I always hesitate to write these things. You know that’s what these people intend in the first place. After all, why does someone take a picture and release it onto the interwebs? So, we feed the beast but likely not in a way that they fully intended.

It’s the same reason why they put bumper stickers on their big ass truck or fly the flags at the house. It’s the same reason why they wear their t-shirts and hats to the gym or into the grocery store. It’s a not so subtle fish symbol like the early day Christians used to identify each other. For the rest of us, it is the announcement that I am indeed an asshole and there is nothing you can do about it.

I could focus on poor Logan and the life he has in front of him. I could focus on the hatred that is obviously there. I could focus on the nearly pathological need for attention. I could certainly link it to gun culture and the tragic events that occurred in Buffalo. All of these things are things they want.

My overwhelming feeling when seeing that isn’t anger or fear. Those are the emotions they want, but aren’t the ones they get. The overwhelming emotion is one of pity. At the end of the day they are closer to being a victim than they are to being a bully. They likely went out and stockpiled weapons when Joe Biden became president. They stockpiled weapons because they heard that Biden was going to take their guns. Somewhere the gun manufacturers are having a huge laugh and sharing a round of drinks at happy hour.

See, Jimmy Carter was going to take their guns. That didn’t happen. Bill Clinton was going to take their guns. That didn’t happen. Barack Obama was definitely going to take their guns. That didn’t happen. Even three year olds and most dogs could pick up on the pattern. Somehow the MAGA crowd is incapable of deductive reasoning or maybe even object permanence.

Poor Logan doesn’t stand a chance. He is being indoctrinated and not so much into a life of hatred, bigotry, and violence. Yes, he is being indoctrinated into those things too. More importantly, he is being indoctrinated into a life of abject stupidity. Abject stupidity allows you to be led by the nose to hate, to discriminate, and to respond in violence. Abject stupidity allows you to buy crap you don’t need in order to protect your family from things that will never happen. Abject stupidity allows you to photograph your own ignorance and broadcast it on the internet for everyone to see. The self-own is the cruelest own of all.

Abject stupidity pushes you to do things to own the liberals, leftists, and progressives when you could be a lot happier just living your life. These photos never inspire the fear they think it does. It may inspire outrage, but that outrage fades pretty quickly. More than anything it inspires pity. Anger and stupidity don’t mix well and they are a horrible way to live. Yes, the self-own is the cruelest own of all.

Kyle Rittenhouse, who shot 3 people, killing two, was acquitted yesterday by a jury in Kenosha Wisconsin. Taking almost 30 hours for deliberation, the jury showed careful diligence in arriving at its verdicts, yet those verdicts were not only unjust; they exposed the raw and tragic truth that when it comes to gun violence, our justice system can no longer actually deliver justice.

The killings and the resulting verdicts defy logic.  An underaged teenager illegally possessing a firearm that was illegally bought by a straw purchaser crossed state lines to join an illegal police action by an unauthorized self-styled “militia”.  He then left the group that was “guarding” businesses and wandered into the crowd that was protesting police brutality.  Rittenhouse, displaying the maturity of a 17-year-old, walked into an angry crowd protesting a police shooting and was then shocked at those people’s reaction.  Had he walked into the crowd without an AR-15 strapped to his chest, probably nothing would have happened; with an AR-15 he almost guaranteed to provoke a response, and he got it, in spades.  Rittenhouse fired a number of shots, hitting three people and killing two of them.  But for him toting an AR-15 in plain sight, this tragedy would not have happened.

