If you must do something outrageous around the full moon, try howling at the sonofabitch. Always works for me.
I’d love to be able to blame the full moon for this, or maybe Friday the 13th, but it happened on Thursday night.
The scariest part may be that this apparently was not a single incident, but rather three separate shootings.
What. The. Fuck.
And lo siento mucho, but candlelight vigils with Modelo backs are not the answer, any more than thoughts and prayers.
Put down the fucking guns, please. And thank you.
Tags: More guns!
Mad Blog Media 
September 14, 2019 at 9:29 am |
Like my old boss at the gun store used to say, “if everyone carried a gun there would be a lot more killings but a lot less crime.” He was wrong then, and he would be wrong now. We need less guns in circulation, background checks on all sales, waiting periods for handguns, magazine capacity restrictions, and an assault weapon ban with no loopholes.
September 14, 2019 at 9:52 am |
Like pretty much everyone else (save the NRA and its drones) I’m at a loss when it comes to stuff like this.
What purpose does this chickenshit serve? Some rite of passage? How does shooting trailer-park grannies from a moving vehicle make you a man?
September 14, 2019 at 10:51 am |
Poverty, drugs, endless violence, and hopelessness explains some crimes, maybe most of them. Most of these things are forced on the people, but the ones who do it blame the victim.
As far as the assault rifles go, I can’t explain it except for maybe war and hero worship mixed in with a toxic quantity of false, bumper sticker patriotism. For a few it might be for fun or curiosity, but those folks are willing to give them up for the common good. For others, it must be that they think they have a little wienie.
September 14, 2019 at 12:21 pm |
Ya gotta wonder when/if the NRA ownership of Congress will ever end? The thing needs to be sued out of existence as a menace to public safety. There’s certainly enough evidence to link the insane number of guns in the USA with the frequency of bullets being fired into people and to link NRA actions as stopping what the vast majority of citizens want according to poll after poll, after poll – reasonable controls like so many other civilized countries have.
September 14, 2019 at 12:47 pm |
It’s the friggin’ Second Amendment, an incomprehensible bit of word salad that must have slipped through while the Founding Daddy-os were all drunk. Hucksters, shysters and arms dealers have been making bank off that one since before the ink dried.
September 14, 2019 at 2:01 pm |
The second amendment, like other bill of rights amendments, is not absolute as proven in multiple supreme court opinions. The 1994 assault weapons ban passed their test. But, the NRA claims to have 5 million members. If they vote as they are told by wayne baby, then that is enough to affect how the swing states go which give the electoral college victory to disasters like bush and trump. Politicians know that, along with the fact that in any close race the NRA can make or break your candidacy. To sum it up, people are stupid. The NRA loves ignorant and easily influenced members.
September 14, 2019 at 2:51 pm |
Alas, the Supremes we have now are not those of yesteryear. I don’t see much hope of getting a Second Amendment massage past this Originalist lot, which has no respect for precedent.
September 14, 2019 at 3:30 pm |
Word.
September 15, 2019 at 12:29 am |
Exactly right! Did the Founding Fathers include cannons and whatever other weapons-of-mass-destruction existed at the time? The problem is the definition of ARMS. Nobody (well, perhaps Steve King of Iowa?) would defend private ownership of a tank with working turret or an attack helicopter gunship but somehow AR15’s are OK?
This is an issue like abortion, something that was no big deal until the right-wingers decided to make it one, knowing full well they could exploit ignorant and easily influenced folks to get all wound up about it.
September 14, 2019 at 2:16 pm |
Fuckin’ A. We almost bought a house in the SE Heights to be close to UNM. Glad we didn’t.
People don’t shoot up the neighborhood when they have better things to do. It seems not a day goes by without someone shooting someone in Albuquerque, where drugs, gangs, illiteracy, joblessness, anger, and other forms of hopelessness rule. Meanwhile, we have over a thousand members in the gun club in Los Alamos and you have to be a historical researcher to discover a shooting. I’m not convinced the whole country should be building nuclear bombs, but what we have are good salaries, high levels of education, and social stability. Far less income inequality than say, Albuquerque or for that matter, Fanta Se with its limousine liberals on the hillsides and people scratching out a living as baristas and struggling to pay the rent.
Somehow a little five year old girl from a troubled family got tossed into the Rio Grande the other day up in Espanola. She washed up S. of Espanola in the Santa Clara reservation. Life is cheap.
As far as ARs there was nothing in the news suggesting they were used in the latest set of firefights in the Duke City. One could make them like most other semiautos with limited internal magazines of ten rds or less. I don’t hear of anyone shooting up the hood with a Garand lately. Most of these morons would be too stupid to figure out the en block clip.
Likewise, I don’t hear of anyone shooting up Dodge with a full auto, although according to The Trace, there are about 600-700k of them out there. Highly restricted. My former neighbor, a machinist at LANL, had one with all the expensive and tedious to obtain Federal permit trimmings. He wasn’t the problem. The fact that anyone with a credit card can get hold of an AR is the problem.
Pat, no offense because I know you used them for their intended purpose but they are fun for board certified gun nuts, mainly because they are modern military type weapons and wickedly accurate. I have a scope on one and like pinging steel targets at 200-300 yards with HPBT match ammo. Then again, since Uncle Sam trusts me to work on far more lethal weapons ‘o war, he probably doesn’t care if I plink with a little Weapon ‘o War, Robert Francis notwithstanding. But I think we do need higher standards for owning those rifles and by all means, for owning handguns, which account for close to 90% of this bullshit.
