The Grift

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We have spent the better part of the last decade debating about Trump and his coterie of Grifters that define both his business, Trump Enterprises (whatever those were) that included Real Estate, Casinos, Clothing Lines, Wine, Classes/Seminars, Steak, and other labeled brands that extended to other members of the Family that shared the name of Trump. From the seat in the White House he managed to further extend that brand to the point it drew attention from the State of New York which prosecuted members of his corporation, his personal Attorney and finally Trump himself for acts of duplicity and fraud regarding his real estate “empire.” That led to a massive penalty which he will not or will pay and this will go on perhaps for years more. There are other debts, trials and tribulations that seem to never have an end game in sight and that is what falls into that classification of the “Long Con.” A long con is one that takes place over a much longer time frame, I feel the story on John Oliver’s show regarding Pig Butchering is a great example of one of the current crops of long con. Bitcoin is a fabulous example of how that also plays into this story. A great long con if ever there was one, with the nefarious invisible “Banksy” who created all this but no one really knows who he is, where he is and what is this about? But even Kara Swisher in her new Memoir writes of another in Silicon Valley, Mark Zuckerberg, who may be perhaps the best at this new type of Grift. Social Media is one long con.

This article in the New York Times discusses the growth of the Grift. And where I found this definition which I have paraphrased and added my own comments.

The difference between a Grifter and “Grafter” are often tied together. “Grift” evokes not so much specific criminal acts as a broad, opportunistic racket, executed with a bit of cunning and panache; Grafters are stolid and conventional, lining their pockets and then quietly retreating to one of their several homes. A Grifters has both flair and ambition, who seem to delight in the con itself — the cleverness of the scheme, the smooth ease with which the marks were gulled. So while Trump is a classic grifter take a look at many who attach themselves to his varying schemes and plans. Many worked for him during his Administration quickly extricating themselves post January 6th but would happily Vote and/or work for him again if the opportunity arose. A Grifter loves a Grafter as they give them legitimacy. I prefer the term “Enablers” which is another way of allowing or permitting if not encouraging the behavior, a person usually associated with Addiction and there is no greater addiction than money. All of Venture Capitalists are some type of Enabler. Without them or the banks would Sam Bankerman Fried or Bernie Madoff made as far and in his case as long without them?

Now we are all being grifted or are grafters at some point. We take an opportunity and we work it to our advantage. I like to think of Real Estate Agents as the lowest on the professional totem pole who play the role of Counselor, Financial Advisor and Best Friend as you try to buy or sell a home. They dip their wick in both pots often coming out well ahead of the game when you are working with one and this adds to the price of housing and why many cannot afford to as they work in tangent with another Grafter, the Mortgage Broker/Agent. Banks are not the only one who writes these loans and they too have a massive interest in making money, yours. The process of this led to a massive financial crisis in 2008 and yet not one saw a trial or a penalty in the process for this and many banks were bailed out and rescued from their misdeeds. But without the Agents and these secondary lenders, few would have made it to sign the papers and make the sales of a product they could not afford. Used Car Salesman get a bad rap, add Real Estate Agents to the list. There are many many more stories about Real Estate Agents and their acts of fraud and duplicity, and by far more costly. Just Google “Real Estate Fraud” to see the list of crimes they have committed.

This week a neighbor and her husband moved out of my building. He is a Surgeon and she is a “Model”/ Real Estate Agent. I did not like nor dislike them I simply lived down the hall from them and kept it at that. Upon their final move out our Refuse room was full of their rejects, disgusting broken furniture, filthy smelling couch cushions, and largely junky items that seemed to be from a college dorm than an adult professionals home. Their move out was done in a small order Uhaul truck with two hired hands who packed what they took with them to relocate to Pittsburgh. To say crap in both quality and design is to be polite. I had to remind myself that this Man was a fucking Surgeon and this filthy shit is his? His wife the model did not adorn herself with the quality of designer goods but they did have three vehicles, two Porches and Volvo. Well priorities. And while living in a building that is largely filled with Asian families and Students who live very cheaply I did laugh as it explains why the fascination with my decorated digs is a source of discussion. And for the record many many folks who rent now are taking it upon themselves to decorate and design living spaces that reflect their taste. And yes folks what comes up can come down and if you are responsible you restore, replace all what you did back to the shit the building gave you. Or you can be like the Doctor and his wife, leave it there and pay for that via forfeit of the damage deposit. Clearly he has the cash. But man would I want that Man operating on me? NO! Again, this is a choice and it takes a weekly wander outside any apartment building at end of month to see the treasures and trash left behind.

And that too is another kind of Grift, the tip. There is now an industry tied to the Tipping Economy. The complaints about the added “service fee” and the mandatory tip on screens when at the Bakery or Butcher even have made one wonder what is appropriate and how much also has become an insidious way of doing business. Living in already overpriced multi family housing means Tips at the Holiday time are mandated if not expected. For many the strain of tipping a building with often dozens of staff, many invisible can be an expensive proposition. To give you an idea, we have in our Building we have Six Front Desk Staff, some whom work Graveyard and often have limited Tenant contact but no less an important job in which to provide security and maintain package inventory and distribution for those who do collect them at odd times. The cleaning and maintenance staff are (often at times) 10 in number and do most of the heavy lifting; Add to that the Superintendent who oversees that crew and lastly the Manager and when we have one, an Assistant. (And for the record the Manager has massive problems holding staff so the turnover is high and often overtly dramatic adding to buildings toxic demeanor) So, at one point we have over 18 people we have to pay at some point, and how much and do all of them get it? I mean the fat fuck who is the Gossip troll deserves the most as that way you won’t be gossiped about right? He should get the most too as he is fat, old, barely walks and is a troll right? Over the young girl who works her ass off. But how about the former Lead who used her position as “helping people” by enabling those with Dogs and Kids to be largely ignored when the kids were running wild in the gym unsupervised or the Dogs shit everywhere or the ones that killed a dog and another attacking a woman, but they were “good” Tenants as they tipped more and more often. So that is hierarchy in Apartment living, who tips, how often and how much matters. And there are a lot of holidays and dates of import. Valentines Day, Lunar New Year, Holi, their birthdays, your birthday all are on the calendar and have cards ready in which to shove in that obligatory payment.

We think of Grift as something associated with Politicians and there is no greater profession guilty of it, but it is everywhere. It is the way we assert our control and and influence even in the most benign of situations. And with that we are not exempt from the fraud, the duplicity and the guilt associated with our role as Grifter or Grafter. The recent story about the New York Times Reporter who handed over 50K in cash to a recent scam, but the Bank who willingly handed over 50K in cash is the same banker who is supposed to notify the IRS if you have deposited more than 10K in your account to notify them as earnings. Or the payment apps if you have transfers exceeding 300 dollars. The Police who will take any amount a cash during a traffic stop legally as a it too is suspect under the guise of Civil Forfeiture. So that Estate Sale, Car Sale, or some transaction is all watched or monitored or taken as it is all seen as gotten gains. But taking it out and in cash to pay an extortion not a problem in the least.

Grift or Graft, the Con, the Long Con and we are all players or victims in the game. This article from Psychology Today explain who is more likely to be a victim, but in reality we all are at some point players in this game. It is just how much you lose what matters. We are all pigs waiting to be butchered.

The Art of the Con and Why People Fall for It

How the con is pulled off, why fraudsters are successful, and how to spot them.

Posted September 26, 2019 | Reviewed by Jessica Schrader

By definition, a con artist is a manipulator who cheats, or tricks, others through persuading them to believe something that is not true. Through deception, they fool people into believing they can make easy money when, in fact, it is the con artist who ends up taking the victim’s money. The criminal and legal consequences of such indiscretions can be insignificant or great, depending on the circumstances and the laws of the land. In the course of co-authoring The Crime Book, which covered more than 100 crimes, I researched and wrote a chapter about con artists. Their crimes are varied, as are their behaviors. But the one thing they each have in common is the power of persuasion to take advantage of unsuspecting people.

Name of the Game

The confidence game, as scam artistry is called, is one of the oldest tricks in the trade. It exploits people’s trust. Human nature is on the side of these masters of fraud when it comes to defrauding their marks, or victims, and contributes to the con’s enduring success. Perpetrators have been referred to everything from flimflam operators, hustlers, grifters, and tricksters. The victims have been called marks, suckers, and gulls. And while media publicity has further romanticized cons and put their crimes in the public eye, their actions are anything but glamorous.

Even further, the cost of the capers to victims may run anywhere from a couple hundred to a few million dollars, with some victims learning the hard way, using their own free will, that when an offer seems too good to be true, it probably is. In fact, the Federal Trade Commission reported that people lost $1.48 billion to fraud in 2018, an increase of 38 percent in 2017.

It Can Happen to You

How do unsuspecting people get duped to begin with? After all, even the most rational people have proven susceptible to crimes of trickery. That’s because con artists often prey on people’s trust and their propensity for believing what they wish was true—especially with get-rich-quick schemes and individual’s desire for a quick buck. They let their guard down and buy into what con artists feed them—all in the belief of the scammer and a high rate of return in exchange for a small investment, albeit a shady deal. But the convincing scammer skews the victim into thinking the payoff will come true and the scheme is legitimate.

Some famous con artists were at the top of their game—until they ultimately got caught. With impersonator Frank Abagnale and international career jewel thief Doris Payne, they are the epitome of the swindling game. By their own rights, they became experts at the art of the con and successfully evaded law enforcement for years. Two centuries earlier, Jeanne de la Motte, a cunning Frenchwoman, orchestrated a diamond necklace affair, which was one of several scandals that led to the French Revolution and helped destroy a monarchy.

Other significant confidence criminals, from forged artwork to fake manuscripts—Elmyr de Hory, a Hungarian-born forger of Picassos and Matisses, who sold more than a thousand pieces to art galleries worldwide, and novelist Clifford Irving, who wrote a fabricated autobiography of reclusive billionaire Howard Hughes. These stories break down how grifters pass off their own works as those of masters and literary greats—but eventually they too were caught.

A con artist can execute remarkable expertise in their trickery, as with Czechoslovakian Victor Lustig, who in an underhanded plot sold the Eiffel Tower for scrap metal—not once, but twice.

Psychology of the Con

Each of these con artists have one thing in common: the power of persuasion to swindle their victims. The successful ones exhibit three similar characteristics—psychopathy, narcissism and Machiavellianism—which have been referred to by psychologists as “dark” personality traits.

Those characteristics allow con artists to swindle people out of their money without feeling any remorse or guilt. Another thing most chiselers have in common are their egos. These extortion sales people boost the psyche of the perpetrators and make them feel even more confident, thus the description of the con has been termed as a confidence game.

Because cons often change their identities as part of their game, it can be pesky for law enforcement to catch them. Also, police may not even go after them when the crime has to do with bilking property and even money from their marks. That’s because the law can consider the loss a civil issue and not a legal one, unless it’s a corporate white-collar crime, such as those committed by Bernie Madoff, a former stockbroker, financier, and operator of a massive pyramid scheme that perpetrated the largest financial fraud in recent US history. Going after grifters is often of low status, more difficult to prove, and less likely to be prosecuted, with violent crimes and terrorist acts of higher priority.

That happenstance leads to a message for everyday people: Buyer beware.

Call and Respond

That is phrase often synonymous with Churches. Music, Schools or with in fact Police radios. The idea is that a Speaker’s words are punctuated by the audience/listeners. In music this is called antiphony and that is the act of responding to the singer as a way of affirming and communicating with them directly as a type of dialogue. It is a history rich in African Culture that has long extended itself into the mainstream with many doing this in Civic Affairs. See a Donald Trump MAGA rally for example. Ah the irony.

But there is another Call and Response associated with Law Enforcement when a call is made to Police through 911 it is transmitted to the local force in the area and with they are to respond to the code used for the call. A common one is 10-31 Criminal Act in process. Another is 10-16 – Domestic Problem. And today’s Police seem to arrive to most calls as if was 10-32 – Gun or Firearm. Yes that is our Police force today, armed and ready at all times to protect us from apparently ourselves. 

When I read the article I have printed below, another from my former home State, Washington, was in the news about a settlement that literally paid the Officers off for killing the man on his way home.  This from the Washington Post:

Ellis was on his way home after picking up a late-night snack at a 7-Eleven when Burbank and Collins stopped him and engaged in casual conversation, according to a report from Ferguson’s office. The two then wrestled Ellis to the ground. In video footage of the incident, Ellis can be heard telling the officers multiple times that he cannot breathe.

The officers had said that Ellis was violent and had tried to get into a nearby car, compelling them to use force, though witness testimonies and video footage called those claims into question.

Could not find the code for that one.

So the protests, the rage, the anger and the money spent to “defund Police” or at least attempt to get Police to stop the mass shootings a massive failure.  I would consider 1200 plus people killed by Police via a neck or a gun or a taser, a stun gun or by running into them into a car regardless of the incident and where it happened and why, I my definition it is akin to mass murder. A type of Genocide that Police commit across the Country at least 3 times a day. 

So the new year has begun and the month of January is now half over. How many have died already? Well there is this one, but I assume they will be busy the next few weeks in which to hit those numbers. So every time you call, you know they will respond. Say their name.

2023 saw record killings by US police. Who is most affected?

Officers killed at least 1,232 people last year – the deadliest year for homicides by law enforcement in over a decade, data shows

Sam Levin in Los Angeles The Guardian Mon 8 Jan 2024

Police in the US killed at least 1,232 people last year, making 2023 the deadliest year for homicides committed by law enforcement in more than a decade, according to newly released data.

Mapping Police Violence, a non-profit research group, catalogs deaths at the hands of police and last year recorded the highest number of killings since its national tracking began in 2013. The data suggests a systemic crisis and a remarkably consistent pattern, with an average of roughly three people killed by officers each day, with slight upticks in recent years.

The group recorded 30 more deaths in 2023 than the previous year, with 1,202 people killed in 2022; 1,148 in 2021; 1,160 in 2020; and 1,098 in 2019. The numbers include shooting victims, as well as people fatally shocked by a stun gun, beaten or restrained. The 2023 count is preliminary, and cases could be added as the database is updated.

High-profile 2023 cases included the fatal beating of Tyre Nichols in Memphis; the tasing of Keenan Anderson in Los Angeles; and the shooting in Lancaster, California, of Niani Finlayson, who had called 911 for help over domestic violence. There were hundreds more who garnered little attention, including Ricky Cobb, shot by a Minnesota trooper after he was pulled over for a tail light violation; Tahmon Kenneth Wilson, unarmed and shot outside a Bay Area cannabis dispensary; and Isidra Clara Castillo, killed when police in Amarillo, Texas, fired at someone else in the same car as her.

Here are some key takeaways from the data and experts’ insight into why US police continue to kill civilians at a rate an order of magnitude higher than comparable nations.

Police violence is increasing as murders are falling

The record number of police killings happened in a year that saw a significant decrease in homicides, according to preliminary reports of 2023 murder rates; one analyst said the roughly 13% decrease in homicides last year appears to be the largest year-to-year drop on record, and reports have also signaled drops in other violent and property crimes.

“Violence is trending downwards at an unprecedented rate, but the exception to that seems to be the police, who are engaging in more violence each year,” said Samuel Sinyangwe, a policy analyst and data scientist who founded Mapping Police Violence. “It hits home that many of the promises and actions made after the murder of George Floyd don’t appear to have reduced police violence on a nationwide level.”

Some advocates say the lack of systemic reforms and continued expansion of police forces have helped sustain the high rates. Polls show most Americans believe crime is rising, and amid voter concerns about safety and violence, municipalities have continued to increase police budgets.

Monifa Bandele, an activist on the leadership team for the Movement for Black Lives, said that while state and local governments continue to rely on police to address mental health crises, domestic disputes and other social problems, killings will continue: “The more police you put on the streets to interact with members of my community, the greater the risk of harm, abuse and death.”

Many people were killed while trying to flee police

The circumstances behind the 2023 killings mirrored past trends. Last year, 445 people killed by police had been fleeing, representing 36% of all cases. There have been efforts across the country to prevent police from shooting at fleeing cars and people, recognizing the danger to the public. But the rates have been steady in recent years, with one in three killings involving people fleeing.

The underlying reasons for the encounters were also consistent. In 2023, 139 killings (11%) involved claims a person was seen with a weapon; 107 (9%) began as traffic violations; 100 (8%) were mental health or welfare checks; 79 (6%) were domestic disturbances; 73 (6%) were cases where no offenses were alleged; 265 (22%) involved other alleged nonviolent offenses; and 469 (38%) involved claims of violent offenses or more serious crimes.

“The majority of cases have not originated from reported violent crimes. The police are routinely called into situations where there was no violence until police arrived and the situation escalated,” Sinyangwe said.

Sheriffs’ departments and rural regions are driving the increase

In 2023, there were more killings by police in rural zip codes (319 cases, or 26% of killings) than in urban ones (292 cases, or 24%); the remainder of killings were in suburban areas, with a handful of cases undetermined. This marks a shift from previous years when the number of killings in cities outpaced rural deaths.

County sheriff’s departments, which tend to have jurisdiction over more rural and suburban areas and face less oversight, were responsible for 32% of killings last year; 10 years prior, sheriffs were involved in only 26% of killings.

Black Americans were killed at much higher rates

In 2023, Black people were killed at a rate 2.6 times higher than white people, Mapping Police Violence found. Last year, 290 people killed by police were Black, making up 23.5% of victims, while Black Americans make up roughly 14% of the total population. Native Americans were killed at a rate 2.2 times greater than white people, and Latinos were killed at a rate 1.3 times greater.

Black and brown people have also consistently been more likely to be killed while fleeing. From 2013 to 2023, 39% of Black people who were killed by police had been fleeing, typically either running or driving away. That figure is 35% for Latinos, 33% for Native Americans, 29% for white people and 22% for Asian Americans.

Albuquerque and New Mexico had the deadliest rates

Police in New Mexico killed 23 people last year, making it the state with the highest number of fatalities per capita, with a rate of 10.9 killings per 1 million residents, Mapping Police Violence found.

In one New Mexico case in April, Farmington officers showed up to the wrong house and killed the resident, Robert Dotson, when he opened the door with a handgun. In November, an officer in Las Cruces near the border fatally shot Teresa Gomez after he questioned why she was parked outside a public housing complex.

Albuquerque, New Mexico’s most populous city, also ranked highest in killings per capita among the country’s 50 largest cities. Albuquerque police killed six people in 2023, while many cities with substantially larger populations, including San Jose and Honolulu, each killed only one civilian last year. Some advocates have said gun culture in the state, particularly in rural areas, could be a factor in the high rates of police violence.

A spokesperson for the New Mexico governor, Michelle Lujan Grisham, said in an email that she was “committed to promoting professional and constitutional policing”, and noted the governor signed a bill into law last year “aimed at increased accountability for those in this critical profession”. SB19 established a duty to intervene when officers witness certain unlawful uses of force; prohibited neck restraints and firing at fleeing vehicles; and required the establishment of a public police misconduct database.

Spokespeople for Albuquerque police did not respond to an inquiry on Friday.

Few officers face accountability

From 2013 to 2022, 98% of police killings have not resulted in officers facing charges, Mapping Police Violence reported.