Let’s go through the crimes committed by Rittenhouse and his compatriots.  First, the straw purchase.  Rittenhouse’s friend, Dominick Black, aged 20, bought the gun for him because he was too young.  That purchase violates federal and state laws, and Black has been charged, but not tried.  Second, Rittenhouse was charged with minor in possession, but just as final arguments began in his trial, the judge, citing a ridiculous reading of the statute, ordered the charge dropped.  The technicality he cited? An inconsistency in the law that said minors can’t carry a weapon unless it has a long barrel.  The defense had argued this technicality, and the judge bought it, effectively rendering the entire law toothless and unenforceable.  The remaining charges were first degree reckless homicide, two counts of first degree recklessly endangering safety, first degree intentional homicide, and attempted first degree intentional homicide.  The defense argument was simple – self-defense.  They painted Rittenhouse as a good intentioned teenager who was attacked by vicious rioters while trying to protect property and provide medical aid.  The judge, acting more like defense co-counsel rather than the trial judge, went along with this argument, banning the term “victim” or “victims” for those who were shot, but allowed them to be called “rioters”, “looters”, and “arsonists”.

But worse than the judge putting his foot on the scales of justice is the idiocy of today’s gun laws in most US states.  Many states, like Texas, have undone two centuries of common-sense gun laws by perverting the meaning of the Second Amendment through decades of junk law that now permeates federal and state case law.  Intended as a protection for the newly founded US government by providing for a citizen army made up of militias under state and local authority, the Second Amendment has been turned on its head from providing for the common defense to enabling any idiot to own and carry a gun in public.  This effort, driven by gun manufacturers and their lobbyists, with a big assist from Antonin Scalia and a conservative majority on the Supreme Court, is virtually complete. Just this year, Texas joined nineteen other states that eliminated all licensing requirements for the open carry of guns in public.  It already allowed open carry of guns, but eliminated all licensing and training requirements, falsely calling such a radical practice as “constitutional carry,” which is nonsense.  All but a handful of states now allow the open carry of firearms in some form or another.  What could possibly go wrong?

Guns are now a fixture in political rallies and protests.  This practice is almost exclusively on the right wing of the political spectrum where outrage is fueled by systemic disinformation which drives the outraged to show up in body armor, helmets, and toting loaded firearms.  Guns and politics don’t mix, have never mixed, and will never mix, but now threats of physical violence and actual violence is commonplace during protests.  Troublemakers often pose as legitimate protestors for the sole purpose of starting destruction and violence, like they did during the George Floyd protests of 2020.  They then use the trouble they caused as an excuse to carry firearms to “protect” businesses and property, mostly owned by white people.

And now, after the Rittenhouse acquittals, we can’t put the genie back in the bottle.  The lesson learned in this trial is that self-defense is a winning argument even when the person claiming self-defense actually started the incident.  The fact is that, but for Rittenhouse wandering into a protest with a locked and loaded AR-15, no one would have died that night in Kenosha.  HE provoked the protestors by openly carrying a weapon of war into a political protest that was already very tense.  When people responded to his provocation, he then shot them, killing two, and then successfully defended that action in court by pretending that the incident began at the moment protestors responded to his provocation.  We have a very similar argument going on right now in Georgia, where three white men chased, confronted, and threatened an unarmed black man, Ahmad Aubrey, who was simply jogging through a neighborhood.  After pulling out a shotgun, one of the defendants then murdered Aubrey.  Their legal justification?  Self-defense.  As ridiculous as that sounds, the trial is in Georgia, and the jury is made up of 11 white men.  I have virtually no expectation that justice will be done in that case either, and I’ll bet you a dollar to a donut that the defense cites the Rittenhouse acquittals as precedent.

I quit the NRA in the 1980s when it went nuts and Charlton Heston started screaming, “From my cold dead hands!” at every meeting.  Being a gun owner, I have been actively opposing for well over a decade the radical gun culture that permeates Texas.  Our politicians have totally failed us, even failing to protect other Texans from gun nuts in the goddam state capitol, creating the necessity of installing panic buttons in every politician’s office to summon state troopers in the event a gun nut gets upset.   Death threats against anyone that gun nuts don’t like is commonplace.  Outrage from disinformation has created an alternative reality where up is down, left is right, the earth is flat, and the sun rises in the west.  Gun nuts even bring guns to protests against science based public health policy.  Career health officials are being driven from office by these threats, and now school board members and their families must be protected by police.

