Another Tragic Reminder: Too. Many. Damn. Guns.

7 min readOut on the Weekend(Permanent Musical Accompaniment to the Last Post of the Week from the Blog’s Favourite Living Canadian)We had another unfortunate exercise of Second Amendment freedoms on Thursday, this one in Bend, Oregon. A 16-year old with his mother's pump-action shotgun killed three schoolchildren and a teacher before he was gunned down by a citizen who’d followed him into the school. Silver Rail Elementary School. From Oregon Public Broadcasting:“Right now we can report that the suspect is a 16-year-old, but as of this morning, the Bend Police Department has not identified the shooter nor given us really any information about what cause or motivation maybe led to the attack,” Brynelson continued. “We don’t know if he had any connection to the school or why he opened fire on at least one vehicle in the area prior to going into the school.”This was the second mass shooting in Bend since 2022, when a guy walked into a Safeway with an AR-15 style rifle and killed himself and two others. I think Bend has done more than its part watering the tree of liberty.Now, we will have the usual dialogue. Oregon has relatively tough gun-safety laws, so we will hear from the usual suspects about how those laws don’t work. The guy who killed the mass shooter will get all the run he wants from Fox News and the other, lesser fauna on the wing-nut media savanna. And all of it will obscure, again, the basic problem this country has.Too many goddamn guns.Well, that happened fast.The people spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe the decision, which was not yet announced. Neither the White House nor Ms. Zacharia responded to requests for comment. But Mr. Trump told reporters on Friday that he had encouraged Ms. Zacharia to “reconsider” the job. “Honestly, if I were you, I’d reconsider,” he told reporters, recounting his conversation with his press secretary. He said he added: “Katie, do you need this? I don’t think you need this.” He said Ms. Zacharia might continue to work for him “in some form, but maybe a more pleasant form.”Whadda guy! Always thinking of his people.Zacharia’s weird tenure as the White House spokesperson is only the most obvious evidence that the administration is coming apart at the top. Somebody else had to have cleared Zacharia’s hiring, which means that someone has taken a big beating on that merciless Procrustean scoreboard in the president’s head.Weekly WWOZ Pick to Click: “Inner Glimpse” (McCoy Tyner): Yeah, I pretty much still love New Orleans.Weekly Visit to the Pathé Archives: Here, from 1968, is the Braemar Gathering in Scotland. The royal family stops by. Lots of heavy-object tossing ensues, and the Brit narrator gets snotty about the American who came from Missouri to toss the caber. History is so cool.The Washington Post has been making a meal out of the relationship between the president and his temporary residence. On Friday, we learned how completely banjaxed that relationship really is.When Vance Patterson learned last spring that President Donald Trump wanted to build a White House ballroom, he turned to the White House Historical Association to offer his help—$2.5 million to pay to demolish the East Wing and preserve its contents. The nonprofit, founded by first lady Jacqueline Kennedy to help preserve and share the White House’s history, had recruited Patterson, a businessman and former GOP congressional candidate, as a high-net-worth donor, he said in an interview last week. Now Patterson saw an opportunity: help Trump tear down the White House’s existing East Wing to build a new ballroom.One thing the president knows the way a vulture knows carrion—somebody, somewhere, always has a price.A spokesperson for the White House Historical Association said in a statement that Patterson’s donation was used for documentation of the East Wing and that no money went toward its October 2025 demolition or construction of Trump’s ballroom. The association declined to identify the spokesperson and did not make McLaurin available for an interview. The organization did not respond to questions about why Patterson believed his gift would be used for demolition. Patterson is not included among a list of ballroom donors obtained by The Washington Post.For the association, new donors like Patterson have been crucial to help weather controversies wrought by Trump and his wholesale changes to the White House. Historians, preservationists and some supporters have criticized the group’s silence as Trump has applied his aesthetic to the presidential mansion and grounds, saying that his actions run afoul of Kennedy’s explicit goals for the organization and that it should have spoken up before Trump tore down the East Wing.It seems that the president has a special interest in erasing the memorialization of John F. Kennedy. His obsession with the Kennedy Center is only the most obvious example of this weirdness. At