This is America, so you don’t get a chance to process one mass shooting before there’s another one. Saturday night in the Ybor City neighborhood of Tampa, two were killed and at least 18 injured when a dispute between two groups devolved into gunfire. This follows Wednesday’s single-shooter rampage in Lewiston, Maine. Meanwhile, the Supreme Court may be about to trash state red-flag laws that keep guns away from dangerous people. I haven’t decided yet whether to cover our gun problem in a featured article or in a very long note in the weekly summary.
What I know I’m writing a featured article about is the ascension of Mike Johnson to the speakership. Initially, Johnson was covered as just another MAGA extremist, but in fact it’s worse than that: He’s a follower of Christian Nationalist pseudo-historian David Barton. That post should appear maybe around 10 EDT. If there’s a gun article, it will follow around 11.
The weekly summary will discuss how the House GOP “moderates”, who seemed to have found their backbones when Jim Jordan was running for speaker, crumbled completely in the Johnson vote. I don’t have a lot to say about the Israel/Gaza War, but I’ll link to people who do. There’s Trump trial news every week: more people flipped on him, two different judges are trying to figure out how to discipline his outbursts (which would send any other defendant to jail for contempt), and his children are going to have to testify this week in the Trump Organization fraud trial. And he gets more befuddled on the campaign trail, where he projects his own mental decline onto President Biden.
You may not have noticed Mike Pence was running for president, but he has dropped out. A Cat 5 hurricane hit Acapulco without drawing much media attention. Virginia is about to have an important election. And I’ll close with 18,000 people singing a Toto song. I’ll try to get that out by noon or so.
The Weekly Sift 
Comments
Maine clearly proves mental illness killed the people not a gun walking in shooting by itself – a professional National guardsman with a legally obtained gun going nuts – how would gun restrictions have stopped him ? However if anybody in the bowling place had had a concealed weapon she could have shot him when he started shooting
This is a perfect example of the fantasy fever that pollutes rational discussion of our national epidemic of gun violence, often resulting in the deaths of innocents.
The idea that a non-professional, someone who doesn’t regularly train to anticipate and respond to confronting sudden lethal situations, will cooly and calmly pull a concealed weapon she happened to still have on her while bowling, and will stand there in the face of a barrage from a semi-automatic AR-15 and neutralize the shooter (who in this case was a trained and skilled user of his weapon), and do so without hitting anyone else, or starting a chorus of concealed weapon holders shooting up the place, is so untethered to reality it wouldn’t even deserve a response if it weren’t the standard reflexive reaction from people who place imaginary gun rights above all other considerations. Why, we just experienced a responding police force in Texas refusing to confront a single shooter because they were afraid of his AR-15. But sure, some random amatuer civilian is going to save the day, so let’s be sure everyone has a gun 24/7, because if there’s always a solution for the gun nuts, it’s more guns.
The problem is the AR-15. It used to be illegal to possess one (or more, because the NRA won’t be happy until everyone has at least a couple dozen), and it needs to be illegal again. It won’t completely solve our completely deranged, pathological gun culture, but at least it would be start.
It would seem American people want Trump as their GOP candidate and the speaker of congress also with similar mindset while Biden and Harris are as popular as the plague
Why do you think that is ?
For values of “American people” equal to “the ones in my own little bubble.”
By “the American people”, you mean MAGA cultists? And, the current POTUS, and the first adult in that office since 2017, is currently supported by 70% of Democrats, the people who will select the Democratic nominee.
This isn’t Red State or the Daily Caller. Facts matter in this neck of the woods.