A year ago this week, a 22-year old Army reject with a shaved head and a 9mm opened rapid-fire on a Congressional meet-and-greet outside a Tucson shopping mall, killing six and wounding 14, including a non-fatal headshot against Democratic Rep. Gabrielle Giffords. The day after the shooting, I flew to Tucson to look for stories. Upon landing I found my way to Sportsman’s Wharehouse, the massive gun-shop where Loughner had purchased his Glock as easily as buying a bagel. At the counter I saw two kids Loughner’s age with sleeve and neck tattoos indicating current or past membership in one of the area’s many white power gangs. When I asked the guy behind the counter if the shooting had impacted sales, his manager cut me off and said staff weren’t allowed to talk to press. (more…)
A huge number of “going postal” rampage massacres that I’ve studied feature Glocks, including last Saturday’s assassination-rampage in Tucson. What is it about the Austrian-made handgun that makes it such a favorite of rampage killers, not to mention narco-gang-bangers and…
Mark Ames was back on MSNBC’s The Dylan Ratigan Show yesterday talking about the Tuscon assassination-rampage murder, the degeneration of America’s political class and how growing inequality makes everything and everyone shittier. To quote eXiled hero Charles Portis, “We’re weaker…
This story was first published in Vanity Fair. Saturday’s shooting in Tucson, Arizona, has been variously described as an “assassination” and a “shooting rampage”—but which one is it? This may seem like a semantic quibble, but what occurred in that…
File this under “Seriously Fucked Up”: While most of America has been hiding under the covers afraid they might have to confront the ghost of Joe Stack, shooing him away by pretending he was something else–”He was a Tea Bagger!”/”He…
The American “going postal” virus just spread to the U.S. territories in the South Pacific, after a gunman killed 4 people and wounded at least 8, including a group of South Korean tourists, before blowing his brains out at the…
This article was first published in Alternet. It’s hard to pinpoint what’s the most shocking thing about Major Malik Nadal Hasan’s shooting rampage in Fort Hood, Texas. I’ll start with this: there’s nothing all that ground-breaking about it. Happens all…
This article first appeared in Alternet. There was another workplace rampage killing last week, just outside of Fresno, California, leaving two company employees dead and the other employees grateful to be alive. Fresno, like so much of unofficial America, is…
