Today is Monday, September 1, 2025, a new month and the unofficial end of summer. As this is the Labor Day weekend, a disturbing but all too predictable article in The US Sun appeared online which detailed the raft of violence that occurred in the country. Entitled “Sixteen dead & dozens hurt in Labor Day violence with at least 52 shot in Chicago alone as Trump sets sights on city,” Arshi Quershi reports on the unceasing victims of gun violence that were taken by lawful and unlawful firearms.

Gunfire erupted then in multiple cities, with Chicago suffering the worst toll – 52 shot, seven fatally, since Friday night.

The holiday carnage began on Friday night when a 25-year-old woman was found shot to death inside an apartment just before midnight in South Shore, Chicago. She was hit twice in the abdomen and once in the left leg. Another woman inside was also wounded.

Just hours later on Saturday morning, two men were standing outside in East Garfield Park when a dark SUV pulled up and a gunman opened fire. Two men, aged 29 and 32, were shot, according to ABC affiliate WLS-TV.

The 29-year-old man was shot multiple times and died at Mount Sinai Hospital.

That evening, a 43-year-old woman in Altgeld Gardens was ambushed by five males who unleashed a fuselage of bullets. She later died in the hospital.

In Bronzville, seven people were wounded late on Saturday when a gunman opened fire at a large gathering in a terrifying mass shooting.

Early on Sunday, a 33-year-old man was killed during an argument in the Englewood neighborhood after being shot in the head.

And several mass shootings followed, despite officials’ insistence the city does not need Dump’s help.

Chicago was not the only U.S. city to be rocked by violence over the final weekend of summer.

Atlanta police say a man in his 50s was killed after a fight between a woman’s current and former boyfriend turned deadly.

Officers said the suspect, believed to be the current boyfriend, fled the scene, ABC affiliate WSB-TV reported.

Cincinnati was the setting for three young people being the victims of gun violence in Mt. Washington, Ohio, before the gunman turned the weapon on himself.

Hours later, a woman was found shot in the head in Millvale and declared dead at the scene.

An 11-year-old boy was shot in Houston after playing a “ding dong ditch” prank as he rang doorbells and ran away. This young victim, sadly, learned the hard way that doing this trick is a far more dangerous stunt in 2025 when everyone, especially in Texas, is armed.

On the West Coast, two men died after shots rang out at Don Knabe Regional Park in Cerritos, Los Angeles, early Sunday.

The two victims were rushed to a nearby hospital but did not survive their injuries, CBS News reported.

Further east, three men, aged 35, 37, and 41 were shot outside a building in New York just after 3:30 a.m. on Sunday. This shooting has a more optimistic outcome: all three were rushed to Bellevue Hospital and are expected to recover.

In Nashville, North Carolina, police confirmed one person died Sunday after being found with multiple gunshot wounds inside a home.

The Dump regime’s crime crackdown in D.C. has included aggressive street sweeps and gun confiscations, with city and federal authorities taking around 150 weapons off the street since the Orange Turd declared a public safety emergency nearly three weeks ago.

The Orange Ogre has renewed threats to send federal agents and National Guard troops to Chicago, prompting a swift response from Illinois Governor JB Pritzker and Mayor Brandon Johnson.

Pritzker called the plan “unprecedented and unwarranted” and “illegal, unconstitutional, un-American.”

Mayor Johnson signed an executive order, the “Protecting Chicago Initiative,” to affirm city police authority and block cooperation with federal operations.

Johnson warned that deploying the National Guard could inflame tensions and emphasized the city would pursue all legal avenues to protect residents’ rights.

it’s too early to tell what will happen in these cities, mainly blue, where the reigning autocrat wants to deploy his own secret police to allegedly fight crime. Little does he know that most crime is up in red rather than blue states, but this idiot will never send the National Guard to Alabama or Mississippi anytime soon.

Related to this article on senseless gun violence occurring over this holiday weekend is an online opinion written by Thom Hartmann on how to end this national nightmare of ceaseless gun violence. His piece is entitled “The one thing that will end this national nightmare,” and it is a very thoughtful assessment of what is needed to finally end this repetitive cycle of bullets being fired into innumerable victims.

Hartmann takes us back to the brutal murder of Emmett Till that had its 70th anniversary on Thursday, August 28. This week also brought us another mass school shooting, this time in Minneapolis, with two children dead and 17 people in the hospital.

After the recent shooting in Minneapolis, Hartmann rapped a “pathetic” Republican congressman who claimed that the slaughter wan’t facilitated by guns but by “mental illness, including radical gender ideology.” This is totally pathetic, in my opinion too.

Hartmann writes about the issue, “This is a phenomenon as systemic and unique to the United States today as Jim Crow was in the 1950s.” He feels that the gun control movement needs to learn from the Civil Rights movement.

If you don’t recall, Emmett Till was kidnapped by two Mississippi white men on August 28, 1955, brutally tortured, murdered, and his mangled body thrown into the Tallahatchie River. This being the Deep South, the white men who did it, and the white woman who set it off with a terrible lie, were never brought to justice at all.