This contributes to the steady rate of violence, said Joanna Schwartz, University of California, Los Angeles law professor and expert on how officers evade accountability for misconduct: “Even with public attention to police killings in recent years and unprecedented community engagement, it’s really business as usual. That means tremendous discretion given to police to use force whenever they believe it’s appropriate, very limited federal and state oversight of policing, and union agreements across the country that make it very difficult to effectively investigate, discipline or fire officers.”

Problem officers with repeated brutality incidents or killings frequently remain on the force or get jobs in other departments, she noted.

Some cities experienced decreases in lethal force

Some cities with histories of police brutality had notably few killings in 2023. St Louis police killed one person last year, and there were no killings recorded by Minneapolis, Seattle or Boston police.

“It suggests that even places with longstanding issues can see improvement. It’s not fixed that they always have to be this way,” Sinyangwe said.

Bandele noted that community violence prevention programs have helped reduce reliance on police and limit vulnerable people’s exposure to potentially lethal encounters. Denver has received national attention for its program sending civilian responders to mental health calls instead of police. A Brooklyn neighborhood last year experimented with civilian responders to 911 calls.

“Every week, someone who needs mental health care ends up killed by police,” Bandele said. “But there are alternative ways to respond.”

Out of Control

I listen to many different podcasts and in turn I am going into comedy now after major news and true crime ones finally exhausted me. And usually they are quite entertaining, very vacuous and focused on pop culture. One I did listen to until finally it became too exhausting was Heather McDonald’s Juicy Scoop. From her I began to listen to Chris Franjola’s Cover to Cover and Julie and Brandy’s Dumb Gay Politics. I have seen her and Chris live and enjoyed the shows and now I don’t. I don’t mind that they are not the most informed folks of all time and that endless discussions on Britney Spears is tedious, so all things eventually will run a course and this finally has. The Nation’s obsession on Scandoval including inviting the dumped partner to the White House Correspondent’s Dinner says more about the lack of IQ over lack of actual News and Newsmakers. But when two Comedians are spending an hour discussing issues that they seem ill informed and equipped to discuss it is time to pull the plug. The reality is that they both live and work in Hollywood and with that could pick up a phone and contact Laverne Cox or Elliot Page who just wrote his Memoirs and is out on the book tour circuit to discuss these concerns and fears Heather McDonald has over Trans women. She has not expressed that over Women becoming Men but both of those individuals fall into each and could perhaps explain some things to her. But I doubt she will listen. She talks over Chris in this episode, rants and makes illogical examples of how Trans Women will harm Women and especially in Prison. Okay so after my head stopped spinning I went to their respective Facebook and Instagram pages to make a point. Many agreed and there are likely many who feel like me that this is not an argument worth having. But point made that again it is not appropriate period. This is get in your own lane and unless it affects you personally or professionally why the fuck do you care?

But as I have written about the rise of Trans bills and laws that are further doing damage to many in this country struggling with their sexual and gender identity I was truly horrified to find the supposed Activists were former pro Trans individuals who had decided to detransition and return to their original gender. Nothing wrong with that it is again a choice and they have the right to make those personal decisions about their health as it has NOTHING TO DO WITH ME. Nor should they project their decisions onto anyone looking into doing the same or changing their gender. This is an individual decision that is only their and their family/friends business. This is the same argument we have made repeatedly over Marriage, interracial or same sex, and now with regards to Abortion and bodily autonomy. But the same groups that preach Liberty and Freedom have no problem taking others away from them when it suits. This suit is one large and ill fitting one.

So when you turn of a podcast for a laugh and get Heather McDonald ranting about a story in a Sorority in Colorado accepting a Trans Woman as a Member posing this individual as weird and a pervert and making them unsafe, is sad.pathetic.grim. And the best part the Girl DOES NOT LIVE in the Sorority House but has come to visit to get acquainted with the group. Clearly that welcome mat is tucked away. Perhaps they need to do this thing called TALKING to her to understand and in turn learn about her and her decision to change genders. Frankly I would love to know why anyone would join a Sorority but have it. It was a bizarre rant that led her Guest Chris to compare the hysteria over Trans people to the issue with Bed Bugs. That was to say the least strange and then of course mock her looks comparing her to the actor Jack Black. Well you can change a Leopard’s spots and still be a Leopard I guess. But then again we as Women are more than familiar with hearing about our looks. Some things change but that trope nope.

When this is the national discussion between two Comics this is how bad it is. That you cannot find anything in contemporary culture to discuss and laugh at but rant about a bunch of girls upset their club now is taking on a Member who looks less like Laverne Cox and well yes like Jack Black, is really what it is about. Not the gender switch and at least that point Chris made for if she was in fact a natural born girl and looked like that (and yes women come in all shapes and sizes) she would have found the Welcome mat pulled in as well.

We have a gun problem in America. We have health care problems in America. We have Democracy at risk and we have a massive Immigration crisis and a War abroad that is taking a toll. With that we are worried about .25% of a population that causes no threat what.so.ever. Change Trans to “Black” “Asian” “Native” “Latino” and then see the picture there. It is not a pretty one.

And this will be my last mention of Trans issues. I support anyone who needs to fix or change their lives. I will respect and acknowledge we may agree to disagree on the fuss over pronouns, names and endless issues over who has a priority when it comes to attention to this or any issue. We choose to decide the matters of import and this is not one in my life. I do not make decisions on what to go, who to see, read or care about because of that. I can find even those I disagree with a common ground and move on from there. This particular issue is frankly one that has no impact on me at all, can cause me no harm and with that I want to live and let live. The end on that.

The issue of Guns however do have an impact. I can be killed at work or on the street, in a store, on a bus, in a theater, or any place I go that many gather. Guns are the largest health problem in the nation but banning health care for a marginal group of people seem to take the priority seem so be, I disagree as I will never stop discussing gun rights and the need to protect ourselves from Guns that kill ALL kinds of people regardless of the kind but often most directed to whom? The Marginalized ones.

Below is a timeline of Gun Control efforts and laws from the inception through the early 20th Century to 2019. And below that another breakdown of how those laws have transpired via the psychology and mentality associated with Guns and Gun Control. And lastly and Editorial from the New York Times about how FEAR is the predominant reason behind most Gun purchases and who seems to buy and own them; and in turn how that it is reinforced during training and sales of guns. The current stats is that the amount of guns in this country exceed licensed vehicles and cell phones.

• US has 120.5 firearms per 100 residents, report finds
• Only country with more civilian-owned firearms than people

US gun owners possess 393.3 million weapons, according to a 2018 report by the Small Arms Survey, a Geneva-based organization, which is higher than the country’s population now of about 330 million. India, which has almost 1.4 billion people, had the second most civilian-owned firearms with 71.1 million.

Here’s a Timeline of the Major Gun Control Laws in America

By Sarah Gray Time Magazine April 30, 2019 11:13

Through their grief, the students from Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School have become a political force. One week after 19-year-old Nikolas Cruz allegedly used an AR-15 to shoot and kill 17 people at the school, around 100 students met with lawmakers in the Florida state capital to advocate for gun control. They also met with President Trump in the White House Wednesday. In organizing the March For Our Lives, they’ll rally next month in Washington, D.C.

But with the right of gun ownership enshrined in the U.S. Constitution, gun regulations remain a thorny issue in the U.S. Throughout history, there have been several laws and Supreme Court cases that have shaped the Second Amendment. This timeline outlines the most important events in influencing the country’s federal gun policy.

1791

On Dec. 15, 1791, ten amendments to the U.S. Constitution — eventually known as the Bill of Rights — were ratified. The second of them said: “A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.”

1934

The first piece of national gun control legislation was passed on June 26, 1934. The National Firearms Act (NFA) — part of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s “New Deal for Crime“— was meant to curtail “gangland crimes of that era such as the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre.”

The NFA imposed a tax on the manufacturing, selling, and transporting of firearms listed in the law, among them short-barrel shotguns and rifles, machine guns, firearm mufflers and silencers. Due to constitutional flaws, the NFA was modified several times. The $200 tax, which was high for the era, was put in place to curtail the transfer of these weapons.

1938

The Federal Firearms Act (FFA) of 1938 required gun manufacturers, importers, and dealers to obtain a federal firearms license. It also defined a group of people, including convicted felons, who could not purchase guns, and mandated that gun sellers keep customer records. The FFA was repealed in 1968 by the Gun Control Act (GCA), though many of its provisions were reenacted by the GCA.

1939

In 1939 the U.S. Supreme Court heard the case United States v. Miller, ruling that through the National Firearms Act of 1934, Congress could regulate the interstate selling of a short barrel shotgun. The court stated that there was no evidence that a sawed off shotgun “has some reasonable relationship to the preservation or efficiency of a well regulated militia,” and thus “we cannot say that the Second Amendment guarantees the right to keep and bear such an instrument.”

1968

Following the assassinations of President John F. Kennedy, Attorney General and U.S. Senator Robert F. Kennedy and Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., President Lyndon B. Johnson pushed for the passage of the Gun Control Act of 1968. The GCA repealed and replaced the FFA, updated Title II of the NFA to fix constitutional issues, added language about “destructive devices” (such as bombs, mines and grenades) and expanded the definition of “machine gun.”

Overall the bill banned importing guns that have “no sporting purpose,” imposed age restrictions for the purchase of handguns (gun owners had to be 21), prohibited felons, the mentally ill, and others from purchasing guns, required that all manufactured or imported guns have a serial number, and according to the ATF, imposed “stricter licensing and regulation on the firearms industry.”

1986

In 1986 the Firearm Owners Protection Act was passed by Congress. The law mainly enacted protections for gun owners — prohibiting a national registry of dealer records, limiting ATF inspections to once per year (unless there are multiple infractions), softening what is defined as “engaging in the business” of selling firearms, and allowing licensed dealers to sell firearms at “gun shows” in their state. It also loosened regulations on the sale and transfer of ammunition.

The bill also codified some gun control measures, including expanding the GCA to prohibit civilian ownership or transfer of machine guns made after May 19, 1986, and redefining “silencer” to include parts intended to make silencers.

1993

The Brady Handgun Violence Prevention Act of 1993 is named after White House press secretary James Brady, who was permanently disabled from an injury suffered during an attempt to assassinate President Ronald Reagan. (Brady died in 2014). It was signed into law by President Bill Clinton. The law, which amends the GCA, requires that background checks be completed before a gun is purchased from a licensed dealer, manufacturer or importer. It established the National Instant Criminal Background Check System (NICS), which is maintained by the FBI.

1994

Tucked into the sweeping and controversial Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act, signed by President Clinton in 1994, is the subsection titled Public Safety and Recreational Firearms Use Protection Act. This is known as the assault weapons ban — a temporary prohibition in effect from September of 1994 to September of 2004. Multiple attempts to renew the ban have failed.

The provisions of the bill outlawed the ability to “manufacture, transfer, or possess a semiautomatic assault weapon,” unless it was “lawfully possessed under Federal law on the date of the enactment of this subsection.” Nineteen military-style or “copy-cat” assault weapons—including AR-15s, TEC-9s, MAC-10s, etc.—could not be manufactured or sold. It also banned “certain high-capacity ammunition magazines of more than ten rounds,” according to a U.S. Department of Justice Fact Sheet.

2003

The Tiahrt Amendment, proposed by Todd Tiahrt (R-Kan.), prohibited the ATF from publicly releasing data showing where criminals purchased their firearms and stipulated that only law enforcement officers or prosecutors could access such information.

“The law effectively shields retailers from lawsuits, academic study and public scrutiny,” The Washington Post wrote in 2010. “It also keeps the spotlight off the relationship between rogue gun dealers and the black market in firearms.”

There have been efforts to repeal this amendment.

2005

In 2005, the Protection of Lawful Commerce in Arms Act was signed by President George W. Bush to prevent gun manufacturers from being named in federal or state civil suits by those who were victims of crimes involving guns made by that company.

The first provision of this law is “to prohibit causes of action against manufacturers, distributors, dealers, and importers of firearms or ammunition products, and their trade associations, for the harm solely caused by the criminal or unlawful misuse of firearm products or ammunition products by others when the product functioned as designed and intended.” It also dismissed pending cases on October 26, 2005.

2008

District of Columbia v. Heller essentially changed a nearly 70-year precedent set by Miller in 1939. While the Miller ruling focused on the “well regulated militia” portion of the Second Amendment (known as the “collective rights theory” and referring to a state’s right to defend itself), Heller focused on the “individual right to possess a firearm unconnected with service in a militia.”

Heller challenged the constitutionality of a 32-year-old handgun ban in Washington, D.C., and found, “The handgun ban and the trigger-lock requirement (as applied to self-defense) violate the Second Amendment.”

It did not however nullify other gun control provisions. “The Court’s opinion should not be taken to cast doubt on longstanding prohibitions on the possession of firearms by felons and the mentally ill, or laws forbidding the carrying of firearms in sensitive places such as schools and government buildings, or laws imposing conditions and qualifications on the commercial sale of arms,” stated the ruling.

A Brief History of Guns in the U.S.

How to explain Americans’ astonishing personal arsenal? Start with politics, fear, and marketing.

By Cathy Shufro Bloomberg News

Let’s start with a few facts about firearms in the U.S.: Americans own 393 million guns, the Geneva-based Small Arms Survey reports.

Firearms can be found in 44% of U.S. households, according to a 2020 Gallup survey.

And, tragically: Almost half of Americans know someone who has been shot, a 2017 Pew Research Center report noted.

How did we get here? Marketing, politics, racism, fear, and other forces have contributed to America’s exceptional proliferation of guns.

Soon after the end of the Civil War, gunmakers with surpluses sought peacetime customers. They convinced dry goods stores to sell handguns alongside flour and sugar; they ran classified ads in newspapers; and they told parents that a rifle would help “real boys” to develop “sturdy manliness.” Private gun ownership dramatically expanded.

The end of slavery catalyzed the formation of armed groups, some seeking to protect newly freed Black men, others to terrorize them. After Reconstruction failed, supremacist military groups like the White League in Louisiana used guns to threaten and sometimes murder Black men attempting to vote.

While the popular imagination holds that gunslingers sauntered down the dusty streets of Western towns, that’s largely a myth, according to UCLA law professor Adam Winkler, JD. “Frontier towns—places like Tombstone, Deadwood, and Dodge—actually had the most restrictive gun control laws in the nation,” Winkler wrote in the Huffington Post. When visitors arrived in Dodge City, Kansas, they encountered a billboard announcing, “The Carrying of Firearms Strictly Prohibited.”

Indeed, by the early 1900s, 43 states limited or banned firearms in public places. Gun control would become sharply divisive only with the federal Gun Control Act of 1968, made law after the assassinations of President John F. Kennedy, Malcolm X, Martin Luther King Jr., and Robert F. Kennedy. The legislation limited interstate sales of firearms but did too little to satisfy gun control advocates including President Lyndon Johnson.

By the late 1990s, fear became a potent selling point as cultural attitudes changed. In a 1999 poll, most gun owners said they kept guns for hunting and target shooting; only 26% cited protection as paramount. By 2015, however, 63% cited self-defense as a primary motivation for gun ownership, according to a 2015 National Firearms Survey. In reality, having access to a gun triples a person’s risk of suicide and nearly doubles the risk of being a homicide victim, according to a 2014 Annals of Internal Medicine meta-analysis. For a woman living with an abusive partner, the risk of being murdered increases fivefold if the partner has a gun, according to an American Journal of Public Health study led by Jacquelyn Campbell, PhD, MSN, a faculty member of the Johns Hopkins Center for Gun Violence Prevention and Policy at the Bloomberg School.

As gun owners increasingly emphasized self-defense in recent decades, restrictions on carrying concealed firearms evaporated. Whereas in 1990 concealed carry in public spaces was illegal in 16 states (including Texas), by 2013 all 50 states and Washington, D.C., allowed some civilians to carry hidden guns.

At the same time, gunmakers have redesigned their wares. “Technology has focused on making smaller and smaller handguns, with more lethality, and with almost no attention to safety,” says Josh Horwitz, JD, who directs the Coalition to Stop Gun Violence. For example, the popular $450 Smith & Wesson M&P Shield 2.0 pistol is 6 inches long and carries 15 9mm cartridges. And children now have their own firearms, like the 2½-pound, .22-caliber Crickett (“my first rifle”). Its gunstock comes in pink, camo, and “amendment”—Second Amendment text overlaid on American flags.

Horwitz says lobbyists and owners of military-style weapons increasingly embrace “the insurrectionist idea.” Since 2009, he has warned of armed citizens who claim that “threatening violence against government officials is within normal bounds of political discourse.”

The multiplication of “stand-your-ground” laws marked another shift in American attitudes, with Florida taking the lead in 2005. Today, 34 states give gun owners the right to use deadly force outside of the home with no duty to retreat or use other means to protect themselves. The laws “make it much easier for a person to legally kill someone,” writes University of Texas sociologist Harel Shapira, PhD, who credits the laws with “the militarization of everyday life.”

“In almost any aspect of public health, culture and policy are reinforcing and reflecting each other,” says Daniel Webster, ScD ’91, MPH, director of the Center for Gun Violence Prevention and Policy. “You gradually see carrying a gun around as normative.” Forty years ago, if someone brought a gun to a party, Webster says, “you would have been shocked. It would have been incredibly abnormal.” Now, gun ownership is a lifestyle choice, one rooted in the individualism “baked into our culture and our laws.”

In recent decades, the National Rifle Association has identified its greatest foe as the government itself. After Congress passed the Federal Assault Weapons Ban of 1994, NRA President Wayne LaPierre told members that the bill “gives jack-booted government thugs more power to take away our constitutional rights, break in our doors, seize our guns, destroy our property, and even injure or kill us.”

“The gun lobby thrives on fear and drives fear,” says Horwitz. In many ways, he adds, “this is about white men feeling less powerful.”

Horwitz notes that gun sales rose during the past year. “People are afraid of other people with guns, so now they’re buying guns. Breaking that cycle is really important. Are we too far down the road? I don’t think we are, but we’ve got to make major changes in how we approach gun violence, soon.”

“A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.”

Gun owners embrace the U.S. Constitution’s Second Amendment, claiming it guarantees that civilians can own and use guns. Contemporary interpretations of the amendment diverge, however. A key issue is whether “the people” means individuals or the collective. In the second instance, the right to bear arms would derive from a state’s interest in being able to raise a militia.

Emory University Professor Carol Anderson, PhD, offers a historian’s interpretation of the amendment’s origin, calling it “a bribe”: When the Constitution was drafted, Revolutionary War hero Patrick Henry of Virginia warned that Southerners couldn’t count on federal help if enslaved people revolted. James Madison needed Virginia’s vote to ratify the Constitution, so he promised to draft a Bill of Rights once Congress met. For this reason, Anderson argues, the Second Amendment is “steeped in anti-blackness.”

Firearms Classes Taught Me, and America, a Very Dangerous Lesson

May 16, 2023

By Harel Shapira Harel Shapira is an associate professor of sociology at the University of Texas, Austin.

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I did not grow up around guns, but 10 years ago, I started attending firearms training classes. I wasn’t there to learn how to protect myself or my family. I was there to learn what was taught in the classes themselves, which a broad coalition of groups — including many police officers, Republican and Democratic legislators and gun violence prevention organizations — have hailed as a path out of the nation’s epidemic of violence.

