Month: September 2024

School Shootings: A Retrospective

Another mass shooting but not at a school (for a change)….this time in Birmingham, Alabama…..

A mass shooting killed four people and wounded 18 others in a popular nightlife area in Birmingham, Alabama, with many of the victims caught in the crossfire, police said. No one was immediately arrested, and police asked the public for information. The shooting happened shortly after 11pm Saturday in the city’s Five Points South entertainment district, said Officer Truman Fitzgerald in an email to the AP. Officers arriving at the scene found two men and a woman on a sidewalk with gunshot wounds, and they were pronounced dead there. An additional male gunshot victim was pronounced dead at a hospital.

A preliminary investigation showed that “multiple suspects fired upon a large group of people who were outside in a public area,” Fitzgerald said. “Detectives believe the shooting was not random and stemmed from an isolated incident where multiple victims were caught in the crossfire,” Fitzgerald said. Injured people began showing up at hospitals, Fitzgerald said. By early Sunday, police had identified 18 other victims with injuries, some of them life-threatening.

That attack lead me to look at the school shootings that are all too common.

Almost daily there is a school shooting or a bomb threat or other assorted attacks on the schools of our great nation….it has become commonplace and gets nothing more than a shrug from the people that we depend on to make our schools safe…..why is that?

School shootings are American Exceptionalism in action. No other country does them like we do. None even come close. USA! NRA! USA! NRA! USA! NRA!

 A country that tolerates the routine shootings of its own school children as the cost of doing business in our weird notion of a “free society” is unlikely to feel any empathy for Palestinian children killed by the weapons we sell Israel. Violence is our chief export; indifference to the bloodshed is our national characteristic.

This is just a retrospective of these incidents and how some politicians handle them.

JD Vance, who now speaks at outdoor rallies inside a box of bulletproof glass, said that school shootings are now “a fact of life” in America.

Number of school shootings in the US by year…

2024: 45
2023: 82
2022: 79
2021: 73
2020: 22 (Pandemic school closures)
2019: 52
2018: 44
2017: 42
2016: 51
2015: 37
2014: 36
2013: 26
2012: 13
2011: 15
2010: 13
2009: 22
2008: 18

States with the highest per capita school shootings since 2008

Louisiana: 32 shootings; 0.69 shootings per 100,000 people
Maryland: 32 shootings; 0.52 shootings per 100,000 people13 s
Alabama: 25 shootings; 0.50 shootings per 100,000 people
Tennessee: 33 shootings; 0.48 shootings per 100,000 people
Mississippi: 13 shootings; 0.44 shootings per 100,000 people
Arkansas: 13 shootings; 0.43 shootings per 100,000 people
North Carolina: 41 shootings; 0.41 shootings per 100,000 people
Georgia: 41 shootings; 0.38 shootings per 100,000 people

How long will we tolerate this kind of crap?

Instead of action against this obscenity we get such platitudes as “thoughts and prayer’ or the ever politician BS…’there is no place for violence in America’….have these idiots ever watched a news story?

Violence does have a place in America unless you are too blind to see it…..and will continue as long as some garden slugs believe there is a Constitutional right to kill children.

Thanx to my friend at beetleypete.com for bringing this quote from Tom Waits to my attention.

“We are moneys with money and guns”

I Read, I Write, You Know

“cognito ergo me agitare”

“Banality Of Evil”

That is a term that was first used by Arendt back in the early 60s at the trial of Eichmann…..

The term “banality of evil” was coined by intellectual Hannah Arendt after she observed the 1961 trial of Adolf Eichmann, the Nazi official who, from his post atop the inscrutably-named Office IV B 4, oversaw the grim logistics of funneling Jews into German concentration camps.

Arendt said she was struck to find Eichmann “neither perverted nor sadistic,” but “terrifyingly normal.” Rather than a rabid ideologue or psychopathic antisemite, Arendt found herself observing a boring bureaucrat whose diligent performance of his assigned duties was largely motivated by a mere desire for career advancement. “The deeds were monstrous, but the doer – at least the very effective one now on trial – was quite ordinary, commonplace, and neither demonic nor monstrous,” Arendt later wrote.

The term “banality of evil” was coined by intellectual Hannah Arendt after she observed the 1961 trial of Adolf Eichmann, the Nazi official who, from his post atop the inscrutably-named Office IV B 4, oversaw the grim logistics of funneling Jews into German concentration camps.

Arendt said she was struck to find Eichmann “neither perverted nor sadistic,” but “terrifyingly normal.” Rather than a rabid ideologue or psychopathic antisemite, Arendt found herself observing a boring bureaucrat whose diligent performance of his assigned duties was largely motivated by a mere desire for career advancement. “The deeds were monstrous, but the doer – at least the very effective one now on trial – was quite ordinary, commonplace, and neither demonic nor monstrous,” Arendt later wrote.

That typed….ever heard of the Office of Foreign Asset Control (OFAC)?

No?

As tourists complete their strolls to the White House from the east along Pennsylvania Avenue, they pass a relatively unremarkable, columned office building that overlooks Lafayette Square — oblivious that, behind its walls, bureaucrats are quietly inflicting poverty, illness and death on innumerable innocents around the world.

The Freedman’s Bank Building doesn’t house CIA or Department of Defense officials, but rather the US Treasury’s little-known Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC). Instead of orchestrating airstrikes or insurgencies, these bureaucrats impose mass suffering via economic warfare, collectively serving as the tip of the spear that is America’s ever-expanding economic sanctions regime.

https://starkrealities.substack.com/p/ofacs-banality-of-evil-small-us-agency

This group can be as lethal to innocent civilians as an airstrike….

Just thought you might like to know.

I Read, I Write, You Know

“cognito ergo  me agitare”