This is insanity that cannot be altered by reason, so I’m changing tactics.  Tomorrow I’m trotting my happy ass down to Guns ‘r Us and buying myself a nice AR-15 with all the trimmings – a couple dozen boxes of ammo, a pile of 30 round mags, and body armor and a tactical sling.  I’ll guarantee that if a couple hundred of us protesting for social justice, fair elections, and racial equality start showing up armed to the teeth, especially those with non-white skin, the politicians will change their tune in a hurry, calling for protection from “radical leftists”.  Nothing else has worked, maybe this will.  After all, we can’t depend on elected officials or even the courts to protect the common good; it’s time to use some of the same tactics as the other side to level the playing field.

The pictures are all over Facebook and other social media. That’s right folks, they’re doing it again. Daunte Wright is barely buried in the ground and people are trying to bury him again. I wish I had saved the Facebook posts but they have been taken down. I wonder why.

For those that don’t want to click on the link, they’ve found Daunte Wright in pictures with guns. So, obviously he must have been a bad guy. They did the same thing with George Floyd and countless others before them.

Let’s ignore the hypocrisy for the moment of people that have no qualms about openly carrying huge firearms raising a stink about a black man taking a picture with his gun. I think we are far beyond the racist double standards at this point. The implications are much simpler than that.

See, Wright was a bad guy. How do we know he was a bad guy? Well, he’s dressed like a gang banger with his gun. See, he’s threatening. So obviously it’s not a bad thing that he was shot. That’s just one more dangerous criminal off the streets. The beauty of the Facebook memes is they don’t even have to say that. If you get the racist code you are already thinking it.

The problem is two-fold. First, the reasoning only works if the officers knew all this at the time. They didn’t know who Wright was when they pulled him over. Even when they looked him up they only knew he had an outstanding warrant. They did not see a gun on the scene. Cops are supposed to assess the situation at hand. They wouldn’t have had the benefit of seeing those pictures beforehand and even if they did it wouldn’t have helped them properly assess that particular situation.

Of course, that leads nicely into the second problem. How do we know he was a bad guy? Do pictures with a gun indicate that definitively? If only there was some kind of mechanism like a court with judges and a jury that could help us determine that. That’s what’s supposed to happen. They aren’t supposed to be gunned down by the police when they are unarmed.

I’m a little more than sick and tired of the postgame chicanery from the right. They’ll post numbers of how many white people are killed by cops. They’ll post how many of them are unarmed. Even if we took those numbers at face value it doesn’t excuse any of it. It just makes the point come through with more force.

If we want to get to the bottom of this thing we can’t scour the inter webs trying to find anything to make the victims look guilty. We need to figure out why those officers went through the steps they did. Racism is surely involved on some level but maybe it wasn’t the key factor here. Maybe this would have happened regardless. Either way, we need to take a good long look at procedures and what they lead to. A postgame picture can’t erase the shame or tragedy of this event or make the officers any less guilty.

The Tampa Bay Times got their hands on a House GOP caucus memo that gave members talking points to respond to constituent questions about mass shootings and the need for common sense gun safety legislation.  The answers are as disgusting and disheartening as you would imagine.  They contain the normal boilerplate bullshit, repeating the mental health and video game mantra, even though those myths have been debunked for decades.  No Republican can explain, since mental health problems and violent video games proliferate throughout the world, why the US is a singular outlier when it comes to gun violence generally and mass shootings specifically.  They will dance around the issue, blaming EVERYTHING except the actual problem – the omnipresence of guns and the ease by which they can be obtained.

Worse, this memo coached House members how to answer the problem which is the answer in the room…violence of extreme right-wingers and white supremacists.  Here’s the coached question: “Do you believe white nationalism is driving more mass shootings recently?”  Here’s the official House caucus answer: “White nationalism and racism are pure evil and cannot be tolerated in any form.  We also can’t excuse violence from the left such as the El Paso shooter, the recent Colorado shooters, the Congressional baseball shooter, Congresswoman Giffords’ shooter and Antifa.”