I found something very different. The classes I attended trained students to believe that their lives are in constant danger. They prepared us to shoot without hesitation and avoid legal consequences. They instilled the kind of fear that has a corrosive effect on all interactions — and beyond that, on the fabric of our democracy.

I took 42 classes and conducted interviews with 52 instructors and 118 students, in traditionally red states like Texas as well as blue states like Massachusetts, in urban areas like Newark as well as rural Southern Illinois. (The instructors knew I was there to conduct research; in keeping with my university’s academic protocols, I had permission to take notes in class and to record interviews but not to publish anyone’s names.) Most of all, I immersed myself in firearms schools in Texas, where I live, that cater to people who wish to learn how to use guns for self-defense. Some instructors in these schools told me they have been involved in drafting public safety protocols or running active shooter drills for public school teachers. Some of these instructors’ students have gone on to open training programs of their own.

While American gun culture has diversified in recent years, the overwhelming majority of firearms instructors — in Texas it’s 75 percent — are white men. Many have a background in the military or law enforcement. Nationwide, more than 125,000 of them have taken a certification course offered by the National Rifle Association. Many states require instructors to complete additional training.

First, the good news: Every firearms instructor I encountered was extremely serious about preventing accidents. When a student inadvertently pointed his gun at me for a moment, our instructor immediately chastised him. And when the student objected, saying he didn’t have his finger on the trigger, the instructor became livid and threatened to kick him out of class.

But teaching people how to avoid shooting someone by accident is a small part of what these classes are about. The primary lessons are about if and when to shoot someone on purpose. And this is where the trouble begins.

Instructors repeatedly told me that a big part of their job was to make people feel vulnerable, to make them aware of dangers they were not conscious of before to understand that bad things can happen at any time. One instructor told me he encourages students to carry their gun at all times. If students say they plan to leave it in the car, he responds, “So what you’re telling me is the only time you are ever going to get attacked is if you are in your car?”

The instructors describe a world teeming with violent and deranged individuals. And not just any individuals. The scenarios cluster around the public spaces of racially diverse cities. “More often than not,” an instructor who had been a high-ranking police officer said, the place you’re likely to be attacked is “in an urban part of society.” Another instructor, also a former police officer, tells students to keep their gas tanks filled at least halfway to avoid situations in which “it’s the middle of the night and you need to get gas in downtown Houston.”

Outside a restaurant in Austin, an instructor saw a disheveled man sitting on the curb and nudged me in the other direction, directing me to pick up the pace. He said he had detected “potential predatory behavior” and wasn’t sure if this man was a panhandler or someone about to stick a gun in our faces.

Instructors repeatedly told me that statistics about crime are meaningless when it comes to the need to carry a gun. It’s not the odds, I heard on numerous occasions; it’s the consequences. I have been taught strategies for avoiding interactions with strangers. I have participated in scenario training sessions in which students carrying guns loaded with plastic ammunition enact mock burglaries, home invasions, mass shootings and attacks by Islamic terrorists. Repeatedly the lesson was that I ought to shoot even when my instincts might tell me otherwise.

For example, in one scenario, an instructor pretended to punch someone I know and care about in the head. The instructor’s back was toward me, so I held my fire. Later, I told him that I hadn’t had enough information to act. Wrong answer. Being punched in the head can be fatal, the instructor told me, so there was no time to wait. I had never heard someone advocate shooting an unarmed person in the back. The instructor did it with a sense of moral, legal and tactical clarity and conviction.

Officially, the message is caution. A line I heard from multiple instructors was: If you are not about to die in the next three seconds, don’t pull the trigger. If you are not 100 percent sure, then don’t shoot. But relentlessly harping on the dangers that surround us changes the way students assess those risks.

I experienced it myself.

On a recent night I saw a driver who didn’t appear to realize that he was going the wrong way on a one-way street. As the other car approached, I began to slow down, roll down my window and stick my hand out in a friendly gesture. Suddenly I worried the other driver might have a gun. How might he respond to someone slowing down a car and waving at him in the middle of the night? Would he shoot? Probably not. But it’s not the odds, I remember telling myself; it’s the consequences.

That’s the great irony of firearms training: In learning how to use a gun for self-defense, something that seems like it might give you confidence and a sense of safety, people end up feeling more afraid than before. “I knew the world was dangerous,” a student told me after class one day, “but this was a real wake-up call.” “He scared the daylights out of me,” I heard from another student, who went straight from class to a gun store. Others who already owned a gun told me the classes made them feel the gun should be bigger, with a larger caliber and more capacity.

Firearms instructors are not the only ones who make an appearance at self-defense classes. Lawyers do, too. Lawyers who specialize in defending gun owners. They go to classes and tell students how to talk (or not) to 911 operators and police officers in the event they shoot someone. In one seminar, a lawyer emphasized the importance of explaining, “I had no choice.”

With more than 200 mass shootings in our country this year alone, advocates of gun regulation often cite the tragic number of lives lost or the fact that gun-related injuries have surpassed car accidents as the nation’s leading cause of injury-related death among people under 24. But another, less recognized casualty is the kind of public interactions that make democracy viable. The N.R.A. says that “an armed society is a polite society.” But learning to carry a gun isn’t teaching Americans to have good manners. It’s training them to be suspicious and atomized, learning to protect themselves, no matter how great the risk to others. It’s training them to not be citizens.

The Next Pandemic

The next pandemic will be one with regards to mental health. We already do a piss poor job on that count serving the needs of those seriously mentally ill, let alone those who have struggles with other disorders from Anxiety to Depression. Now that the Mental Industrial Complex have added Grief as a mental health problem more will follow with regards to being handed medications and given little else to find the coping skills needed to manage. Grief is an emotion different for each individual and given the numerous articles and books about how many Children, now adults, are glad that their parents are dead as it shows we have a long ignored the realty of how Parents continue to fuck us over in ways that carry on long past childhood and that exemplify the failure of most parents to be, well parents. Ask Davie Sedaris about that one, or this woman whose essay is quite similar in nature to David’s own.

For the record my Parents sucked and they didn’t. I have long worked past the rage and disappointment and still focus on being grateful that whatever they did wrong or right enabled me to survive this very unconventional life I have been fortunate to lead. I know now I struggle with intimacy and tried too hard and then when I checked out as I always do it is not handled well or I am dumped early on because of it and rather than give a shit I packed my shit and left leaving the mess tidely packed in designer bags and placed in storage until I finally could no longer do so. And with that I know am a one and done and will be super company for a moment, an hour, a minute but I will call it a day and live with that. We all do what we have to to survive, be a day, a week, a month, a year or a pandemic. But the toll is there and there is always that which must be unpacked, tossed or given away in which to fully function.

There is no one size fits all when it comes to how to diagnose and treat mental health. It is why we have so many confusing issues when it comes to understanding the mind, treating the patient and in turn actually “fixing” it in a way that enables an Individual to adjust, adapt and function in a productive manner with regards to society’s expectations on what is “normal.” I have to avoid going off on a tangent about this as frankly it is another definitive that means a specific “type” of behavior, attitude and manner that allows for little deviation by the one providing the definition. Again, who provides the definition controls the narrative and with that the ability to conform or manage falls to those who agree what is “normal” or not. Think about how Gay people were defined? Women defined? People of Color defined? Yeah.

There was an article in the Washington Post about the crisis in public education that has finally realized there is an extensive mental health problem not on the horizon but in fact now. I do feel that more is coming as Children born during the pandemic and are about now two years old should be included as these were born in a panic mode, have witnessed nothing but panic and given the evidence I have seen from 946 below me we have major problems with their parents mental health so their daughter will equally reflect some of that. And with that they are not alone, as many primary caregivers are primary breadwinners, despite the presences of two parents but more critical only one, few other family members active in care, and the pressure to work from home full time, yet maintain education or basic training all while trying to offer organized play. all under this whole mantra of “STAY SAFE” will produce a generation of children, I believe, to be truly mentally unstable. I see the evidence in the Schools, the Streets, in Public, at the Parks how undisciplined and confused they are with regards to order and managing their own behavior and expectations. Those parents who are succeeding are doing so I believe as they simply have worked double time to get their children back on track and usually those are people who have worked in Education or in some type of Medical Care as they are aware of developmental benchmarks and what those mean as Children age.

The privileged set have always had Nanny’s and Private Schools that did not close and with that their children will be as always, privileged. That said the diversity and inclusion issues will not happen as the ways they do so, via sports, music and other extracurricular activities declined and with that the social isolation only furthered that with more and more families relocating, going to home school or again relying on the biggest segregation method – Religion. Churches have understood this dynamic and weathered many a plague and this is no different. The rise in more dogmatic and conservative faith has been noted – particularly among Families of Color. Gimme that old time religion! And why? Because again the lack of AFFORDABLE mental health counselors is a massive issue. And with that the Post article states that both funding and available trained staff are an issue.

****

In many areas, even when money is in hand, hiring is not easy. As this school year opened, nearly 20 percent of schools reported vacancies in mental health positions, according to federal data. Schools often said they employed too few staff to manage the caseload but also complained about difficulties finding licensed providers, the data showed.

“We simply don’t have enough people in our profession to meet the need,” said Kelsey Theis, president of the Texas Association of School Psychologists. When families seek private therapists, “sometimes there’s a wait list of months and months before they get help,” she said.

In Maine, waiting lists grew so long last year that school counselor Tara Kierstead began looking out of state for therapists who had openings — a solution that was not practical for many families.

Surgeon General Vivek H. Murthy called out the “devastating” effects of the pandemic on youth mental health in a public advisory last December. Earlier that year, the American Academy of Pediatrics, the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry and the Children’s Hospital Association together declared “a national state of emergency” in children’s mental health. They pointed out that young people of color were especially affected and linked the struggle for racial justice to the worsening crisis.

A year later, this October, they sounded the alarm again. Things are not getting better.

***

And with this let’s discuss the mental health crisis that is being played out on our public streets. From coast to coast we are hearing about an immense housing crisis and with that many who are working but living paycheck to paycheck are finding themselves not out pacing inflation and the rising rents thanks to the housing market which rising interest rates have led to more renters, and with that more renters as the multi family market has never struggled to build, one look at Jersey City should confirm that, where as single family housing has. And with that when you struggle to pay bills and support your family the strain shows on all members regardless of age. I do believe that some of the better survivors are those with extended family members and multi age generations sharing a home. From an economic standpoint it enables a stronger base to afford housing and associated costs but also responsibility between the members regarding care and emotional support. It is not always ideal but there has to be ways to look at this and see what we can do to improve it (aka size of home) and in turn how there are ways to encourage access and availability to those without extensive community/family ties. The New York Times has been very active in writing articles about living alone and aging and the risks associated with that, that they had their former writer, Frank Bruni, do an essay on that issue to counterpoint the idea that being alone and aged is detrimental to one’s physical and mental health.

To truly see what is like to age in place there is nowhere better than New York City.  This is a city awash with varying levels of wealth and industry and yet I have never witnessed so many individuals within my peer group age so badly.  It is distressing to note that while all these supposed sophisticates living in the greatest City in the world they do so in simply poor physical and mental health.  I have met few that are mobile and independent without some type of assistance and those that are seemingly independent not functioning at high order.  They have access and availability to attend events, go to varying places in the City and yet getting therapy of some kind is either ignored or manipulated.   The body and the mind are connected folks and there are real problems here with the aging population.

This weekend I attended two Operas, The Hours, based on the book/movie and was created for the Soprano Renee Fleming to return to the MET and Rigoletto, the story of a sad clown which is by far more of a story of being alone and afraid despite the tone of the subject The Hours is about. I cannot say that The House is a complex story as it is and if you have no seen the movie or read the book, the Opera would be a loss. And fo the two this weekend, I adored Rigoletto, hada better seat and was besotted with the cast, they were PERFECTION; Despite the Hours stellar cast, the same could not be said. the story was missing, a theme which through a song would have shown the connection between the women, a use of lyrical hook perhaps may have worked. Again if you had not sen the movie or read the book the story was odd, you have Virginia writing the book, The Hours about Mrs, Dalloway; another woman jokingly called that by her friend and writer as she plans a party for him, and another reading said book while struggling with being a Wife/Mother in search of a “room of one’s own” all in different times in history and place. As they say it is complicated. And while I loved all the women, , they were beautiful and immensely talented there was no emotional connection to any of it. Rigoletto on the other hand… Reviews were mixed and not one person I spoke to liked it. The women in my row left at intermission, there were two men who hated it and raged all the way out, another who did not like a single piece and felt it lacking, and the woman crying on the subway informed me that it was garbage and should never have been made! At least the two women just left without incident, the need to stay throughout not one but two intermissions, and to rage all the way out, on the subway seems to have a a problem with emotional restraint and management. In other words – mental health. And this is visible everywhere, which explains the burst of violence (not just guns but in both verbal and physical assaults.

Texas and Florida have been front and center in the culture wars when it comes to education and with that, I read about Brevard County in Florida and the mass exodus by Teachers and other Staff in the district due to Students uncontrolled behavior.   From masturbating in class to utter disregard and abuse to Teachers during class does not shock me in the least.  I saw similar acts of excess in Nashville when I lived there and I can only imagine the state of the schools now.  I am exhausted trying to explain to Teachers here the way the District alone disrespects Substitutes it is only a part of the reason the Students do.  They model the expectations and behaviors which sends a message to Students to do the same.  I welcome the day when proper introductions are made and I am greeted by name, but that is beyond reach in most schools but it is possible.  Try to imagine coming into someone’s home or they into yours and not being formally introduced or acknowledged.  I guess that is what these people do, just ignore strangers, and hope they take care of the formality.  The reality is that we are invisible and with that it greatly affects my mental health in ways that harken back to the days when I had Traumatic Brain Injury, it is that serious and traumatic.  I have spent days contemplating my mental health and long-term wellness and with that it affects how I see myself and my relationships to others.

During the pandemic being a loner paid off, and I thrived.  Today when out and about I am exhausted being in the company of others.  The endless sense of entitlement you once saw in New Yorker’s has now doubled down.  The extreme rudeness and paranoia are on overdrive.  I have experienced it one time too many in the Theater and until Saturday managed to avoid it at the Opera.  The reality is that many went to see the acclaimed star, they arrived in walkers, wheelchairs, with canes, hearing aids and other disabilities that are so prevalent I cannot imagine why they did not go to a theater to view it on HD simulcast or listen to it on the radio simply for that reason alone.  The man behind me at Rigoletto was stoned eating edibles the entire performance, his friends had never been and were clueless, about the protocol, and they were not young.  They expressed amazement at the seat shuffle that took place, not realizing as the Opera began many were moving seats as now is customary and that many open seats were being sold at a flat $50 dollars to anyone willing to come as the MET day of, as its online site had been cyber attacked so empty seats were for the taking.  It is why I moved immediately once the lights went down and my row did as well to much better views.  I informed them that this is the new Met, sit anywhere and come late they hold the doors for at least 15 minutes for that reason.  Nothing starts on time.   The boxes are equally empty and if you know how to handle that area no one would notice you slipping into one.  Frankly the sight range is poor but the sound is better so it is a tradeoff.  And these two demanded to go to a box immediately.  Dear God. This is common to any coffee shop or bar of late, the endless demands and orders as if they are at home and this is simply an extension of it.    But sadly, this behavior is not confined to New York by any stretch.

Mental health is a problem, the depth and breadth are not fully realized as in reality many have employed coping skills and strategies to make it work, as do I, but this long-range problem is not anywhere near resolution.  Look at Twitter the cesspool of idiocy and hate.  Look at Washington Post comments and see a miasma of cranks, bots and morons writing their brain farts as if they have just composed a modern version of Great Expectations. Do you honestly believe the progeny of these individuals will be mentally sound and capable of handling a crisis let alone daily living?  I do not. And I point to the precious snowflake in  Apt 946 and her psychotic parents as an example of unhinged idiots.  The Mother a massive Karen and her spouse an abusive asshole who threatened me.  These are not model parents in any way. Nor are the ones storming the gates of schools, threatening Board Members, Teachers and Administrators.  I am not alone in the abuse but I am alone and I am having none of it.  And with that I pick and choose my battles but I soldier on. But I am afraid, very afraid. And I agree with this essay from this EMS Tech we are nowhere near fixing what is now, let alone what is coming.

I’m an N.Y.C. Paramedic. I’ve Never Witnessed a Mental Health Crisis Like This One.

Dec. 7, 2022 The New York Times Guest Essay

By Anthony Almojera

Mr. Almojera is a lieutenant paramedic with the New York City Fire Department Bureau of Emergency Medical Services and the author of “Riding the Lightning: A Year in the Life of a New York City Paramedic.”

There are New Yorkers who rant on street corners and slump on sidewalks beside overloaded pushcarts. They can be friendly or angry or distrustful. To me and my colleagues, they’re patients.

I’m a lieutenant paramedic with the Fire Department’s Bureau of Emergency Medical Services, and it’s rare to go a day without a call to help a mentally ill New Yorker. Medical responders are often their first, or only, point of contact with the chain of health professionals who should be treating them. We know their names and their routines, their delusions, even their birthdays.

It is a sad, scattered community. And it has mushroomed. In nearly 20 years as a medical responder, I’ve never witnessed a mental health crisis like the one New York is currently experiencing. During the last week of November, 911 dispatchers received on average 425 calls a day for “emotionally disturbed persons,” or E.D.P.s. Even in the decade before the pandemic, those calls had almost doubled. E.D.P.s are people who have fallen through the cracks of a chronically underfunded mental health system, a house of cards built on sand that the Covid pandemic crushed.

Now Mayor Eric Adams wants medical responders and police officers to force more mentally ill people in distress into care. I get it: They desperately need professional help and somewhere safe to sleep and to get a meal. Forceful action makes for splashy headlines.

People with mental health challenges can be victims of violence. I’m also painfully aware of the danger people with serious mental illness and without access to treatment can pose to the public. Assaults on E.M.S. workers in the New York City Fire Department have steadily increased year over year. Our medical responders have been bitten, beaten and chased by unstable patients. A man who reportedly suffers from schizophrenia has been charged with fatally stabbing a colleague of mine, Capt. Alison Russo-Elling, in Queens on Sept. 29.

But dispatching medical responders to wrangle mentally disturbed people living on the street and ferry them to overcrowded psychiatric facilities is not the answer.

For one thing, the mayor is shifting more responsibility for a systemic crisis to an overworked medical corps burned out from years of low pay and the strain of the pandemic. Many E.M.S. workers are suffering from depression and lack adequate professional mental health support, much like the patients we treat. Several members of the Fire Department’s Emergency Medical Services have died by suicide since the pandemic began, and hundreds have quit or retired. Many of us who are still working are stretched to the breaking point.

I’ve gone down the road of despair myself. The spring and fall of 2020 left me so empty, exhausted and sleepless that I thought about suicide, too. Our ambulances are simply the entrance to a broken pipeline. We have burned down the house of mental health in this city, and the people you see on the street are the survivors who staggered from the ashes.

Those who are supposed to respond and help them are not doing well, either. Since March 2020, the unions that represent the Fire Department’s medical responders have been so inundated with calls from members seeking help that we set up partnerships with three mental health organizations, all paid for by the E.M.S. F.D.N.Y. Help Fund, an independent charity group founded and funded by medical responders and the public through donations to help us out in times of crisis.