Here is my problem. As I said years ago, if we wanted to regulate these buggers, we should have done it in the sixties because the bright line was not ammo capacity or speed of reloading, but semiauto v full auto but with ARs, that is irrelevant. Now that they are as common as ice cream cones, I think we need to finesse the problem. Right now all Beto is doing is putting us at risk of another four years of Orange Hitler. Its not just me saying that, its actual Serious Democrats(tm) too.
Like Scrooge, I’d say I’ll retire to Bedlam, but I think its all filled up.
September 14, 2019 at 2:39 pm |
For sure handguns are the big issue. Death meted out retail, day to day, rather than in wholesale lots every so often.
In “Wolf,” Jim Harrison — who shot animals for food and punched people for sport — had this to say about handguns:
“I’m not going to shoot any presidents or leaders may I keep my guns. Outlaw all pistols though. Creep machines. Everyone in Detroit carries one now after the riots. May they shoot off their toes. They aren’t any good anyway unless you have had considerable practice.”
September 14, 2019 at 3:04 pm |
Pocket pistols. Glocks. Drum magazines. Jeezus.
People don’t like to shoot target pistols at bullseyes anymore. Its all two handed shots with plastic pistols at people-shaped targets. I’ve thought about it but I would probably feel like a fuckin eejit. Not exclusively, but this stuff generally done by white guys who don’t live anywhere near danger. I don’t think the club does traditional slow, timed, and rapid fire NRA pistol very often, at least on an organized basis. Mostly IDPA and the like. I have a pen pal who is a sociologist at Wake Forest U. who studies gun culture. He calls the current culture of self defense GC 2.0 whereas dinosaurs like me are back in GC 1.0
https://gunculture2point0.wordpress.com/
Sounds like a good book. Hell, I haven’t shot an animal in over thirty years. I thought, during that last hunting trip in 1985 while dragging Bambi to the car to be made into chops, “what did an animal ever do to me that I should shoot one?” It sounds far more likely that a human would do something deserving to be shot, but I really don’t want to go there either.
I don’t understand the mentality that seems to rule where “when all you have is a handgun, everything looks like a target”. Maslow’s Handgun. Sociologists call it a social contagion. Let’s not solve problems if we can shoot people instead.
Someone told me that Proud Boys were gonna show up in your neck of the woods today too. Really?
September 14, 2019 at 3:18 pm |
Proud Boys? Shit, why not? We got Ginger Hitler coming to Rio Gabacho on Monday, might as well have the whole menagerie on display.
They’d better bring their own helicopter, though, or they’ll get stuck in traffic like everybody else.
September 14, 2019 at 2:44 pm |
No offense take buddy! As i said, I know folks who have them for the same reason you do. But, the fun you can have does not outweigh the destruction they do in the country at large. Besides, the damn things are butt ugly! AK types are even worse looking. So, I support an air tight and properly written assault weapon along with a 15 round magazine capacity limit. I want the supply of these things to start drying up now. A voluntary buy back program would be fine with me as well.
You want a beautiful rifle to shoot out to 500 yards? Here you go. I’m too cheap.
https://shilohrifle.com/rifles/1877-sharps-rifles/1877-1-shiloh-english-rifle/
September 14, 2019 at 2:49 pm |
PS: because I flew in helicopters a lot, I traded my M-16 for a 1911 45 ACP and a M-79 grenade launcher. Most of time when I was flying I just had the 1911. I needed both hands to carry equipment and tool boxes.
September 14, 2019 at 3:23 pm |
1911 is a nice pistol. I had a work buddy, since deceased, who had a short barreled shotgun as defense weapon in Vietnam. He was a chopper pilot and flew one of those two rotor jobs into combat. Told me some stories of having to use it in landing zones. He came back from Vietnam minus an eye and with a major league liver toxicity problem.
I learned on a 1911, as my stepdad was a competitive shooter. So I learned to shoot his 1911 Gold Cup and his Hi Standard Supermatic Trophy at the range or back yard. Learned archery from the old guy, too.
September 14, 2019 at 2:54 pm |
You would have been flying down Memory Lane here the past few days, Paddy me boyo. The choppers have been buzzing around overhead like big ol’ dragonflies. I thought maybe Bill Kilgore was paying us a call but the surfing sucks here and I didn’t hear any Wagner playing.
September 14, 2019 at 3:36 pm |
The Border Patrol flies them around here all the time. Come over the house twice a day. Hell, the Cochise County Sheriff has one too. Probably subsidized by Buffet.
September 14, 2019 at 3:11 pm |
Yowsir. That’s expensive hardware. We got my old man a 45/70 replica instead on his eightieth birthday. Plus he reloads.
I have a Model 70 in 300 H and H magnum (inherited it), but it costs two fifty a round to shoot the damn thing and my shoulder gets black and blue. The most expensive 223 ammo I buy is fifty cents a pop. And with the gas operation, it doesn’t punish me.. But I cannot think of ever loading more than 5 rds in it. Usually its three round groups and then the spotting scope to check point of aim.
But yeah, let’s make it hard enough to buy these black rifle things that they aren’t street candy.
September 14, 2019 at 9:51 pm |
Jeeziz. You folks have your hip waders? https://www.abqjournal.com/1366288?utm_source=abqjournal.com&utm_campaign=breaking+bar&utm_medium=breaking+bar