Till’s mother, Mamie Bradley, made the extraordinary brave decision to show her child’s mutilated face with an open-coffin funeral in their hometown, Chicago.

What invigorated the dormant Civil Rights movement was a picture that ran in Jet magazine that showed the mutilated face of Emmett Till. That picture made real the horrors of white violence against Black people in America for those who were unfamiliar, or just unwilling, to confront it.

Fast forward to our own ensnarement of gun violence with the innumerable school shootings starting with Columbine in 1999 and continuing up to the present day. Hartmann believes that Americans must see the horrors of gun violence in pictures like the ones that accompanied Till’s funeral in 1955.

It would be a controversial challenge, Hartmann agrees, but he feels that pictures convey an unmistakable reality that words cannot. He hopes that parents of children murdered in a school shooting may make the same decision as Mamie Bradley Till did in 1955. He feels it’s about time for America to confront the reality of gun violence in order to take bold measures to ameliorate it once and for all. He feels that the media are too squeamish when it comes to printing actual gunshot photos of children murdered in school killings. Of course, there has to be a Mamie Bradley in the form of a parent, spouse, or other relation who is willing to allow the photos of their loved one to be used in this way.

Comparing this country’s perpetual inaction over this issue to other countries, Hartmann points to Tasmania, Australia, where a gunman using an AR-15-style weapon to shoot up a public square resulted in multiple people dead. While the mainstream media generally didn’t publish photos from the massacre, they were still widely circulated.

As a result, the Australian public was so repulsed that within a year semiautomatic weapons in civilian hands were outlawed altogether, as strict gun control measures were put into place, and a gun-buyback program went into effect that voluntarily took over 700,000 weapons out of circulation.

In the first years after the laws took effect, firearms-related deaths in Australia fell well over 40 percent, with suicides dropping by 77 percent. There have been only two mass killings in the 29 years since.

Here Hartmann writes, “The year 1996 was Australia’s Emmett Till moment. America needs ours.”

I agree wholeheartedly. We finally need this if we want to see gun violence receding in this gun-toting country.

Anyway, the weekend was quite a whirlwind of activity. We were supposed to have driven to “Ralph” and “Sandy’s” house on Saturday, but we had to wait for our new Whirlpool refrigerator to arrive and to be installed that afternoon. We bought the appliance on Friday and contracted to have it delivered the next day. However, I expected it to be delivered in the morning, but I got a text on my phone saying the item would be at our door between 12:15 and 3:15. The refrigerator came around 2:05. It was installed within 45 minutes or so.

We didn’t get launched, so to speak, until about 3:40 or so, and we didn’t arrive until about 6 or so. We spent the rest of the evening indoors with our hospitable hosts with Sandy providing us with her excellent, home-cooked lasagna and a salad for dinner. A friend named “Mary” arrived a little later with dessert, a fruit tart. We all sat in the dining room and schmoozed.

After Mary left, we stayed up a little longer, trying to watch a Kirk Douglas film on TCM: The Heroes of Telemark, but I was nodding off, so we went inside to our room and to bed.

The next day, we woke up around 9:30 to have knishes that we brought from Yonah Schimmel’s Knish Bakery, on East Houston Street, and fruit salad, plus bagels. We waited until about 11:45 to drive to Sellersville, Pennsylvania, to attend my best friend of 60 years’ standing retirement party at the Washington House Restaurant, on North Main Street. We made great time, arriving before 1, when it was scheduled.

All in all, the party was lovely. There were, maybe, 25 to 30 guests, many of whom I didn’t know, except for “Harold'”s immediate family consisting of wife, son, daughter, daughter-in-law, and granddaughter. Harold made an at-times humorous speech recounting his employment history as someone interested in the music field for many years of his life and how he met his current employers, the husband-and-wife couple who own the theater that has employed Harold for close to 21 years. I didn’t know all of the details of his vocational journey here and I was happy to learn them that day. I sat with his daughter, son, and family, so I enjoyed smooching with all of them at the table.

The food consisted of a first course, mixed green salad; a second course, a choice of falafel wrap, oriechette pasta, or seared Atlantic salmon (I chose this entree); and dessert consisting of fresh fruit or chocolate chip cookie sundae. Which one do you think I chose here?

Maybe after a little over 2 and a half hours, we made our exit. Now it was time to drive back to Forest Hills. That was quite a long drive, considering how long it took. Of course, you do have to count the hour or so it took us to have dinner on the road to the overall commute, which was close to 4 hours. We encountered traffic leading to the George Washington Bridge. I think we got home after 8.

Tomorrow I will be attending my gay men’s reading club to discuss Thomas Grattan’s In Tongues. I missed August’s meeting since I couldn’t get the book in time. Thus I will miss my blog tomorrow night then, especially if we all go to Julius’s Bar for refreshments afterward.

Hope to see you on Wednesday. Oops, I just remembered we’re seeing our adopted “nieces,” “Esther” and “Rene” on Wednesday for dinner, so I don’t know if I will write one then either. I do think, however, we won’t have a long night with them since Esther still works. She’s only 27.

Have a good Tuesday.

And so it went!