The letter actually called the El Paso shooter, who was a white supremacist and hated immigrants, a person “from the left”.  They later tried to say that was “a mistake” – no shit, Sherlock.  What the letter blatantly did, though, and what they always do, was to discourage members from telling the truth and to try and frame a false equivalency that “both sides do it”.  Well, both sides don’t do it.  Not even close.  The Anti-Defamation League actually keeps track of domestic violence, and through 2018, not even counting the violence from this year, 73%  of domestic violence in America was committed by rightwing extremists and white supremacists.

So, let’s sum up.  The messaging experts for the GOP are coaching their members to lie, equivocate, obfuscate, and distract from the actual problem of gun violence in America.  That problem is fourfold –

1. It is well known that there are now 400 million guns in circulation in America today.
2. Guns are easily obtainable in many states, and Republicans have been systematically dismantling gun safety laws for the last 3 decades. The assault weapons ban was allowed to expire by Republican leadership and the GWB administration in 2004, kicking off massive growth in assault weapons manufacturing.
3. White supremacism and rightwing extremism exploded during the Obama administration, driven by the corporate backed Tea Party movement which normalized the anti-government, pro-gun culture.
4. Trump has encouraged this culture and has used social media to vilify everyone non-white and non radical conservative.

The combination of these forces has been explosive.  Our homicide rate, which is multiples above the rest of the developed world.  Even so, that rate has been declining, however, in recent years, as red states have stupidly weakened gun laws and encouraged the proliferation of assault weapons, our homicide rate is increasing.  Worse, the incidence of mass shootings has also exploded.  To date this year there have been 262 mass shootings.  There have been almost 9,300 deaths and almost 19,000 wounded.  The gun violence in America eclipses the entire developed world.  Travel advisories have been issued in other countries advising against traveling to the US due to our gun violence.

And what are Republicans doing about this?  What is Moscow Mitch, Trump, and the other shitbags in Congress doing?  Lying. Deflecting. And hiding.  They’re all hiding.  Now is the time for the spotlight of normal Americans calling bullshit on the do nothing Republicans.  Call your Congressperson and Senator.  Write to your local paper.

Raise hell.  Until we get His Orangeness out of the WH, that’s all we can do.

Today, Barack Obama broke his characteristic silence, this time on gun violence, prompted by the two mass murders this weekend that has taken 31 lives, wounded 44.  I could summarize it, but it’s better read in long form.  So here it is.  Read it twice – it only gets better.

Michelle and I grieve with all the families in El Paso and Dayton who endured these latest mass shootings. Even if details are still emerging, there are a few things we already know to be true.

First, no other nation on Earth comes close to experiencing the frequency of mass shootings that we see in the United States. No other developed nation tolerates the levels of gun violence that we do. Every time this happens, we’re told that tougher gun laws won’t stop all murders; that they won’t stop every deranged individual from getting a weapon and shooting innocent people in public places. But the evidence shows that they can stop some killings. They can save some families from heartbreak. We are not helpless here. And until all of us stand up and insist on holding public officials accountable for changing our gun laws, these tragedies will keep happening.

Second, while the motivations behind these shootings may not yet be fully known, there are indications that the El Paso shooting follows a dangerous trend: troubled individuals who embrace racist ideologies and see themselves obligated to act violently to preserve white supremacy. Like the followers of ISIS and other foreign terrorist organizations, these individuals may act alone, but they’ve been radicalized by white nationalist websites that proliferate on the internet. That means that both law enforcement agencies and internet platforms need to come up with better strategies to reduce the influence of these hate groups.

