(Abbott’s purported legal basis for pardoning Perry is Texas’ NRA-sponsored “Stand Your Ground” bill, which permits the no-retreat use of deadly force if one is attacked. The killer claimed that his victim raised a weapon at him before he shot but the obvious fact presented by numerous eyewitnesses is that Perry totally instigated the confrontation. That’s not “standing your ground.”)
If it walks like a fascist duck and sounds like a fascist duck…
We might want to get serious about what we’re up against in this country.
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