We need to sift through the embers and see what we can salvage. Then we need to lay a new foundation, put in some beams to support the structure and start building.

What New York, like so many cities around the United States, needs is sustained investment to fund mental health facilities and professionals offering long-term care. This effort would no doubt cost tens of millions of dollars.

I’m not opposed to taking mentally ill people in distress to the hospital; our ambulances do this all the time. But I know it’s unlikely to solve their problems. Hospitals are overwhelmed, so they sometimes try to shuffle patients to other facilities. Gov. Kathy Hochul has promised 50 extra beds for New York City’s psychiatric patients. We need far more to manage those patients who would qualify for involuntary hospitalization under Mr. Adams’s vague criteria.

Often, a patient is examined by hospital staff, given a sandwich and a place to rest for a few hours and then discharged. If the person is intoxicated, a nurse might offer a “banana bag” — an intravenous solution of vitamins and electrolytes — and time to sober up. Chances are the already overworked staff members can’t do much, if anything, about the depression that led the patient to drink or take drugs in the first place.

Let’s say a patient does receive treatment in the hospital. Mr. Adams says that under the new directive, this patient won’t be discharged until a plan is in place to connect the person with ongoing care. But the systems responsible for this care — sheltered housing, access to outpatient psychiatric care, social workers, a path to reintegration into society — are horribly inadequate. There aren’t enough shelters, there aren’t enough social workers, there aren’t enough outpatient facilities. So people who no longer know how to care for themselves, who need their hands held through a complex process, are alone on the street once again.

A few days ago, I treated a manic-depressive person in his late 30s who was shouting at people on a subway platform in Downtown Brooklyn. The man said he’d gone two years without medication because he didn’t know where to get it. He said he didn’t want to go to a shelter, and I told him I knew where he was coming from: I was homeless for two years in my early 20s, and I slept in my car to avoid shelters; one night at the Bedford-Atlantic Armory was enough for me.

I persuaded the man to come with me to Brooklyn Hospital Center and made sure he got a prescription. Whether or not he’ll remember to take it, I don’t know.

While I don’t know how forcing people into care will help, I do see how it will hurt. Trust between a medical responder and the patient is crucial. Without it, we wouldn’t be able to get patients to talk to us, to let us touch them or stick needles filled with medications into their arms. But if we bundle people into our ambulances against their will, that trust will break.

Also, medical responders aren’t equipped to handle standoffs with psychiatric patients. In my experience, police officers are not keen to intervene with the mentally ill. They don’t have the medical knowledge to evaluate patients. So who is going to decide whether to transport them? What if we disagree? Protocol has been that the E.M.S. workers make the decision. Will the police now order us to take them? I can only imagine the hours that medical responders and cops will spend debating what to do with patients.

Rather than look for a superficial fix, Mr. Adams should turn his attention to our neglected health care apparatus. We must heavily invest in social services, housing and mental health care if we want to avoid this ongoing tragedy. We need this kind of investment across the United States, where there has been a serious mental health crisis since the pandemic began. My contact with New York City’s mentally ill population over the years and my own brushes with depression and homelessness have taught me we are all much closer to the abyss than we think.

Stories from the heart

I read this this morning and my heart aches for those who have been lost to gun violence. There are many kinds, homicide, suicide and of course mass shootings. They all share the same fact – death by a gun – but the way they were killed and how they were killed, differ.

These are some from the Washington Post that are about 9 individuals killed by a gun. I have little more to add but to ask that you read these stories and make no judgements other than the fact they are American and almost all of them are of color they are also largely people who were working class, they were not Gangsters or involved in the act of a crime nor even doing anything that would make you go, “Hmm well that is what you get going out to, coming home at…” Guns did this and the people who had the guns got them easily and had no problem using them to kill. We always need a motive, how about “Hey I got a gun let me go shoot some shit. I got to make it right” Who they kill why they kill is secondary to the fact that they had a gun and they used it to shoot to kill a fellow human. What more motive do you need? All gun crimes are hate crimes.

These are nine stories from America’s homicide crisis.

Jaylon was on his front porch.

Jody was at the park.

Juanita was sitting in her car.

Violence found them all

By Washington Post Staff

Nov. 27, 2022

Fowler reported from Jackson, Miss.; Gilsinan reported from St. Louis; Cusick reported from New Orleans; Freedman reported from Memphis; Bailey reported from Baton Rouge; Connors reported from Cleveland; and Rosenzweig-Ziff reported from Washington, D.C.

Topper photos by Kathleen Flynn, Dustin Franz, Maddie McGarvey and Joe Martinez.

Photo editing by Natalia Jimenez. Copy editing by Dorine Bethea. Story editing by Amanda Erickson. Design and development by Stephanie Hays. Data analysis by John D. Harden. Design editing by Madison Walls.

During the last three years, homicides nationwide have reached their highest levels in decades.

The deadly spike coincided with the onset of the coronavirus pandemic: The rate of killings rose nearly 30 percent in 2020 and remained high through the following year, according to a Washington Post database created to track the toll. Even now, as the bloodshed has slowed, the homicide rate outpaces pre-pandemic levels.

This gun violence tends to grab headlines when it occurs in horrific public spasms: at a Walmart in Virginia, a nightclub in Colorado, an elementary school in rural Texas. But the focus on mass shootings obscures the totality of the American ailment: people killed on city streets and inside their homes, deaths that seldom attract national attention and cases that rarely involve high-profile prosecutions. In many, an arrest has yet to be made.

The slayings have left a trail of grieving families, neighborhoods in mourning and an untold number of people dealing with the trauma of sudden, brutal loss. And the toll is not equally borne.

Gun crime disproportionately impacts people of color, especially Black men. Victim data collected from each city profiled here show Black people made up more than 80 percent of the total homicide victims in 2020 and 2021. And while data show gun deaths have surged around the country, a number of cities lead the way.

The Post visited nine of these places, which have seen some of the nation’s highest recent murder rates. They are spread mostly across the South and Midwest. Some have long been in the spotlight for their homicide numbers, others have not.

In each place, monuments have sprung up to commemorate those lost, some informal and fleeting, others lasting — some public, some private. They mark a death, but just as important, they remind everyone who sees them of the lives lived: the aspiring aerospace engineer, the retired chef who cooked for the hungry, the teen so funny he was granted five minutes at the end of class to joke around, the 4-year-old who laid flowers on her dad’s grave last Father’s Day.

Cleveland

Lawrence Morgan, 17

‘He was my person.’

Bethany Rohrer, left, and a friend of her late son Lawrence Morgan comfort Allison Radulov during a vigil held in memory of Lawrence in Parma, Ohio.

A couple of years before he was killed, 17-year-old Lawrence Morgan posted a sign on his bedroom door: “Guns Forbidden.

“He was always talking about how he hated how people carried guns,” said Joey Kline, Lawrence’s best friend since fourth grade. “He was just so against guns.”

He had other passions too. His mother Bethany Rohrer said her son loved basketball and making people laugh. He was goofy and endearing — one of his teachers even offered him five minutes at the end of every class to joke around, as long as he cut it out during lessons.

“Every memory I have of him is of us laughing and smiling,” Kline said.Lawrence’s uncle Bob Schnable puts together a picture board before a celebration of life ceremony.

Friends were always popping over to Lawrence’s house in Parma, a Cleveland suburb; his mother wanted it that way. The boys would sometimes wander to a nearby park or drive around the neighborhood. That is what they were doing the afternoon of June 21, when someone started firing.

At least 170 people were killed in Cleveland in 2021

Lawrence was shot seven times in the chest and died on the scene. Police later arrested Gunnar Glaszewski, 16, and charged him with murder and felonious assault. Gunnar and Lawrence lived a couple of blocks from each other and went to the same high school. “There was a six-month period where Gunnar was at our house every day,” Rohrer said. “Then they had a falling out, and they weren’t friends anymore.”

The day after Lawrence was killed, two of his friends created a memorial at the corner where he was shot. They wrapped a telephone pole in strips of crepe paper — red and purple, his favorite colors — and attached star-shaped balloons. At the base, they pinned a large piece of poster board with #LLL — Long Live Law.

That evening, they held a vigil. A small crowd of friends and family lit candles; Beyonce’s “Heaven” played in the background.

“He was my person, really the only person I could ever talk to,” said a sobbing Allison Radulov, a friend from middle school. “He’s just a genuine person, never out to hurt anyone.”

“Lawrence was such a good kid,” said Tashondra Forster. “He tried to direct my son on the right path. He was just a positive role model for him.”

St. Louis

Damion Baker, 25

He helped a woman to her car. Then the shooting started.

Family members of Damion Baker mourn near his casket during the memorial and celebration of life services at Lighthouse Baptist Church

Damion Baker was in elementary school when he picked up the phrase he’d use for the rest of his life: “Well, technically …”

It tickled his mom An’namarie Baker to hear her son carefully explain some finer point. The expression captured Baker’s essence, she said. He was witty and diligent, a leader in school and a Division I college football player who went on to run his own construction business.

262 people were killed in St. Louis in 2020

Baker was “cooler than a Cadillac with AC in hundred-degree weather,” his friend Kevin Spraggins Jr. said at his funeral. He had great taste in sweatshirts, An’namarie said, and gave “the best hugs,” according to his aunt Carlotta Baker.

That kindness was on full display on July 3 when Baker escorted a woman to her car in downtown St. Louis. The pair were shot in an attempted carjacking. She survived; Baker died at the age of 25. The case remains unsolved.

At a service in Baker’s honor, images flashed across the auditorium screen ahead of the ceremony. In one photo, Baker is a skinny kid with big ears. In another, he is a grinning teenager in a #17 jersey at Christian Brothers College High School. In one video clip, he is teaching his beloved niece De’Sanyi, now 5, how to brush her teeth. (“Don’t eat” the toothpaste, he advises her on the video.)

Baker dreamed of playing for the NFL, making enough money so his mother would not have to work. But when he realized that was not going to happen, he adjusted. “One thing D-Bake told me was, ‘if we’re stand-up men, that’s all our mama want,’ ” his cousin Abryon Givens said at the service.

Baker’s older brother Devon said their mother called the two of them her “Double Ds.” At an early age, they had decided that meant “dedication and determination.” The boys saw things through to the end, An’namarie said, “whether they liked it or not.”

An’namarie is focused now on ending the gun violence that has taken so many other children from their mothers. “Damion cannot just be some random number of homicide, and we move on to the next number,” she said. “It’s gotta look different.”

Columbus, Ohio

Glenn Clark III, 50

‘He was a proud daddy.’

The family of Glenn Clark III gather in Grove City, Ohio, to commemorate his death.

As a high-schooler in the late 1980s, Glenn Clark III would get out of the shower and head straight outside. The only way to get his hair just right was to speed down the road past his family’s farm on his motorcycle, his family said.

He soon found joy working with his hands while tilling the sod fields at his home outside Columbus, Ohio. That passion led to a career as a mechanic working in factories in Ohio and Kentucky, where he moved with his then-wife, Deana Burke, and his two children.

“He was a proud daddy and a simple guy,” said Desere Adams, 54, his older sister. “He wore T-shirts with holes in them and loved riding his motorcycle. If I needed him, if they needed him, he was there.”After Clark was killed, his parents named their cat Happy, Clark’s nickname.

After he and Burke divorced 20 years ago, he moved back to work in Grove City, Ohio, to live with his parents.

Then, almost seven years ago, he met Rochelle Rice, now 53. On their first date, they spent five hours talking about Vikings — Clark knew everything about the Scandinavian seafarers’ history — and laughing. Two months later, they bought a house near Columbus.

In August, Clark received a promotion. That night, he went to a bar with members of his motorcycle club, the Avengers, to toast his new job. At the bar, a fight broke out. Five people were shot, and at least one bullet hit and killed Clark, one of two Avengers who died.

At least 100 people have been killed so far in Columbus in 2022

Nearly three months later, the police investigation is ongoing.

On what would have been his 51st birthday last month, Adams, Rice and the rest of the family gathered at Clark’s parents’ home to celebrate his life. They all wore their new urn jewelry — necklaces with his photo or Viking symbols and a small place for his ashes — and Adams, Rice and Shadow, now 28, showed the tattoos they had gotten to memorialize Clark.

“He was bigger than Everest in my mind,” Shadow said. “He was my hero.”

New Orleans

Shane Brown, 20

‘He was my little brilliant mind.’

Shane Brown, 20, was murdered in March. His body was found in a canal near this intersection in New Orleans East.

At St. Anna’s Episcopal Church in the Treme neighborhood, the Rev. Bill Terry and his team have maintained a somber project. On large boards hung across the church’s facade, they handwrite particulars about each New Orleanian killed by violence. Date. Name. Age. Method.

Among this year’s names: Shane Brown. 20. Shot.

“He was my little brilliant mind,” his mother, Gloria Brown, 56, said.

At least 205 people were killed in the first eight months of 2022 in New Orleans

Nicknamed “the brain” by his family, Shane Brown was an avid reader and honor roll student who enjoyed programming and robotics. He was also socially aware, said E’jaaz Mason, 31, Brown’s digital media teacher at New Orleans Charter Science and Mathematics High School.

“You can tell he internalized a lot of what is going on in this country when it comes to Black boys,” Mason said. “He cared about the state of his people, and I always really respected that about him.”

Gloria Brown holds her phone showing a photo she made of an “S” she saw in the clouds recently. She said since he passed she has seen the shape in the clouds or in water and can feel his presence. Handwritten names, ages and method of death of New Orleanians killed are kept on a memorial on the facade of St. Anna’s Episcopal Church in the Treme neighborhood, including Brown, who was fatally shot. The program from Shane Brown’s funeral sits next to the Louisiana Film Prize he received for his 11-minute short, “Like a Ship Without a Sail,” when he was in high school. Brown, 20, was an avid reader and honor roll student.

As a junior, Brown approached Mason with an idea: He wanted to make a film about what Black boys experience in New Orleans.

“Kids used to come to me 10 times a day talking about wanting to make a movie,” Mason said. “But literally the very next day, Shane came with a double-sided sheet of loose-leaf paper, with a skeletal structure of a story.”

The two assembled a small team to bring Brown’s vision to life. The resulting 11-minute short, “Like a Ship Without a Sail,” swept the student awards at the Louisiana Film Prize the following spring.Gloria Brown sits at her kitchen table in Slidell.

A year later, as the covid-19 pandemic ravaged New Orleans, Brown graduated in a drive-through ceremony held at a local park. He turned down offers at engineering programs across the country to instead begin his undergraduate education at a local community college. Brown hoped to someday transfer to one of his dream schools, like Massachusetts Institute of Technology or Georgia Tech, with the ultimate goal of becoming an aerospace engineer.

By 2022, Brown was balancing his courses with a job at the port and getting around in his first car. Then this March, less than two weeks after his 20th birthday, Brown did not come home from work one day.

Five grueling days would pass before Brown’s body was discovered floating in a New Orleans East canal. Coroners later determined he died of a gunshot wound to the head.

Police made an arrest in the case, but Brown’s loved ones said they still do not know why he was killed. Gloria Brown instead tries to focus on appreciating the 20 years she had with her only child. “He was the person that I had asked for when I became a late mom,” she said.

Mason said Brown’s death signifies a loss of potential.

“You never know what that person would have done to improve and perfect our world,” he said. “And now we’ll never know.”

Memphis

Juanita Washington, 60

Juanita Washington’s photo sits outside the dance studio she loved.

“I just want to feel her presence,” said Ladia Yates, 32, owner of the Memphis dance studio where Washington worked as an administrator. “I don’t want anyone to forget her.”

Washington, 60, was fatally shot around lunchtime on Dec. 29, 2021, while sitting in her car in a Walgreens parking lot. A suspect was arrested in Las Vegas in March.

Homicides hit a record high in 2020 — and 2021 in Memphis

Yates had known Washington for nearly two decades. She and Yates’s grandmother Yvonne Paschal, who also works at the dance studio, had become particularly close.

“She was like our sergeant-at-arms,” said Paschal, 77. It was Washington who made sure everyone paid admission at events. She was loving but firm with the kids, and known for her honesty. “She was very open — you didn’t have to guess where she was coming from,” Paschal said.

“I just really didn’t have a friend like I had with Juanita,” she added. “I don’t have anyone that I can talk to and share things like she and I did.”

Washington was considered family by many employees of the studio where she worked for years before she was shot and killed. Yates, center, with some of her youth dancers, pose for a photo while wearing hoodies honoring the memory of Washington. Yates poses with some of her dancers around a memorial honoring Washington.

Washington’s spot at the front desk, beside Paschal, remains off limits. Yates held a candlelight vigil there in the days after the shooting, and has dedicated performances in Washington’s memory, tributes her studio has carried into performances this year.

The first of those came the day of Washington’s funeral — but took place 1,800 miles away in Los Angeles. Yates had committed to a competition there and did not want to back out. The specially choreographed opener, a swirling portrait of fury and grace set to gospel star Kirk Franklin’s “Don’t Cry,” was devoted to Washington.

Earlier that day in a Facebook post, Yates had written: “These folks don’t understand the beast that’s about to come out of me on this dance floor.”

Birmingham, Ala.

Jaylon Palmore, 13

He told his family he was going to be famous.

Kim Woody-Walker, the mother of Jaylon Palmore, stands next to the overgrown garden she and her son kept together. Since Jaylon was killed by a stray bullet on March 5, Woody-Walker has not been able to bring herself to clear and replant the garden.pper

The quiet 13-year-old stood before his parents in their east Birmingham home and made a bold declaration: “Y’all just watch, I’m gonna be famous.A keepsake card from the funeral of Jaylon, who was killed at his home in east Birmingham by a stray bullet on March 5. Jaylon was an avid gamer and hoped to go pro when he became an adult.

It was the kind of thing kids always say, and Jaylon Palmore had said it before. Like the time he told his mother, Kim Woody-Walker, and her husband, Gregory Walker, that he would be a star football player. “You’re going to have to beef up, son,” they replied, smiling at the lanky teen.

But Jaylon’s real passion was gaming. So when he said it again, and told his parents to remember his gamertag — “You’ll be looking for Jaypop27!”— they were inclined to believe him.

After all, they watched the way he set his mind to something and followed through, like when his grades began to slip and they told him he’d lose the PlayStation if he did not shape up. The report cards that followed made his parents proud.

At least 100 people have been killed since the start of 2022 in Birmingham

Jaylon’s stepdad liked to rib him about all the time he spent in his room, controller in hand, headset on: “Don’t you have a girl you can speak to?” Walker would ask, joking with the son he had helped raise for a decade. But really, his parents did not mind the hobby. He was soft-spoken and introverted, and gaming kept him inside, safe and out of trouble.

“My baby said he was going to be famous,” Woody-Walker said. “But I did not know and I did not want it to be this way.”

On the afternoon of March 5, Jaylon was on the porch with some of his older sister’s friends when two cars drove past the house, and gunmen opened fire. The first bullet hit Jaylon in the back and tore through his internal organs. Another hit an older man in the arm; he would survive, but Jaylon did not. In September, more than six months after the shooting, police arrested a suspect in the case. They believe someone else on the porch that day was the intended target.