But just as important, all of us have to send a clarion call and behave with the values of tolerance and diversity that should be the hallmark of our democracy. We should soundly reject language coming out of the mouths of any of our leaders that feeds a climate of fear and hatred or normalizes racist sentiments; leaders who demonize those who don’t look like us, or suggest that other people, including immigrants, threaten our way of life, or refer to other people as sub-human, or imply that America belongs to just one certain type of people. Such language isn’t new – it’s been at the root of most human tragedy throughout history, here in America and around the world. It is at the root of slavery and Jim Crow, the Holocaust, the genocide in Rwanda and ethnic cleansing in the Balkans. It has no place in our politics and our public life. And it’s time for the overwhelming majority of Americans of goodwill, of every race and faith and political party, to say as much – clearly and unequivocally.

We all saw it.  In the midst of tragedy, even as law enforcement was gathering evidence from the Santa Fe High School shooting, some idiot shows up wearing a Trump MAGA cap, carrying an American flag and openly carrying a semi-auto handgun.  When asked by the press what he was doing, his answer was, “Making America Great Again,” and that, “‘God bless y’all’ goes a long way.”  Somehow, in the face of crisis and indescribable grief, this tone-deaf goofball actually believed that bringing a gun and American flag to the scene of massive violence was somehow “comforting” to the families of murder victims.  Normal people reacted to his actions as you’d expect, with “WTF are you thinking?”

It’s easy to dismiss this guy as just another ignorant and supremely insensitive Trumpist jerk who has no common sense upon which to draw.  While those descriptors are certainly understandable, it’s actually worse than that; by openly carrying a firearm and an American flag at the scene of a tragedy, he actually believed he was helping.  He lives in that upside-down world where common sense has been displaced with idiotic dogma bred from long exposure to brainwashing.  The echo chamber in which people like this fellow live pumps out so much bullshit in a continuous stream that it actually bends reality for them.  Down is up, up is down, the sky is green, and the sun rises in the west.  Pouring mining waste into streams and spewing carbon dioxide into the air is “freedom”.  Cutting taxes increases revenue and strengthens the nation.  Money equals speech; corporations are people.  Climate scientists are conspiring against American business to help China.  Googling nonsense about vaccines invalidates decades of immunology research.  The tsunami of guns in America increases safety even though EVERY objective peer-reviewed study concludes the opposite. Consensus conclusions by the ENTIRE international intelligence community are dismissed as anti-Trump conspiracy; eliminating voting rights protects democracy; frolicking with prostitutes and porn stars is forgivable if you’re a member of the correct tribe.  Israel must be protected from the Palestinians so it can rebuild the Temple Mount and Jesus can come back.

This clown’s behavior in public is a textbook example of the shocking result of brainwashing.  Relying purely on the bullshit poured into his head, he engaged in behavior that jarred normal people.  I’m reminded of another example of this behavior, the goofy “Ride for the Constitution” in 2013, whipped up by talk radio screamers using birtherism as its basis during the Cruz-induced government shutdown where over the road truckers were encouraged to drive their rigs all the way to Washington to drive around the beltway.  The premise was that said truckers would somehow bring DC to a standstill and inspire Americans to stand up and “remove” Barack Obama, John McCain, and other prominent politicians from office.  In the end, all the truckers accomplished was raising the profile of the talk radio screamers and burning a lot of expensive diesel fuel for nothing. After a weekend of driving in the rain, they all declared victory and went back to working for subsistence wages to pay the fuel bill and try to feed their families.

It’s really easy to mock people like the MAGA guy and the truckers burning expensive fuel for nothing, but their beliefs and actions are alarming.  We have an entire segment of our society who believe that bullshit is filet mignon.  They act, AND VOTE, against their own interests.  They vote for carnival barkers like Donald Trump and Ted Cruz.  They are the classic “useful idiots” who are so ignorant of actual facts that they threaten our democracy by supporting anti-democratic oligarchies, voting away their own rights to those who spent billions to seize and maintain an iron grip on our democracy.  Democracy dies in darkness?  Certainly, but that darkness is created by institutionalized ignorance.