the White House, he has deliberately demolished all the improvements Jacqueline Kennedy made—most notably the Rose Garden, which now is a soulless patio.Meanwhile, his lawyers have asserted executive privilege over some documents in the current lawsuit over his proposed “renovations” to the Kennedy Center. I’m sure that’s been done simply out of his respect for the institution of the presidency.Discovery Corner: Hey, look at what we found. From CBS:Archaeologists have discovered the world’s oldest shipwreck off the coast of Turkey, dating it to between 4,400 and 4,700 years old. The structure of the ship has not survived the nearly five millennia underwater, but its contents of clay jars have been preserved surprisingly well, with some still containing traces of what they transported over 4,000 years ago. The archaeologists who found the vessel said that it was a nearly 33-foot-long trade ship transporting goods across the Mediterranean Sea and originated somewhere on the eastern Mediterranean coast. The wreck dates back to the same time period as when the Pyramids of Giza were being built, and will “offer insights into ancient trading connections and the everyday lives of seafarers,” according to Turkey’s Culture and Tourism Minister Mehmet Nuri Ersoy.Hey, Reuters, via NBC, is it a good day for dinosaur news? It’s always a good day for dinosaur news!The partial skull of a tiger-sized predator that prowled what is now the Isle of Wight off England’s southern coast about 120 million years ago is giving scientists a better understanding of an enigmatic group of meat-eating dinosaurs known for running down prey and ripping them apart with massive hand claws. Researchers said the fossil belongs to a species they have named Invictibellatrix amberina, an early member of the lineage of Cretaceous Period carnivorous dinosaurs called megaraptorans. Invictibellatrix adds to the knowledge of skull anatomy among early megaraptorans and, being the first one known from Europe, helps show how the group spread globally.And more proof that folks go out to Mongolia to dig and sweat when all they have to do is explore museum basements.The Invictibellatrix fossil, a fragmented braincase, was discovered about a century ago and acquired by the Natural History Museum in London in 1924. “It was left in one of the collection’s drawers ever since, and no one noticed it until a couple of years ago,” Scherer said.Speaking of fragmented braincases, the president today…Nah, it’s too easy.(By the way, Wednesday was National Fossil Day. I wonder if they had a bipartisan party in the Senate.)I’ll be back on Tuesday for whatever fresh hell awaits. Be well and play nice, ya bastids. Stay above the snake-line and wear the damn masks, and take the damn shots, especially the boosters and any New One. In your spare time, spare a thought for all the victims of our current epidemics, including the killer countertops, and for the victims of the horrific glacial collapse and flood in Nepal, and for Representative Max Miller’s wife and child, and for the Iranian people, and the Lebanese people, and all the other people downrange in our newest war, and all the people in ICE detention, and the victims of ICE violence, and the Epstein victims, and Eric Swalwell’s victims, and the victims of the storms in Hawaii, and the victims of the Canadian wildfires, and also the ones in Spain, and the victims of the floods in Missouri, and the victims of the heat domes, and those affected around the world by wildfires, and the victims of the Venezuelan earthquake, and for the victims of the earthquake in Japan, and the victims and their families in the Tumbler Ridge school shooting in Canada, and for the shooting victims in Austin, and for the families of the victims of the mosque shooting in San Diego, and in Michigan, and in Virginia, and in Louisiana, and for the victims and their families of the shootings in Wilmington, Delaware, and Kansas City, and for the families and victims of the mass shooting in Midland, Texas, and for the brilliant journalists of The Washington Post, and for the citizens of the occupied city of Minneapolis and South Burlington, Vermont, and for all the people recovering from Hurricane Isaias, and the people in the flooded areas of southern Africa, and in the flooded areas in Ireland, and in the flooded areas of Brazil, and the flooded areas of Nepal, and for the storm-clobbered, flooded areas of the upper Midwest, including my alma mater, and in Georgia, and for the people affected by the tornadoes in Mississippi, and for people suffering from the hantavirus outbreak on the Hondius, the plague outbreak in Siberia, the Ebola outbreak in the DRC, the outbreaks of measles, the Hegseth Flu down in Texas, the explosive-diarrhea bug, and the Legionnaires’ disease outbreak in Harlem, and the victims of the heat wave in Europe, and for our LGBTQ+ citizens, who deserve so much more from this country than they’re getting.