Jaylon was killed just weeks before his 14th birthday, just months before the end of eighth grade. At school, his teachers and classmates painted a banner with his name in bright blue script and released a raft of balloons in his honor. The sign at the building’s entrance read “We love you Jaylon.” At graduation, the school held a seat open in his honor, adorned with his photo and a rose.

Woody-Walker is waiting to set up her own space to celebrate Jaylon. The couple decided to sell their house, which was full of reminders of their son.

The family did not take many pictures, but they have a reel of memories: Jaylon stroking his mother’s face and asking, “Momma, why you so soft?”; and the time his dad took him fishing, and Jaylon showed him up, catching bream after bream.

The sound of Jaylon’s music, oldies like Frankie Beverly and Maze and Earth, Wind and Fire. And his eclectic sense of style, an outfit never complete without a colorful pair of sneakers.

On May 27, Woody-Walker visited her son’s grave with a big Happy Birthday sign. She cleaned up around the site, sat down and talked to him. She told him she loved him, she’d never forget him and that she would see him again one day.

“Just rest, baby,” she said. “Just rest.”

Baton Rouge

Leslie Joseph Riley Jr., 66

He said he would die under the tree he loved. He was killed there.

From left, Larry Mack, Mike Walker and Charles Russell hang out at a lot that has been a gathering place for longtime friends in the neighborhood in Baton Rouge. Their friend Leslie Joseph “Jody” Riley Jr. was killed there in the afternoon of July 24th.

His name was Leslie Joseph Riley Jr. But almost everyone knew him as “Jody,” a gregarious man with a teasing smile who could often be found lingering in the shade of the towering oak trees at the corner of Tennessee and East Polk streets in South Baton Rouge.Riley is pictured in a family photo with his grandchildren Jaden Brown, right, Kyson Brown, bottom left, and Kensley Brown of Durham North Carolina.

A small vacant lot, it had for decades been an unofficial park for the locals. There were chairs and a grill, which Riley, a retired chef, often used to cook meals for neighbors who could not afford anything to eat. At 66, he had spent his life in the shadow of those trees, growing from a boy into an old man — recently joking with his family that he’d probably spend his last hours on earth in that very spot.

No one ever imagined that would be true. But on July 24, just after 3 p.m., a crackle of gunfire interrupted a sunny Sunday afternoon. Someone in a passing car had opened fire, spraying a volley of bullets toward the trees. Riley, who is not believed to have been the target, died at the scene. A second man, 20, was also shot but survived.

Gunfire has been the soundtrack of a violent stretch here in a neighborhood known as the Bottom — a nickname tied to its hilly terrain but which to some has also come to define the decline of what used to be the vibrant center of the Black community. Riley had been there through it all here, choosing to stay and raise a family even as businesses shuttered and homes fell into disrepair.

LEFT: A memorial plant was planted near where Riley was killed. RIGHT: Leslie Brown, second from right, and his daughters Jasmin Brown, left, Tonniesha Johnson, and Jada Brown, right, pose for a portrait in Leslie’s neighborhood in Baton Rouge.

Riley dreamed of becoming a chef and got his culinary arts degree. For years, he worked at Louisiana State University, cooking at a fraternity house and then at the student union. But at night, he returned to the Bottom to cook for his family, friends and neighbors.

149 people killed in Baton Rouge in 2021, nearly double the number killed in 2019

“He was always passionate about cooking, and that’s how he gave back to the community that he loved,” said Jasmin Brown, Riley’s granddaughter. “He cooked under that tree, all the time. For people he knew, for total strangers. That’s who he was. A man with a heart of gold.”

Riley was angry to see the neighborhood falling into decline, even as other areas of Baton Rouge were being revitalized. His oldest son, also named Leslie, had recently started a nonprofit aimed at drawing city resources and jobs into the community. Riley had recently played in a charity baseball game to raise money for the group. Now, a photo of him from that game is pasted to one of those towering oaks so central to his life.

In the days after the shooting, the spot sat eerily empty. Police have made no arrests. Nearby a sign waved from one of the trees: “Long live Jody,” it read.

Jackson, Miss.

Mariyah Lacy, 4

She buried her dad. Then the violence came for her.

Treasha Lacy, 55, holds a tribute blanket alongside photos memorializing her deceased son and granddaughter at her home in Carrollton, Miss.

Mariyah Lacy slips in and out of the video frame. The 4-year-old is in a pink tank top and ponytail, blue balloons around her. As the camera shifts toward the ground, Mariyah’s tiny gold sandals fill the screen. She lays flowers on her father’s grave.

The clip is from Father’s Day 2021. Mariyah had told her aunt she wanted to “go see Daddy.”Memorial signs remain outside the home of Treasha Lacy in honor of her deceased son and granddaughter.

A year later, her family would bury Mariyah beside him, both victims of Mississippi’s gun violence epidemic. Mariyah was shot sitting in the back of her mother’s truck on June 12. Her mother’s ex-boyfriend has been charged in the killing.

Jackson had the highest homicide rate per capita in 2021, with 153 killings

The family’s “ball of sunshine,” Mariyah was always telling jokes. She loved to be around people and gave everyone she encountered a hug. She liked to stay up late and watch cartoons; Treasha Lacy, her grandmother, would often make a pallet on the floor for Mariyah and her older sister to spend the night. She loved Ramen noodles and seafood; when her father Cornelius Lacy was alive, he would feed her crab legs.

Treasha wanted to honor her granddaughter’s “princess” spirit at her funeral. Mariyah’s casket was covered in images of mermaids, unicorns and butterflies. The toddler was buried in a blue-and-pink fluffy dress; Treasha knew she would have liked it.

Treasha doesn’t like to think about the moments after Mariyah was shot. Was she in pain? Barely 4 feet tall, Treasha’s afraid she knows the answer. “I try not to think she suffered but I’m pretty sure she did,” she said.

Treasha has suffered too. There are days when she is angry. Days when the house is quiet, and it is all just too much to bear. In those moments, she swears she can hear Mariyah running through the house, pulling on her pants leg, saying, “Nana, Nana, Nana.”

Family photos line every wall in Treasha’s home; Mariyah’s face is in half a dozen. A wall in the living room is dedicated to pictures of Cornelius. After Mariyah’s death, Treasha added three more photos of Mariyah, now hung underneath a portrait of her father.

They had the same eyes. Walking down the hall from her bedroom, Cornelius’s photos would greet Treasha each morning. She used to say “Good morning, Cornelius” aloud. Now she silently says good morning to them both.

“What helps me out so much is I know Mariyah is an angel watching over us,” she said. “She’s an angel, and she’s with her dad in his arms.”

Baltimore

Jesika Tetlow, 18

She always wanted to help.

Susannah Ford gathers with friends and family two months after her daughter Jesika Tetlow’s death.

She stood up for her intellectually disabled older sister, classmates who were bullied and any animal she could find. She convinced her family to rescue five stray kittens during two hurricanes. While walking into a Walmart with her mom near her home outside Baltimore, Jesika Tetlow, then 8, called the police because she saw a dog left by itself in a shopper’s car.

“She had this big huge heart for people and for animals,” said Susannah Tetlow, her mother. “She made people feel special and made them each feel like her best friend.”

In Baltimore, at least 200 people have been killed so far in 2022

In middle school, her friend who was having suicidal thoughts had been in the bathroom for longer than usual, so Tetlow volunteered to go look for her.

She found her friend trying to drown herself in the toilet of the school bathroom. Tetlow called 911 and helped save her friend, but the incident made going into school too painful. So Tetlow was home-schooled instead, her family said.

Ford pets one of the cats that her daughter Jesika Tetlow rescued. She had gathered with friends and family to memorialize Tetlow two months after her death. Ford and her son Josh Tetlow decorate a poster with pictures of Jesika. Tetlow was murdered inside a friend’s home during a home invasion.

But when the pandemic hit, forcing classes online, Tetlow thrived, her mother said. She developed an interest in medicine and decided she would either be a veterinarian or a doctor — or maybe both.

On Aug. 30, Tetlow, now 18, went to her friend’s house to take her online classes — she had continued to take classes online even when in-person learning resumed. That night, five masked people dressed in black raided the house. At least one of them had a gun, and shot Tetlow twice through the head and killed her.

Tetlow’s family found out the next morning. “My brain and my heart just shattered,” Susannah Tetlow said of the moment she found out.Tetlow was killed in a home on this block in Baltimore.

The police investigation is ongoing as the family figures out how to memorialize their daughter. A photo of Tetlow and her sister dressed up for homecoming has taken on a new meaning. Tetlow hated being alone and in the dark, so they all got necklaces with space for her ashes so she will always be with them. The family is also wearing turquoise bracelets that say, “Justice for Jesika,” and is hoping to start a foundation in her name.

Susannah Tetlow has also started attending a Thursday night meeting of grieving families at Roberta’s House in Baltimore. “It’s the kind of camaraderie you would not wish on your worst enemy,” Tetlow said of the group, which includes others who have also lost children.

But still, she has struggled to make sense of what happened.

“This is not normal. This is not normal for a city and a country to have so many shootings every day,” Susannah Tetlow said. “This is a human. This is my child. And now she’s gone.”

Thoughts, Prayers, what.ever

Another shooting on a campus, this one a College at UVA. Meanwhile across the country in Idaho outside the campus four were found dead believed to be a homicide.

I wrote about the school I used to teach at and where I began my career in Teaching in 1996. It was the students who kept me going and I believed in them and with that I no longer do. I have come to fear and dislike them. The lack of any dignity for themselves and others is most apparent. It was happening long before Covid and I saw that in Nashville and now in Jersey City that is only further exacerbated by the pandemic and distinction between those who managed to attend private or charter schools that remained open or had access to better online learning tools that also allowed them to forge forward on the path of academia. But with that I have already written about the challenges and adjustments made by those who went onto higher learning and have struggled, often blaming others and leading to Professors being terminated as their work was too challenging, they were unavailable or many other factors that seemingly have little to do with their actual skills or abilities that lend to achievement. That is our current state of affairs and again has been happening for quite some time – lay blame, point fingers and deny any personal responsibility or have any accountability.

Now we have 99 problems that have come from the pandemic and the magnifying glass that was finally placed upon the social inequity of our country and its heavy systemic and broken systems that are racist and elitist enabled those who for whatever reason seemingly knew nothing about it did. They read the right books, attended the right protests and then went back home to post their endless diatribes on social media to validate and confirm their wokeness. And with that the pendulum swung from left to right and with that we now have curriculum banning, book banning, conversations and word banning and a divisiveness that is now entrenched with the words”crime” as the dog whistle to remind everyone that the others are dangerous and could do harm. What “they” do harm with is of course guns but that is okay as now we are opening the flood gates and allowing anyone within arms reach of a gun to have one. It is working out great as the age of shooters are declining as access to guns is increasing. Coincidence much?

The political divisiveness was always a problem but we are back to serious racial ones. For those who were citing George Floyd as their moment to defund the Police, I suggest they turn back the clock to Michael Brown, or earlier to Eric Garner (2014) or earlier to Amadou Diallo. Or to any number of Police Brutality cases that may or may not have ended with death but serious harm and long term damage. There are no shortage of them but until Michael Brown there was what? Little accountability or information with regards to the number of cases thanks to no single source of record keeping. There are so many different agencies that are under the umbrella of law enforcement it is why many did not know and with that so many Police who were ultimately let go for said behavior simply transferred to another agency and continued to act in the manner that was less about serving and protecting the public, but of their own needs and beliefs. Think about the amount of law enforcement in your community, the City Police, the State Patrol, the County Police, the Transit Enforcement, the Port Authority are just some that all work or have business here in New Jersey. Then you have the Federal Agencies and their distinct Police – the FDA, the FBI, the CIA, the ATF and all of them have jurisdictions that supersede the State and Municipal ones. Yeah you can run but you can never hide.

But the reality is that despite it all Guns are the most significant tool and weapon we carry. The ATF is the single largest organization in which to regulate and enforce gun legislation but we have little to NO federal laws over guns and with that the piecemeal of laws that States and Cities try to enact are now being taken to the largest Federal Court in the land to overturn them. One minute it is State’s rights to create and enforce laws regarding Abortion but not when it comes thanks to the pesky 2nd Amendment. So with that it is Check and Mate on gun control. And yet when it comes to ATF they are being played well by Chess Masters that defy game play.

The constant refrain is that it is a Mental Health issue , and with that the idea that anyone who is nuts will not be able to get a gun. Sure that is a belief, but despite it all few if any of the most recent shooters had a mental health “red flag” that would have prevented them from doing so. I point to the Michigan shooter as his Parents are awaiting trial for their role in enabling if not encouraging their fucked up son from having a gun despite the school sharing with them their concerns. Great parents there. And the same goes for the Parade kid whose Dad bought him his gun. More shooters, more guns and more dead. Thoughts and prayers.

And so now with the crime bullshit being the least mentioned factor in the midterm and abortion as the reason many went to the polls will anything change? In a word? Fuck no. Okay that is two but in reality we are a Nation of Karen’s and Ken’s (their male equivalent) who are sure they are right about their indignant feelings of entitlement and rightness. That is the new “wokeness” as the aggrieved state of it all is about their inconveniences, their accommodations and their betterness about being white and yet no one is accommodating them? But they read White Privilege isn’t that enough? No, for anyone who is not like you, just like you, if not in actual color but in belief and demeanor, you are not white enough, so no clearly no. But a gun can solve that. If you fail to kill yourself with it try killing your own. It will work out well. Or not.

Blame Fox News

There is no question that Fox News plays a significant role in spreading misinformation and with that views from specific hosts that contribute to the rise of Anti Semitic and White Supremacist views. They lend their voice to the paranoid. And like Mass Shooters I have no desire to name the names of those who seem to truly be mouthpieces for hate. But they are only one part of the campaign to destroy Democracy.

The rise of the Internet and specifically Social Media is perhaps the biggest contribution to the lack of dialogue and ability to communicate effectively. It is part of the reason for the divisiveness and the tribal nature of our current state of mind. And with that our minds have become tools in which to serve either larger tech companies to fuel their Tesla’s with and line their wallets with the immense amount of data they have collected and use to sell you more shit, be that believes or actual shit. The other is by political leaders and their agenda in which to control the message. America is most at risk as their are few and far protections for this type of propaganda that lines the interwebs. Under the guise of free speech many platforms can be hijacked by any number of agents of mass destruction to weave a web of lies and misinformation. We have seen that repeatedly by both Russia and China but it has happened in many other countries where access to larger sites are not available so the back channels also are manipulated to enhance fear and spread discontent.

There are Web Sites, Blogs, Advertisements, Chats, all clickbait that are also equally tooled in which to confuse and mislead others. They thrive in what is often called the “dark web” but in reality they are right there in the light but Google and other search engines simply don’t boost those searches to the top of the food chain. When someone can find a White Supremacist meetup openly on Twitter they are not doing that great of a job to hide such info. The lack of ability to actually monitor all that shit on reddit, Twitter, etc is a massive task that is beyond the scope and scale of several individuals who speak every single language in which one speaks. They rely on users to do what they fail to do. But in the time that the info is up the damage is done. Technology is made to be addictive and we have a way bigger crisis than the opioid one with regards to this.

When Paul Pelosi was attacked out came the cry, Blame Fox! Yeah a homeless drifter has been watching cable news as the shelter. Really? The man was always on the fringes. but with a cell phone you have internet access to something way larger in scale and by far more dangerous. I have written about the educated and supposed sophisticated New Yorkers with college degrees and live in the Upper West Side and their dalliance with Q’Anon and trust me New York for all its grandiosity it is a very provincial town. Many never leave their neighborhoods and if so do so by cab or car service and frequent the same places daily. They are often clueless about their own city and where things are or what to do unless they have a review from the Times that has made it a must see/go. Then they all flock like sheep to it and head back to their overpriced apartments unless they are oldsters and have rent controlled ones. They are all to some degree the overrated Fran Lebowitz, she just became famous capitalizing on the Yenta persona. I have people here in Jersey City a 5 minute PATH ride or Ferry Ride into the City who don’t. Trust me people are tribal, they live in them and have little reason to venture into another one’s territory and that reason is FEAR. Fear of not knowing and the effort it takes to know. As long as people are AFRAID you can have some sort of conformity and compliance, it makes it easier to rule and keep order.

Much of the current state of paranoia or another type of “plague” is that of CRIME and the fear of being attacked, harmed, raped, murdered, robbed etc. The largest criminal activity most have ever experienced is a car break in or car theft, some other type of small scale robbery taking something that was left out or visible, like package theft; however, in most cases there is no actual VICTIM. Wait, but I was harmed, yes but not physically. Victimless crimes are the ones that fill the Police docket and lead to the most Police shootings, They are the stop and frisk, you look suspicious and lack an actual complainant. Michael Brown was “suspected” of taking cigarettes, George Floyd of passing a fake 20, Sandra Bland a traffic stop. But if they had not died in Police Custody we likely would never hear of it, unless Sandra or George drove and killed a nice white girl jogging, walking, taking a nap at the park, going to a Wendy’s, or say Michael being accused of raping a nice white girl… you know like Emmet Till.

Actual Crime Stats are not that interesting and you do have to search for them and again they are largely happening in the Brown and Black communities. And actual data and information is complex as this thesis from the Brennan Center discusses.

And then we have the media with its own agenda and crie du cour headline or clickbait invite to remind you that shit is happening and we got you covered, now back to Stu for Weather! Crime sells folks and paranoia does as well. I read this profile of a family in Arizona who are divided over their beliefs and those are largely formed by a 24 hour dose of Fox. I literally laughed out loud reading this story as these are the epitome of White Trash Americans. None seem to have a real job and claim to have degrees as in multiple ones, and of course add the entire faux spirituality bullshit shared by many MAGA and non MAGA Americans. The Shaman anyone? Any religion, any cult, with a focus on a belief be it standard vanilla or neopolitan has a person predisposed to myths and bullshit. So add to that a drifter, a person not connected to standard anchors that can at least circumvent some of this. And even that is not a guarantee that the bullshit one needs in which to feel they belong to a “tribe”. And Paul Pelosi’s attacker fits that bill to a tee. As do many of the attacks on Jews, Asians or others who are profiled in the news and believed to be the raison d’etre for the assault. Asian hate began after the spa attacks and which there were none after that and we have heard nothing more about the case or the attacker’s motives. What happened there, no trial or what? Again we move on and then a a random attack by a mentally ill lunatic on the street towards an Asian and sure enough we have a crime spree and Asian Hate. The mentally ill likely not again watching Fox at the Shelter but has access to information aka disinformation on the one medium they do have access to – the interwebs. Then the idea is implanted into their broken brains and they act upon this as to belong to the “tribe” to be seen, to have a narrative and have a place. So pick a week and pick a new victim in which to target. And with it hear more about it where? The news and social media which will affirm and reaffirm the real and more importantly the imagined. And then some idiot who is already losing their religion, so to speak, acts on it.

What this is is Stochastic Terrorism. This is violence committed by an attacker who, though acting on personal volition, is inspired by language demonizing the target. It has existed for as long as those who hatemonger have communicated and urged their communities to despise some minority in its midst.

This is explained in the article I have put below to enable you to understand this concept and how it affects many and their motives behind their acts. Some are clearly used to defend and support their beliefs and others who have simply been swept up in the medias drumbeat and the way social media adds to it only making it louder and more resonant to those who have little else in which to belong. And don’t we all want to belong? Oh yeah and be more white.

Troubled Loner? Political Terrorist? Both? It’s Often Hard to Say

The attack on Nancy Pelosi’s husband has raised questions about the role of demonizing political speech in violent acts, not for the first time.

By Max Fisher The Interpreter The New York Times Nov. 3, 2022

The search for a larger lesson in the invasion of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s home, chiefly from among the details of the accused invader’s life and social media history, has, like so many things in American life, been split by partisanship.

“The Republican Party and its mouthpieces now regularly spread hate and deranged conspiracy theories,” Hillary Clinton, the 2016 Democratic presidential nominee, tweeted. “It is shocking, but not surprising, that violence is the result.” Others, though, have argued that the attacker’s mental state makes any political cause he latched onto incidental.

Just because a debate is partisan does not mean that both views are equally valid. Experts in political violence have argued for years that dehumanizing and apocalyptic language by prominent right-wing figures is helping to drive the rise in far-right violence. Federal agencies call far-right terrorism a growing threat.

The man who attacked Ms. Pelosi’s husband, Paul, may have been inspired by acrimonious political messaging. At the same time, he also may be a troubled loner who latched onto political conspiracies incidentally. The two possibilities are not necessarily in tension.

Some extremism researchers see those two explanations as so intertwined that there is even a name for the sort of violence they can jointly provoke: stochastic terrorism.

Stochastic terrorism is defined as violence committed by an attacker who, though acting on personal volition, is inspired by language demonizing the target. It has existed for as long as hatemongers have urged their communities to despise some racial or religious minority in their midst.

What details have emerged about David DePape, the man accused of attacking Mr. Pelosi, have raised the possibility that his attack might fit this model. Prosecutors’ filings portray him as acting on behalf of right-wing political narratives that characterized Ms. Pelosi as a danger to the nation. But the filings also give no indication that the attack was anything other than his idea alone.

Other details about Mr. DePape suggest that he was adrift and emotionally troubled. This is hardly unusual with individuals who commit violence on behalf of some cause encountered online — indeed, it is a profile that extremist groups are known to actively pursue — but it makes the question of motivation a psychological as much as a political one.

The term “stochastic terror” emerged in the 2010s, as extremist groups of all stripes began using the internet to reach millions in the hopes that even one individual might be inspired to action. It comes from the Greek word stochastikos, meaning randomly determined or a guessing aim, referring to the instigators’ inability to control who will act on their incitement or how.

The messiness of assigning motive in such cases means that society’s biases can sometimes intrude. In the United States, white attackers are often identified as disturbed loners, where a Muslim attacker with a similar profile might more readily be called a terrorist, for example.

What we now call stochastic terror is most associated with modern jihadist groups like the Islamic State, which have issued online calls for volunteers to indiscriminately attack civilians in countries at war with the groups.

But they did not invent such methods. In the early 1900s, Russian newspapers filled with hateful conspiracies against Jews, helping to provoke the waves of communal violence known as pogroms. In the 1960s in the United States, a series of angry loners acted on far-right language demonizing civil rights leaders, launching a wave of assassinations.

More recently, in India, Hindu nationalist groups have trumped up accusations against the country’s Muslim minority, inspiring some Hindus to turn on their Muslim neighbors.

Often, the demonizing language might inspire violence without calling for it explicitly. Instead it suggests that the offending target poses a danger so grave that extreme action may be necessary.

In a paper last year, Molly Amman, a former profiler for the F.B.I., and J. Reid Meloy, a forensic psychologist, cited as one example an attempted plot to kidnap and perhaps kill Gretchen Whitmer, the governor of Michigan.

The accused plotters appeared to be likely acting in part, the authors suggested, on language from then-president Donald J. Trump portraying Ms. Whitmer as a runaway despot and urging followers to “liberate Michigan.”

That there was no explicit link between Mr. Trump’s language and the accused plotters’ actions, and that Mr. Trump may not have even intended as much, can be typical of such violence, Ms. Amman and Mr. Meloy argued.

“The speaker’s rhetoric may range from bombastic declarations that the target is a threat by some measure, to ‘jokes’ about violent solutions, or to the shared problem posed by the target,” the authors wrote.

In individual cases, the authors added, the speakers’ intentions are often impossible to prove, as is the role of that speech in nudging some listener closer to action.

Sometimes this is deliberate, meant to instigate violence while inoculating the speaker from blame. But sometimes the language is not aimed at incitement at all, but merely at rallying supporters in ways that provoke some of them to action.

But, regardless of intent, the instigating speech tends to follow a pattern far more specific than merely denigrating some individual or group — meaning that, like calling “fire” in a public theater, the resulting danger is foreseeable.

Messages in these cases tend to divide the world between a pure and virtuous “us,” who is besieged by an implacably hostile “them.” Listeners are told that they are locked in an existential battle with enemies who seek their total domination and the destruction of their way of life.

This threat is portrayed as imminent and unchecked — justifying, even necessitating, drastic steps to prevent it. And the speaker often describes society as having fallen into lawlessness and chaos, leading some listeners to conclude that they alone have the power to act.

J.M. Berger, a scholar of extremist violence, has called this “the crisis-solution construct,” writing that it can resonate especially with isolated or troubled individuals. It reframes their personal struggles as caused not by impersonal social or economic forces, but by the nefarious actions of some “them” group waging a war on the listener’s virtuous “us” group.

This makes the listeners feel less alone, their hardships feel more comprehensible and the solution, however extreme, within their power to impose.

Some argue that the motivation of such attackers, on an individual level, could be said to be chiefly psychological, the details of whatever political cause they latched onto almost incidental.

“The connections between mental illness, conspiratorial thinking, right-wing rhetoric, and violence are made in our heads, not theirs,” the writer Jay Caspian King wrote in an essay for The New Yorker on efforts to understand Mr. DePape.

“How we ultimately choose to describe these violent men often betrays more about us than about them,” he added.

But such a view misses the point of how stochastic terrorism works, scholars have argued.

As political demonization following the script of incitement saturates a society, regardless of whether the propagators of that language intend as much, the odds that someone will follow through on the implied call to action increases sharply.

If those people are often lost souls with histories of unruly behavior who appear to have only a tenuous relationship to the political causes that seemed to help inspire them, then this is how extremist recruitment has always worked.

The propensity of such language to provoke violence is established enough that some terrorist monitoring groups now track upticks in such speech as an early-warning indicator for attacks that are thought to follow as a result.

Sure enough, as extremist right-wing language has escalated across Western countries in recent years, so have attacks by white extremists, many of them seemingly loners.

Ms. Amman and Mr. Meloy, the extremism researchers, warned that the diffuse nature of this threat, emerging as it can from individuals with no formal ties to hate groups, makes it both especially dangerous and devilishly difficult to prevent.

“It is as dire as it sounds,” they wrote.

Starter Home

You can still here this phrase on the varying HGTV flip shows. How they are still in business in this housing market is beyond me as now with rates over 6% and costs to rehab doubling down I suspect that there will be fewer and fewer of them doing this as a full time business. But then again they were always a bizarre mash of people doing the same home repeatedly and acting as if it was the greatest project ever done. Yes we need more shiplap.

With that there were two articles this weekend about what defines Starter Home. The LA Times says this about the California marketplace:

For decades, the single-family home has been Southern California’s ultimate lure — a chance to live a life of sun and sand from the comfort of your very own property.

Most buyers’ ticket into that life is the starter home. Something modest but not minuscule. Two bedrooms, maybe three. A picket fence in front and a yard out back for the kids and dog to play.

But the starter home has changed. As home prices have soared and higher mortgage interest rates have made everything less affordable, wish lists have become more and more wishful, and buyers have been forced to find something smaller and less practical.

Want two bedrooms? How about one, plus an office that might fit a twin-size bed. Want a backyard? How about a space shared with the rest of the condo complex. Want to paint the exterior of your townhouse? The homeowner association won’t allow it, but feel free to spruce up the inside.

Making compromises has always been a part of house hunting, but in a market where some two-bedroom homes are selling for $1 million or more — often for hundreds of thousands over the asking price — middle-class buyers are forced to take whatever they can get.

So we have over bidding and homes now in the six figures that defines a median or at least an average price in some markets – Seattle, LA, Portland are good examples of how out of control it has been as they are the “it” cities. San Francisco and NYC have always been out of range of many but now that includes the burbs and boroughs that were for years ignored are now equally competitive in the marketplace. Is it really jobs? I doubt it as New York City is facing a massive tax downfall from the pandemic and the offices that have not reopened fully to workers. So with that comes that many of the higher tax bracket did leave and have not returned. As the article states:

The sheer number of people who left in such a short period raises uncertainty about New York City’s competitiveness and economic stability. The top 1 percent of earners, who make more than $804,000 a year, contributed 41 percent of the city’s personal income taxes in 2019.

About one-third of the people who left moved from Manhattan, and had an average income of $214,300. No other large American county had a similar exodus of wealth.

On that note the reality is that many of them never left and with that they are pushing the housing market into untenable reaches as they bid up for rentals the same way one does in purchasing housing. And many who did kept their apartments for pied a tier’s for when they do return and/or visit keeping them vacant and off the market. So who is moving here? I suspect many who dreamed of living here and with that sold homes, cashed out savings and are living off 401Ks and investments the same way I am. The difference is that the market is shit now and with that we are all at risk. Things will not end well I am afraid.

The article goes on to state:

In the years before 2019, the people who left and the people who stayed in New York City had similar average incomes, the IRS data showed. But during the pandemic, the residents who moved had average incomes that were 28 percent higher than the residents who stayed.

Still, New York City collected more tax revenue in both 2020 and 2021 than in 2019, thanks in part to at least $16 billion in federal pandemic aid.

The outlook for this year has become much less certain as the stock market has plummeted in recent months and certain forms of federal aid, like stimulus checks and expanded unemployment benefits, have (long) ended.

Again the current financial state of Manhattan and its environs are at risk in ways not seen since the 80s. And with that I suspect many a newcomer will find themselves wanting to leave, but the costs of leaving are considerably higher and for many it will be akin to a hostage situation. I saw that quite a bit in Nashville during its “it” heydays. People come for jobs, to seek adventure, to find a new life and a tribe. It never works out that way. Sorry folks I know this better than most.

Inside the incredibly shrinking Southern California starter home

By Jack Flemming Staff Writer LA TIMES Sept. 23, 2022

For decades, the single-family home has been Southern California’s ultimate lure — a chance to live a life of sun and sand from the comfort of your very own property.

Most buyers’ ticket into that life is the starter home. Something modest but not minuscule. Two bedrooms, maybe three. A picket fence in front and a yard out back for the kids and dog to play.

But the starter home has changed. As home prices have soared and higher mortgage interest rates have made everything less affordable, wish lists have become more and more wishful, and buyers have been forced to find something smaller and less practical.

Want two bedrooms? How about one, plus an office that might fit a twin-size bed. Want a backyard? How about a space shared with the rest of the condo complex. Want to paint the exterior of your townhouse? The homeowner association won’t allow it, but feel free to spruce up the inside.

Making compromises has always been a part of house hunting, but in a market where some two-bedroom homes are selling for $1 million or more — often for hundreds of thousands over the asking price — middle-class buyers are forced to take whatever they can get

“Beggars can’t be choosers,” said Zach Zyskowski, a TV producer who bought his first home last summer.

His search started with two-bedroom homes in West Hollywood and Mid-City, but he quickly realized that everything was out of his price range.

“Anything under $1 million was hard to find,” he said. “There was nothing that was both nice and unique, and I wanted something that wasn’t cookie-cutter.”

Zyskowski decided to switch strategies. He stopped searching for homes on the market and got creative, asking friends if anyone was planning to sell in their respective condo complexes. He ended up buying a one-bedroom condo directly from a seller in an off-market deal.

In the end, he sacrificed space for character. His new home is in El Cabrillo, a Spanish-style courtyard complex built by movie mogul Cecil B. DeMille in the 1920s.

It’s a bit small at 800 square feet, and he uses a pull-out sofa in the living room to host guests. But the stylish building, which has been featured in shows such as “Hollywood” and “Chuck” and enjoys a spot on the National Register of Historic Places, more than makes up for it.

“Would I have loved something bigger? Yes, there’s always more you can want,” he said. “But I’d rather have something smaller and nicer than bigger and boring. I was just amazed I could buy a place at all.”

For Elena Amador-French, smaller wasn’t an option. A planetary scientist for NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, she grew tired of working on the Mars Rover from her dining room table during the pandemic. The newborn baby didn’t help.

She and her husband started house hunting last year and set their sights on Altadena, a community tucked into the San Gabriel Mountains filled with charming Craftsman, English Tudor and Colonial Revival-style homes.

With a budget of $800,000, they wanted a house with character — as long as it had two bedrooms. But their search played out like many others: putting in an offer, watching dozens of other buyers drive up the asking price, and seeing the house sell for hundreds of thousands more than they could afford.

“You just have to laugh at a certain point. We couldn’t get upset because we couldn’t even compete,” she said.

They switched strategies and aimed for a duplex, which didn’t have the appeal of the single-family lifestyle but also didn’t have dozens of buyers swarming every open house.

In the end, they paid $970,000 for an 1,800-square-foot duplex with three bedrooms and three bathrooms in an east Pasadena complex.

“There’s still a piece of me that wants a single-family home that I can truly make my own.”

— Elena Amador-French

It didn’t have the charm of a single-family home, and it didn’t quite check off all the boxes; they couldn’t fit a swing set for their daughter into the outdoor space, and they weren’t able to add any personal touches to the exterior because of HOA regulations that require all houses to be painted the same color.

But it was an easier process that ended with more space for less money.

“There’s still a piece of me that wants a single-family home that I can truly make my own,” she said. “But this was so much less of a battle.”

In today’s market, it makes sense to settle. Homes that check all the boxes — hip neighborhood, plenty of space, interesting architecture — are still attracting plenty of offers and often selling for over the asking price. But for buyers willing to let go of the dream of single-family housing and redefine what a starter home can be, there are plenty of options.

Condos are regularly on the market in L.A. in the $300,000 range, a fraction of what some single-family homes are commanding. Other buyers are opting for tenancy-in-common units, arrangements in which residents share ownership of a building.

As more buyers choose alternatives, condo price increases are outpacing single-family home price increases. In August, the median sale price for L.A. condos was $675,000, a 7.1% jump year over year, according to Redfin. During that same stretch, single-family homes increased 0.4%.

The same is true for townhouse prices, which have increased 6.7% year over year for a median of $700,000.

For many Southern Californians, single-family homes are simply out of reach. The Times has published a “What Money Buys” series for the last five years that highlights homes on the market at certain price points in different neighborhoods. Now, those stories read like a time capsule.

For example, a 2019 piece featured homes on the market for $800,000 in a handful of L.A. neighborhoods including Jefferson Park and Cypress Park. Both areas had a five-bedroom home listed for around $800,000.

The Jefferson Park home ended up selling for $850,000 in 2019. Now, Redfin estimates that the home is worth $1.28 million. The Cypress Park home grew even more valuable, selling for $800,000 in 2019 and now worth an estimated $1.45 million.

Those prices have become standard. In Jefferson Park, there are no five-bedroom single-family homes on the market for less than $1.2 million. The $800,000 price point now buys a two-bedroom home — or a three-bedroom fixer-upper.

The change becomes even more pronounced at lower price points. A 2017 entry in the series explored what $500,000 buys in the L.A. neighborhoods of Van Nuys, Leimert Park and Boyle Heights. Every single home on the list had at least 1,000 square feet, and most had three bedrooms. One had four.

Five years later, Redfin values all the properties on that list at $750,000 or more, with a few valued north of $850,000.

A look at the options currently on the market in those three communities finds no three-bedroom homes for $500,000 or less. The closest thing is a three-bedroom townhouse in Van Nuys asking $550,000 — cash offers only.

For comparison, a 2022 story exploring homes at $500,000 highlighted much smaller options including a 648-square-foot bungalow in East L.A. listed at $485,000 and a one-bedroom condo in downtown L.A. asking $509,000 (plus $813 in monthly HOA dues.)

Spoiler alert: Both homes sold shortly after the article ran, and the East L.A. bungalow sold for $10,000 more than the asking price.

More buyers are settling for two-bedroom homes as a starter, and it’s driving up prices.

In L.A., the median two-bedroom home — the typical size for starter homes — sold for $765,700 in August, a 10.1% increase year over year, according to Rocket Homes. That outpaces one-bedroom homes, which increased 8.8% year over year, and three-bedroom homes, which increased 9.1% year over year.

Earlier this year, Compass agent Allie Altschuler sold a two-bedroom home in the hills of Eagle Rock for $1.442 million — or $293,000 more than the asking price. What it lacked in bedroom count, it made up for with unique features such as a breakfast nook with a built-in booth and a separate structure in the backyard that can be used as an office or studio.

“Younger buyers are OK with buying smaller homes because they know they won’t be in it forever,” she said. “Buying a house and living in it for 30 or 40 years isn’t the case anymore.”

The Manhandlers

Mmm good

That used to be a soup by Campbell’s, now they can just name some type of faux grade military weapon in which to market to men so they can go on a killing rampage.And with that it is advertising and marketing that brought us to the current state of guns in America.

Below is an article from yesterday’s New York Times about how guns have been advertised and marketed if not branded to attract buyers to certain kinds of weapons of choice, that play upon two factors: Sexuality and Gender Identity and of course FEAR.

I have said repeatedly Americans are terrified of anything or any body that somehow threatens their identity, beliefs and of course their personal safety. It has been used repeatedly as a moral panic and no greater and more recent example of that is Covid. The way they turned a disease into a political weapon is why we have the divisive natue surrounding everything from masks to vaccines and how we view Dr. Fauci. Seriously the histronics in those early days about Fauci, Trump and Cuomo were mind blowing. If you did not somehow reject, adore and admire one of them during Covid, the tribe will pounce. I feared more of my own, Liberals, than any Conservative. I actually could have rational discussions with Conservative folks about the disease, it being AIRBORNE akin to a Pox or Measles like virus and that masks do work in certain circumstances for certain time periods, dependent on the type/kind each were wearing and that yes a vaccine of this kind has great potential and no it is not “new” as it has been kicking around for a while for other diseases and then I left it at that. No argument, no real push or shove just let the info lay there. The “other” is NOT my problem and I can avoid and do my best to work around said issues or problematic people if I so choose. Damn that word again. But what I find with both Liberals and Conservatives is a real reading comprehension problem. If you cannot concisely get your point in akin to a text or social media post you have lost then and then guns are a blazing. With liberals that is their Trump Derangement Syndrome that puts you in line with him and his crazies and then they dismiss you as the “other.” Liberals are the most judgemental unforgiving bores I have ever encountered. And again I am very liberal. I just don’t vest in the tribal mentality that seems to be largely an affiliation of millennials. It explains the social media implosions and cancel culture bullshit as they are coddled beyond belief. I doubt one could get this far in the blog at this point they would be so, “my feelers are hurt.”

With that you need to toughen up if you are ever going to make it out of your home/work pod. Gun Safety, Gun legislation is by far more important that who said something not nice to someone else by someone they did not know about someone they don’t know, will never meet and have nothing to do with.

As or IF you read the article I have highlighted what I think are essential passages that discuss the rise in gun sales. And this will piss off the young millennial woman, it is WOMEN who are purchasing guns at a faster rate than men. They are afraid! BOO! And the other is that most don’t have one fucking clue on how to use, operate or maintain a gun. Shocking, I know, not really.

Gun Sellers’ Message to Americans: Man Up

The number of firearms in the U.S. is outpacing the country’s population, as an emboldened gun industry and its allies target buyers with rhetoric of fear, machismo and defiance.

A man raffled off a golden AK-47 at the N.R.A. convention last month in Houston.Credit…Mark Abramson for The New York Times

By Mike McIntire, Glenn Thrush and Eric Lipton

June 18, 2022

Last November, hours after a jury acquitted Kyle Rittenhouse of two shooting deaths during antiracism protests in 2020, a Florida gun dealer created an image of him brandishing an assault rifle, with the slogan: “BE A MAN AMONG MEN.”

Mr. Rittenhouse was not yet a man when he killed two people and wounded another in Kenosha, Wis. — he was 17 — but he aspired to be like one. And the firearms industry, backed by years of research and focus groups, knows that other Americans do, too.

Gun companies have spent the last two decades scrutinizing their market and refocusing their message away from hunting toward selling handguns for personal safety, as well as military-style weapons attractive to mostly young men. The sales pitch — rooted in self-defense, machismo and an overarching sense of fear — has been remarkably successful.

Firearm sales have skyrocketed, with background checks rising from 8.5 million in 2000 to 38.9 million last year. The number of guns is outpacing the population. Women, spurred by appeals that play on fears of crime and being caught unprepared, are the fastest-growing segment of buyers.

An examination by The New York Times of firearms marketing research, along with legal and lobbying efforts by gun rights groups, finds that behind the shift in gun culture is an array of interests that share a commercial and political imperative: more guns and freer access to them. Working together, gun makers, advocates and elected officials have convinced a large swath of Americans that they should have a firearm, and eased the legal path for them to do so.

Some of the research is publicly known, but by searching court filings and online archives, The Times gained new insight into how gun companies exploit the anxiety and desires of Americans. Using Madison Avenue methods, the firearms industry has sliced and diced consumer attributes to find pressure points — self-esteem, lack of trust in others, fear of losing control — useful in selling more guns.

In a paradigm-setting 2012 ad in Maxim magazine, Bushmaster — which manufactured the rifle used in the racist massacre in Buffalo in May — declared, “Consider your man card reissued.”

At the National Rifle Association convention in Houston last month, a Missouri-based gun maker, Black Rain Ordnance, featured a line of “BRO” semiautomatics punning on the company’s acronym: AR-15-style guns with names like BRO-Tyrant and BRO-Predator. Dozens of other vendors had similar messages.

The recurrence of mass shootings has provided reliable opportunities for the industry and its allies. Since the massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary School a decade ago, gun sales have almost always risen sharply in the aftermath of major shootings, as buyers snap up firearms they worry will disappear from stores.

“Drawing attention to the concern that firearm sales could be further restricted will have a great impact on anxious buyers,” a firearms industry study from 2017 advised.

At the same time, guns rights groups have pushed an aggressive legislative and court agenda. For instance, it soon will be legal to carry a hidden firearm without a permit in half the United States.

In states where pro-gun forces do not have the backing of elected officials, they have taken up the fight in other ways. The U.S. Supreme Court will soon rule on a New York case challenging a century-old law that allows local officials great discretion over who can carry a handgun, which is widely expected to turn into another gun rights victory.

Gun makers and their supporters argue they are only responding to a public need. A rush to buy firearms often coincides with concerns about personal safety or events that could spur legal limits on gun ownership, said Mark Oliva, a spokesman for the National Shooting Sports Foundation, the industry trade group.

“I don’t think that’s a marketing trick,” he said. “I think, more than anything, it’s consumer demand that’s driving the appetite for these firearms.”

Whatever the source of Americans’ sense of unease, the result is a country flooded with firearms and no end in sight.

“Fear,” said Darrell Miller, co-director of the Duke Center for Firearms Law, “is an incredibly powerful motivator.”

Anxiety Sells

Marketing firearms for personal protection is nothing new. For the better part of the last century, certain gunmakers emphasized self-defense: One of the industry’s most influential campaigns was a 1996 ad in Ladies’ Home Journal that showed a Beretta handgun on a kitchen table, with the words “Homeowner’s Insurance.”

Still, hunting accounted for a majority of advertisements in Guns magazine from the 1960s to the late 1990s, according to a survey by Palgrave Communications, an online academic journal. The study found that “the core emphasis” shifted in the 2000s to “armed self-defense,” and that the percentage of hunting-related ads had dropped to about 10 percent by 2019.

This transition was accompanied by a surge in popularity of the Glock semiautomatic handgun and AR-15-type rifle, first widely used by law enforcement and in the military, in its fully automatic version. That provided a built-in market among veterans and former police officers, but also kicked off an effort to woo millions of men who liked to buy gear that made them feel like soldiers and the police.

In 2009, a marketing firm hired by Remington to push its Bushmaster AR-15s settled on an ad campaign targeting civilians who “aspired” to be part of law enforcement. The first draft of the new pitch, later obtained by lawyers representing parents of children killed at Sandy Hook, exhorted buyers to use their new rifles to “Clear the Crack House,” “Ice the Perp” and “Save the Hostage.”

The company toned down the language but embraced the idea of trafficking in fears of urban crime and mass shootings, the documents showed.

Josh Sugarmann, founder of the Violence Policy Center, a gun control group that tracks firearms advertising and marketing, said the firearms industry became adept at exploiting disquieting developments to spur sales.

“If you look back, it hasn’t just revolved around mass shootings. They tailored their marketing to Katrina, Y2K, 9/11, pretty much everything,” he said. “Their goal is basically to induce a Pavlovian response: ‘If there’s a crisis, you must go get a gun.’”

Industry data shows that in 1990, an estimated 74,000 military-style rifles were manufactured for domestic sale in the U.S. That figure began to climb after expiration of the federal assault weapons ban in 2004 and reached 2.3 million in 2013, the year after Sandy Hook, when AR-style guns accounted for about a quarter of all sales revenue, according to the Firearms Retailer Survey, an annual report by the industry trade association.

Along with the rise in gun sales has been an intensifying effort by the industry to understand — and influence — the American consumer. In 2016, the trade association commissioned its first “consumer segmentation” study that developed profiles of potential gun buyers with labels like “Unarmed Aaron” and “Weaponless Wendy,” who presumably could succumb to the right sales pitch.

The newest study, produced last year, is closely held and not circulated outside the industry, but a copy was obtained by The Times. It found that typical gun owners were white men in their 40s earning about $75,000 a year with a preference for handguns. “Less than half consider themselves to be very knowledgeable about firearms,” the study found, though they felt the need to have one.

A common theme in consumer sentiment is anxiety. The 2021 study contained two new categories of buyers: “Prepared for the Worst” and “Urban Defender.” Urban Defenders worry about crime, “do not trust others around them” and are most susceptible to the argument that tighter laws could threaten their ability to purchase a gun.

Gun owners “Prepared for the Worst” tend to have the lowest incomes and are the least likely to have a full-time job. They cite “building confidence” and “empowering themselves” as reasons to learn shooting skills.

To reach these fearful consumers, the trade association offered suggestions in another of its reports. One example depicts an image of a woman in a desolate urban setting, calmly pulling a handgun from her shoulder bag as a hoodie-wearing man approaches from behind with a knife. *note the hoodie, not at all racist, right?**

That marketing approach may work for Weaponless Wendy, the report advised, but such “cheesy images” should be avoided when targeting Unarmed Aaron.

“It is important for the individual protecting himself or his family to appear to be a confident person while not seeming eager, delighted, or excited to be in such a scenario,” the report said.

Beth Alcazar, a former teacher from Alabama turned firearms instructor, has translated these sentiments into practice. More than a third of her clients are women, she said, adding that fear of crime is a major motivator for first-time gun buyers.

“It comes from not wanting to be a victim and from knowing there’s evil in the world,” said Ms. Alcazar, who has published a book for women on using handguns for self-defense.

Comrades in Arms

The aggressive messaging around fear has also helped define a newer crop of gun rights groups that increasingly overshadow the more deep-pocketed, but troubled, N.R.A. These groups, supported by the industry, have adopted a raw, in-your-face advocacy of near limitless freedom to own and carry firearms. Gun Owners of America, which lists more than 30 gun-related companies as “partners,” proudly calls itself the “only no compromise gun lobby in Washington.”

Their tone has grown more extreme along with the public discourse around guns in general. The Firearms Policy Coalition, which has launched numerous court challenges to gun laws around the country, used to sell T-shirts and bumper stickers with anodyne pro-gun mottos such as “Shall Not Be Infringed.”

But today, its online store has gear emblazoned with barbs like – “Abolish the ATF” and “Go and Print It,” a reference to using 3-D printers at home to make untraceable ghost guns. On social media, the coalition whips up members with warnings of an “impending GUNPOCALYPSE” wrought by weak or corrupt Washington politicians.

The image of Mr. Rittenhouse was put on Facebook by Big Daddy Unlimited, a firearms retailer in Gainesville, Fla., whose owners have said they started selling guns after the Sandy Hook massacre raised fears of new restrictions. “Be a Man Among Men” was a recruiting slogan used by the colonialist army of Rhodesia, now Zimbabwe, and has gained popularity among white nationalist groups in recent years, although it is also used outside of that context.

Tony McKnight, chief executive of Big Daddy Unlimited, said in a statement to The Times that the meme was created by a former employee who did not understand the historical significance of the phrase. “The post in question was meant to recognize justice for Kyle Rittenhouse, whose life came in danger while defending the community,” Mr. McKnight said.

Along with using heightened rhetoric, major gun rights groups have been working to roll back state-level restrictions. Their financial partners include companies such as Daniel Defense, the Georgia-based maker of the military-style rifle used in the Uvalde, Texas, school shooting in May, as well as major retailers like Brownells of Iowa, which last summer ran a promotion donating a portion of its sales to the Firearms Policy Coalition.

“Your purchases help defend our gun rights,” Pete Brownell, the company chairman, said as he announced the incentive.

A major target of gun rights expansion has been laws limiting the carrying of concealed weapons in public. More than 20 states over the past decade have moved to eliminate or loosen requirements to have a permit.

“Owning a gun that is locked up in your home is not going to help you when you are targeted in a crime,” said Michael Csencsits, an organizer with Gun Owners of America, which has pushed for the repeal of concealed-carry laws. “People buy guns because they want to carry them.”

In pressing the two-pronged campaign to sell more guns and weaken restrictions, the industry and activists have been informed by marketing research that shows an increasingly diverse pool of customers. Timothy Schmidt, president of the United States Concealed Carry Association, said the new generation of gun buyers encompasses city dwellers, suburbanites and those in rural areas.

“It’s not just the angry white male anymore,” he said “You’re seeing rising gun ownership among Blacks, among women. It’s really a different thing.”

JoAnna Anderson would seem to fit that demographic. A Black real estate agent in North Carolina, Ms. Anderson appears in a promotional video for SilencerCo, an online seller of devices that muffle the sound of a gunshot; its slogan is, “Suppress the Fear.”

In an interview with The Times, she said she carried a gun while on the job because she feared running into disgruntled residents of homes being vacated. Her first purchase was a 9-millimeter Ruger pistol, though she now has a collection of seven guns, including a military-style rifle.

“We cannot expect the government to protect us,” Ms. Anderson said, “because they haven’t.”

Nick Suplina, a senior vice president at Everytown for Gun Safety, a gun control group, said gun rights advocates tended to ignore data showing that firearms in homes often wound up hurting their owners instead of someone threatening them.

“While selling you this notion that a gun may provide security for yourself and your family, which is very appealing, they don’t tell you that owning a gun makes it two times more likely that somebody in the house will die of gun homicide or three times the likelihood they die by gun suicide,” he said.

Ascendant Gun Rights

After the mass shootings at Sandy Hook in 2012 and in Parkland, Fla., six years later, more than 30 states tightened gun laws, a successful effort pushed by well-funded groups such as Everytown, backed by Michael R. Bloomberg, the billionaire former mayor of New York City.

But the scorecard overall remains tilted toward gun rights, as states repeal concealed carry restrictions. Those victories have come amid the Republican Party’s embrace of Second Amendment absolutism and guns as central to its identity, a fervor that gun control proponents have not been able to match, said Mr. Miller of the Duke firearms law center.

“Gun rights advocates are reaping the benefits of a history of asymmetric intensity and political mobilization,” he said.

Energizing gun owners with a sense of alarm over the potential loss of rights has long been a reliable strategy of the firearms industry and its allies. Political candidates from both parties seeking the N.R.A.’s blessing traditionally would try to be seen hunting ducks or plinking at targets to reassure supporters that their gun rights would be safe.

But in the 2010s, with the rise of the Tea Party and increasingly strident opposition to President Barack Obama, Republican political messaging around guns took on a harder edge.

Christina Jeffrey, running for Congress in South Carolina, ran an ad in which she brandished an AK-47 assault rifle while asserting that gun rights were necessary “to ensure that our limited government stays limited.” In a Missouri governor’s race, Eric Greitens blasted away with a mounted machine gun while pledging to “fight Obama’s Democrat machine and their corrupt attacks.”

Such imagery has since become stock-in-trade. When Brian Kemp ran for governor of Georgia in 2018, one tongue-in-cheek ad showed him in a room full of firearms, leveling a shotgun near a young man interested in dating his daughter. It generated criticism, including from Shannon Watts, founder of Moms Demand Action for Gun Sense in America, who tweeted, “This recurring and uniquely American ‘joke’ is tiresome.”

Mr. Kemp responded dismissively with his own tweet: “I’m conservative, folks. Get over it!”

Groups like the Firearms Policy Coalition have filed dozens of court challenges to gun limits, and conservative judges, some appointed by former President Donald J. Trump, have delivered legal victories, including overturning a California law last month that placed an age minimum of 21 on purchases of semiautomatic rifles.

Mr. Suplina, of Everytown, disputed the idea that this was an era of gun rights expansion, citing a recent modest gun compromise in Washington and some state-level victories, including laws banning or limiting ghost guns in Delaware, Hawaii, Illinois, Maryland, Nevada, New York and Rhode Island. At least four states — Delaware, New York, Rhode Island and Washington — have put new limits on high-capacity magazines that can hold a large amount of ammunition.

“The fight is really intense,” Mr. Suplina said. “But for the first time in any recent period, the gun safety movement is showing up, meeting them on the battlefield, as it were, and that includes state houses and also Congress.”

Still, gun supporters are feeling generally optimistic.

“We are just at the start of expanding gun rights,” said Mr. Csencsits of Gun Owners of America.

But lest its members become too complacent, Gun Owners of America has on its website a very different message about the state of things: Be afraid.

“A handgun ban coming to America?” blared a recent headline on the site. The post goes on to ask for a donation to stop “what could be the single biggest attack on our God-given rights.” *uh no that was the founding fathers in the 1700s not God***

Thank you Ms Bus Driver

I live for public transit. I am constantly learning my way among trains and subways to make traveling across the City and State and across State lines in which to expedite and in turn travel safely and cheaply. I don’t mind renting a car but with the price of fuel it is not worth the hassle to worry about it, parking and the rest. I grew up taking the 5 Phinney in Seattle and when you grow up using public transit you realize the convenience and affordability it offers. And then you read about the Subway stabbings, shootings and other problems that are a secondary plague affecting mass transit across the country. For the record, this is not new it is just expanded as the homeless, the deeply mentally ill have found themselves literally stranded in cities across the country in search of, well I have no clue what brought them to San Francisco, Los Angeles, Nashville, Seattle, New York and the city of Denver which this story is about. I do not believe they got there and in turn found themselves unable to be employed, find housing and/or went on a binge of drugs and alcohol to the point they have lost all functioning. This is a slide that starts out slow, out of a crisis and then over time (a time frame that can be weeks to days to months to years) they finally collapsed into the heap you see on your local corners, under freeway underpasses and anywhere they can lay their head.

Yesterday I read of another recall effort in San Francisco regarding their current City Attorney, the job VP Kamala Harris had during her time there which she frankly did not better than the current job she has. I am not a fan of Ms Harris, style over substance and with that I will move on. But the City has always been a haven for many. There is a strong Asian population, the Latin community of the Mission district, of course the Gay Community and many other Bohemian types drawn by the liberal politics and the stunning beauty this city of 49 square miles brings. And with it there are many good memories I have of the area, having lived in Berkeley and Oakland as well over the course of a decade. But like my home of Seattle, I am done with the West Coast and am fine with that decision. There is a passive aggressive nature to the persona of the Coastal Elites that make the passive aggressive behavior of Southerners seem almost quaint if not just a quirk of the region. And trust me the South invented it but Seattle perfected it. And yes it exists here but it is more in a sense of entitlement and arrogance that makes sense if you lived here. Like corruption it is just an accepted part of the way of life. I find it highly entertaining on most days. Think Chris Christie and Bill DiBlasio if they were Gay and Anna Delvey was their daughter and they came to your Pride Party and were the last to leave. You would reconsider having another party next year or at least the guest list.

San Francisco the last time I visited was four years ago and it was already descending into madness. The amount of Tech companies that have moved in and up were making The City (and btw that is how the pretentious in San Francisco refer to the city as “The City) unaffordable if not undesirable. The Pot Shops were aplenty and of course the cool food spots and hipster hangouts were everywhere now as opposed to just a few locales. The great funky hotels almost gone, other than my favorite The Phoneix in the Tenderloin which is where I always stay as it has a pool, great food and is the last of the era in a city that struggles to balance the past with the present. I would not stay there now it is simply not safe enough to walk alone if at all. With that now what was confined to spots and some blocks has permeated the City and made it all unsafe and utterly filthy. The City already recalled some of the School Board Members this last year and now the City Attorney is finding himself the target of ire of those sick of what is across every city today – crime. It is why NYC elected the moron Eric Adams as Mayor as he was a former Cop and promised he would not defund the Police and with that crime is still a major problem. Go figure. He is a moron. Utterly hilarious but still a walking moron. Okay a swaggering moron. They will not recall him as people don’t here, we either wait for a scandal that forces them to quit or wait to vote them out. Our Mayor here in Jersey City wisely keeps crime data under lock and key so the allusion of safety is here despite I am sure is not safe. Our Mayor is invisible if not inaccessible as frankly he is busy planning running for the Governor’s office and opening up a pot shop in Hoboken. Well, a good back up plan is always essential. He ran unopposed and the pandemic enabled that to do so with ease as most of our residents are largely Immigrants and likely unable to vote, have no real vested interest in local politics and with that it makes keeping the status quo just that. People fear, well everything, but change is on the list as well.

But as you read the story below about the Denver Bus Driver her story is not a new or unique story. It is, again, a major problem everywhere. But the sheer level of her coping strategies, her own determination to succeed is impressive. I feel the same way when I work in the schools. I am invisible, alone and spend hours just sitting there and if I don’t get abused I consider it a good day. Imagine going to work, no one knowing your name, addressing you with common courtesy and the endless parade of troubled individuals coming in and out of your workplace, be that a classroom or a bus, which you have to account for and handle. I will never forget that Bitch Admin at Ferris and the way she spoke to me those times that led me to call the suicide hotline, that was when I realized I had the power to never set foot in that school again. And as the year ends I have not. We will see in the fall. But the coping strategies of the Driver I get, I walk, I cry, I find healing through alternative means and I get up and do it again with the belief that this is another day. Not a bad one nor a good one, just another one. And we are the invisible work force and the same goes for the homeless, the unhoused, the troubled, the mentally ill and the many who are simply on the fringes. We all share that sense of not being seen and in turn acknowledged nor respected for any of that which we do, but what we are seen for is for what we FAIL to do.

And while we can recall our Politicians and demand them to do something, we really have no clue what is to be done. We are fine with the clutching of pearls and hands and we can navigate around it until it encroaches now to our doorstep, then suddenly it does become our problem. And then we again demand those we elected to fix “it” be “it” guns, homeless, drugs etc. What we don’t realize that the Pol has already made the call to move onto a new house, a bigger job and the can will get kicked down the road. When I lived in San Francisco, the Governor Gavin Newsom was the Mayor. Kamala the City Attorney. Then it was his campaign of “Care not Cash” to stop the tide of vagrancy and tragedy that existed on the streets. It was the same as it is now just different. They now live in bigger houses with bigger jobs. The reality is that we are the ones who must do something and that is perhaps accept that what was then is not now. The same things that drew you there are not the reasons others are there. Sex, drugs and rock and roll have a place but maybe in memories not in the streets. The Folsom Street fair a bizarre weekend festival of kink and debauchery should not happen anymore or move it indoors with better control and less visability. The San Francisco annual run with carts and nudity needs to end. And with that accept that those drawn there now may not have the same values or beliefs but may be exploiting or in turn harming others with their presence. It was the same during the Floyd Marches how quickly professional criminals used the cover of them to do damage and with that the BLM idea became associated with that not its actual cause. See how the memory plays games and selectively picks the issues that triggers the most base of emotions, FEAR.

So what is the solution? Well we can start to rethink what it means to massively house and treat those who refuse to be treated. We called them Institutions for the Mentally Ill. They were horrible but that was then and this is now. Can we not find ways today in which to improve them? Use the failures of the past as a teaching lesson in which to learn and grow? Uh no, that is hard and shit. We also need to start mental health assessments much early on. By Grade 5/6 all children should be assessed for not only intellectual capability’s and/or learning disabilities but for mental health disorders. And with that we need fully funded mental health clinics in schools with again referrals to behavioral issues that perhaps are a signal of a larger crisis. Wonder why 18 year old boys are taking to the streets with guns, that may answer some of those questions. Oh we cannot do that, its too hard. Or are we afraid we will find out the truth? This story about a young woman’s quest to get a mental health clinic at her school brought all the angry afraid parents to the yard to protest. Me thinks one doth protest too much.

I believe John Oliver sums up the ways schools are funded and of course the move to Police up and Militarize the schools will go well. And this is America – AFRAID and in turn utterly immobile. So nothing will change.

With that I reprint the story of the Number 15. Ride safe.

Anger and heartbreak on Bus No. 15

As American cities struggle to recover from the pandemic, Denver’s problems spill over onto its buses

By Eli Saslow June 6, 2022 The Washington Post

19 minDENVER — Suna Karabay touched up her eye makeup in the rearview mirror and leaned against the steering wheel of the bus to say her morning prayers. “Please, let me be patient,” she said. “Let me be generous and kind.” She walked through the bus to make her final inspection: floor swept, seats cleaned, handrails disinfected, gas tank full for another 10-hour shift on the city’s busiest commercial road. She drove to her first stop, waited until exactly 5:32 a.m., and opened the doors.

“Good morning!” she said, as she greeted the first passenger of the day, a barefoot man carrying a blanket and a pillow. He dropped 29 cents into the fare machine for the $3 ride. “That’s all I got,” he said, and Suna nodded and waved him onboard.

“Happy Friday,” she said to the next people in line, including a couple with three plastic garbage bags of belongings and a large, unleashed dog. “Service pet,” one of the owners said. He fished into his pocket and pulled out a bus pass as the dog jumped onto the dashboard, grabbed a box of Kleenex, and began shredding tissues on the floor.

“Service animal?” Suna asked. “Are you sure?”

“What’d I tell you already?” the passenger said. “Just drive the damn bus.”

She turned back to face the windshield and pulled onto Colfax Avenue, a four-lane road that ran for more than 30 miles past the state capitol, through downtown, and toward the Rocky Mountains. Forty-five years old, she’d been driving the same route for nearly a decade, becoming such a fixture of Denver’s No. 15 bus line that her photograph was displayed on the side of several buses — a gigantic, smiling face of a city Suna no longer recognized in the aftermath of the pandemic. The Denver she encountered each day on the bus had been transformed by a new wave of epidemics overwhelming major cities across the country. Homelessness in Denver was up by as much as 50 percent since the beginning of the pandemic. Violent crime had increased by 17 percent, murders had gone up 47 percent, some types of property crime had nearly doubled, and seizures of fentanyl and methamphetamine had quadrupled in the past year.

She stopped the bus every few blocks to pick up more passengers in front of extended-stay motels and budget restaurants, shifting her eyes between the road ahead and the rearview mirror that showed all 70 seats behind her. In the past two years, Denver-area bus drivers had reported being assaulted by their passengers more than 145 times. Suna had been spit on, hit with a toolbox, threatened with a knife, pushed in the back while driving and chased into a restroom during her break. Her windshield had been shattered with rocks or glass bottles three times. After the most recent incident, she’d written to a supervisor that “this job now is like being a human stress ball.” Each day, she absorbed her passengers’ suffering and frustration during six trips up and down Colfax, until, by the end of the shift, she could see deep indentations of her fingers on the wheel.

Now she stopped to pick up four construction workers in front of “Sunrise Chinese Restaurant — $1.89 a Scoop.” She pulled over near a high school for a teenager, who walked onto the bus as she continued to smoke.

“Sorry. You can’t do that,” Suna said.

“It’s just weed.”

“Not on here,” Suna said. The girl tossed the joint onto the sidewalk and banged her fist into the first row of seats, but Suna ignored her. She kept driving as the bus filled behind her and then began to empty out after she passed through downtown. “Last stop,” she announced, a few minutes before 7 a.m. She was scheduled for a six-minute break before turning around to begin her next trip up Colfax, but when she looked in the rearview mirror, there were still seven people sleeping on the bus. Lately, about a quarter of her riders were homeless. The bus was their destination, so they rode until someone forced them to get off. “Sorry. Everyone out,” Suna said again, speaking louder, until the only passenger left was a man slumped across two seats in the second row. Suna got up to check on him.

“Sir?” she said, tapping his shoulder. He had an open wound on his ankle, and his leg was shaking. “Sir, are you okay?”

He opened his eyes. He coughed, spit on the floor, and looked around the empty bus. “We make it to Tulsa?” he asked.

“No. This is Denver. This is the 15 line.”

The passenger stumbled onto his feet. “Do you want me to call you an ambulance?” Suna asked, but he shook his head and started limping toward the doors.

“Okay. Have a good day,” Suna said. He held up his middle finger and walked off the bus.

Five days a week she drove back and forth on the same stretch of Colfax Avenue, stopping 38 times each way, completing every trip in a scheduled time of 72 minutes as she navigated potholes by memory and tried to make sense of what was happening to her passengers and to the city that she loved. She’d started reading books about mental illness and drug abuse, hoping to remind herself of what she believed: Addiction was a disease. Homelessness was a moral crisis. The American working class had been disproportionately crushed by covid-19, rising inflation and skyrocketing housing costs, and her passengers were among the victims. She thought about what her father had told her, when she was 19 years old and preparing to leave her family in Turkey to become an immigrant in the United States. He’d said that humanity was like a single body of water, in which people were made up from the same substance and then collected into different cups. This was her ocean. It was important not to judge.

And for her first several years in Denver, that kind of compassion had come easily to her. She felt liberated driving the city bus, which Muslim women weren’t allowed to do back home in Ankara. She loved the diversity of her passengers and built little relationships with her regulars: Ethiopian women who cleaned offices downtown, elementary-school children who wrote her thank you notes, Honduran day laborers who taught her phrases in Spanish, and medical students who sometimes asked about her heart ailment. But then the pandemic closed much of Denver, and even though Suna had never missed a day of work, many of her regulars had begun to disappear from the bus. Two years later, ridership across the city was still down by almost half, and a new wave of problems had arrived in the emptiness of urban centers and public transit systems, not just in Denver but all across the country.

Philadelphia was reporting an 80 percent increase in assaults aboard buses. St. Louis was spending $53 million on a new transit security plan. The transportation union president in Tucson said the city’s buses had become “a mobile refuse frequented by drug users, the mentally ill, and violent offenders.” The sheriff of Los Angeles County had created a new transit unit to keep passengers from having to “step over dead bodies or people injecting themselves.” And, meanwhile, Suna was compulsively scanning her rearview mirror, watching for the next crisis to emerge as she began another shift.

Two teenagers were burning something that looked like tinfoil in the back of the bus. A woman in a wheelchair was hiding an open 32-ounce can of beer in her purse and drinking from it with a straw. A construction worker holding a large road sign that read “SLOW” sat down in the first row next to a teenage girl, who scooted away toward the window.

“This sign isn’t meant for me and you,” the construction worker told the teenager, as Suna idled at a red light and listened in. “We can take it fast.”

“I’m 15,” the girl said. “I’m in high school.”

“That’s okay.”

Suna leaned out from her seat and yelled: “Leave her alone!”

“All right. All right,” the construction worker said, holding up his hands in mock surrender. He waited a moment and turned back to the teenager. “But do you got an older sister?”

Suna tried to ignore him and looked out the windshield at the snow-capped peaks of the Rocky Mountains and the high-rises of the city. She hadn’t been downtown on her own time since the beginning of the pandemic, and lately, she preferred to spend entire weekends reading alone in her apartment, isolating herself from the world except for occasional phone calls with her family in Turkey. “I used to be an extrovert, but now I’m exhausted by people,” Suna had told her sister. Increasingly, her relationship with Denver was filtered through the windshield of the bus, as she pulled over at stops she associated mostly with traumas and police reports during the pandemic.

There was Havana Street, where, a few months earlier, a woman in mental distress had shattered the windshields of two No. 15 buses, including Suna’s, within five minutes; and Billings Street, where, in the summer of 2021, a mentally unstable passenger tried to punch a crying toddler, only to be tackled and then shot in the chest by the toddler’s father; and Dayton Street, where Suna had once asked a man in a red bikini to stop smoking fentanyl, and he’d shouted “Here’s your covid, bitch!” before spitting in her face; and Downing, where another No. 15 driver had been stabbed nearby with a three-inch blade; and Broadway, where, on Thanksgiving, Suna had picked up a homeless man who swallowed a handful of pills, urinated on the bus, and asked her to call an ambulance, explaining that he’d poisoned himself so he could spend the holiday in a hospital with warm meals and a bed.

“Hey, driver! Hit the gas,” a passenger yelled from a few rows behind her. “We’re late. You’re killing me.”

She stared ahead at a line of cars and checked the clock. She was two minutes behind schedule. She inched up toward the brake lights in front of her and tried to focus on a mural painted on the side of a nearby building of a woman playing the violin.

“Hey! Do you speak English?” the passenger yelled. “Get your ass moving or get back to Mexico.”

She kneaded her hands into the steering wheel. She counted her breaths as they approached the next stop, North Yosemite Street, which had been the site of another episode of violence captured on security camera several months earlier. An intoxicated and emaciated 57-year-old woman had jumped out in front of a moving No. 15 bus, shouted at the driver to stop, and then pushed her way onboard. She’d started cursing at other passengers, pacing up and down the aisle until a man twice her size stood up in the back of the bus and punched her in the face with a closed fist, slamming her to the floor. “Who ain’t never been knocked out before?” he asked, as the woman lay unconscious in the aisle, and then he stood over her as the other passengers sat in their seats and watched. “Here’s one more,” he said, stomping hard on her chest. He grabbed the woman by the ankle and flung her off the bus, leaving her to die of blunt-force trauma on the sidewalk. “We can keep riding though,” one of the other passengers had told the driver, moments later. “We got to go to work, man.”

Now, Suna pulled over at the next stop and glanced into the rearview mirror. The belligerent passenger was out of his seat and moving toward her. She turned her eyes away from him and braced herself. He banged his fist into the windshield. He cursed and then exited the bus.

Suna closed her eyes for a moment and waited as three more passengers climbed onboard. “Thanks for riding,” she told them, and she shifted the bus back into drive.

Each night after she finished making all 228 stops on Colfax, Suna went home to the silence of her apartment, burned sage incense, drank a calming herbal tea and tried to recover for her next shift. Meanwhile, many of her passengers ended up spending their nights at the last stop on the No. 15 route, Union Station, the newly renovated, $500 million gem of the city’s transportation system and now also the place the president of the bus drivers’ union called a “lawless hellhole.”

The station’s long indoor corridor had become the center of Denver’s opioid epidemic and also of its homelessness crisis, with as many as a few hundred people sleeping on benches on cold nights. The city had tried removing benches to reduce loitering, but people with nowhere to go still slept on the floor. Authorities tried closing all of the station’s public bathrooms because of what the police called “a revolving door of drug use in the stalls,” but that led to more people going to the bathroom and using drugs in the open. The police started to arrest people at record rates, making more than 1,000 arrests at Union Station so far this year, including hundreds for drug offenses. But Colorado lawmakers had decriminalized small amounts of drug possession in 2019, meaning that offenders were sometimes cited with a misdemeanor for possessing up to four grams of fentanyl — enough for nearly 2,000 lethal doses — and then were able to return to Union Station within a few hours.

The city’s latest attempt at a solution was a mental health crisis team of four clinicians who worked for the Regional Transportation District, and one night a counselor named Mary Kent walked into Union Station holding a small handbag with the overdose antidote Narcan, a tourniquet and referral cards to nearby homeless shelters.

“Can I help you in any way?” she said to a woman who was pushing a shopping cart while holding a small knife. The woman gestured at the air and yelled something about former president Barack Obama’s dog.

“Do you need anything? Can we help support you?” Kent asked again, but the woman muttered to herself and turned away.

Kent walked from the train corridor to the bus platform and then back again during her shift, helping to de-escalate one mental health crisis after the next. A woman was shouting that she was 47-weeks pregnant and needed to go to the hospital. A teenager was running naked through the central corridor, until Kent helped calm her down and a transit police officer coaxed her into a shirt. During a typical 12-hour shift, Kent tried to help people suffering from psychosis, schizophrenia, withdrawal, bipolar disorder, and substance-induced paranoia. She connected many of them with counseling and emergency shelter, but they just as often refused her help. Unless they posed an immediate threat to themselves or others, there wasn’t much she could do.

An elderly man with a cane tapped her on the shoulder. “Somebody stole my luggage,” he said, and for a few minutes Kent spoke with him and tried to discern if he had imagined the suitcases or if they had in fact been stolen, both of which seemed plausible. “Let’s see if we can find a security officer,” Kent said, but by then the man no longer seemed focused on the missing suitcases, and instead, he asked the question she got most of all.

“Where’s the closest public bathroom?” he said.

“Oh boy,” she said, before explaining that the one in Union Station was closed, the one in the nearby public park had been fenced off to prevent loitering, the one in the hotel next door had a full-time security guard positioned at the entrance, and the one in the nearby Whole Foods required a receipt as proof of a purchase in the store. The only guaranteed way to protect a space from the homelessness crisis was to limit access, so Union Station had also recently approved a plan to create a ticketed-only area inside the station to restrict public use starting in 2023.

Kent walked outside onto the bus platform, smelled the chemical burn of fentanyl, and followed it through a crowd of about 25 homeless people to a woman who was smoking, pacing and gesticulating at an imaginary audience. A few security officers walked toward the woman, and she moved away and shouted something about the devil. Kent pulled a referral card from her bag, went over to the woman and introduced herself as a clinician.

“What can we do to support you right now?” she asked.

“Nothing,” the woman said. She walked to the other end of the platform, threw a few punches at the air and boarded the next bus.

The job, as Suna understood it, was to drive and keep driving, no matter what else was happening to the city, so the next morning, she pulled up to her first stop at 5:32 a.m. and then made her way along Colfax, stopping every few blocks on her way downtown. Billings Street. Havana Street. Dayton. Downing. Broadway. She finished her first trip and turned around to start again. A woman with an expired bus pass yelled at her in Vietnamese. Two passengers got into an argument over an unsmoked cigarette lying on the floor. Broadway, Downing, Dayton, Havana, Billings. She shifted her eyes back and forth from the rearview mirror to the road as she made her second trip, her third, her fourth, her fifth, until finally she reached the end of the line at 4:15 p.m. and turned around to begin her final trip of the day. She stopped at Decatur station to pick up three women, closed the doors, and began to pull away from the stop.

“Hey!” a man shouted, standing outside at the bus stop. He wore a basketball jersey and a backward cap. He banged on the bus and Suna stopped and opened the door. “Hey!” the man repeated, as he climbed onboard, cursing at her. “What the hell are you doing pulling away? I was standing right there.”

“Watch your language,” she said. “Where’s your bus fare?”

He paid half the fare and then cursed at her again. He walked to the first row of seats, sat down and glared at her.

“What are you staring at?” he yelled. “Go. Drive the damn bus.”

“I’m not your pet,” she said. “You don’t tell me what to do.”

She pulled out from the bus stop and looked away from the rearview mirror toward the mountains. She counted her breaths and tried to think of what her father had said about humanity being a single body of water. She’d dealt with more difficult passengers during the pandemic, including some earlier that same morning, but that was 11 hours and 203 stops ago, and as the passenger continued to rant, she could feel her patience beginning to give way.

“You’re so stupid,” the passenger said, and she ignored him.

“You idiot. You’re just a driver,” he shouted, and she pulled up to an intersection, hit the brakes, and turned back to him. “Why are you calling me names?” she asked. “F-you. F-that. You don’t know a single good word.” She told him to get off the bus or she would call the police. “Go right ahead,” he said, and he leaned back in his seat as she picked up her phone and gave her location to the officer. She hung up, squeezed the steering wheel, and continued driving toward her next stop.

“You dumb ass,” he said. “You bitch.”

“Just shut up!” she shouted. “You can’t talk to me that way.” Her hands were shaking against the wheel and she could feel the months of exhaustion and belittlement and anger and sadness welling up into her eyes, until she knew the one thing she couldn’t do for even a moment longer was to drive. She pulled over to a safe place on the side of the road. She turned off the ignition and put on her hazard lights. She called a supervisor and said that she was done driving for the day, and that she would be back for her next shift in the morning.

She opened the exit door and turned back to the passenger. “Get off,” she said, blinking back tears, pleading this time. He stared back at her and shook his head.

“Fine,” she said, and she stood up from her seat and walked off the bus