Tag Archives: gun-violence

And So It Goes

Today is Sunday, December 14, 2025, the first night of Chanukah, the Festival of Lights. I expected this to be a light news cycle but was shocked by two mass shootings occurring a world apart within the last two days: a shooting here in this country at Brown University, in Providence, Rhode Island, that killed two people and wounded nine others and the horrific mass shooting in Sydney, Australia, at Bondi Beach that resulted in at least 15 dead and scores wounded.

An online CBS News article reports on the attack in Australia that occurred during a Chanukah celebration at the famous Australian beach. The article is entitled “Gunmen kill at least 15 in attack targeting Australia’s Bondi Beach Jewish community Hanukkah celebration, officials say,” and it’s by Emily Mae Czachor and Anna Schecter.

The assault killed at least 15 people, including a 12-year-old, government officials and police said. Another 40 people were hospitalized with injuries, including two officers and three children.

The horrendous event was carried out by a father and son pair who targeted Jews directly. The father was 50 years old and his son was 24 years old. The two cowards opened fire with long guns at Bondi Beach while the local community was celebrating the first night of Chanukah. The 50-year-old died and his son was hospitalized in “serious condition,” New South Wales Police Commissioner Mal Lanyon said.

The younger assailant was identified as a Pakistani national based in Sydney, according to a U.S. intelligence briefing and a driver’s license provided by Australian police.

Officials have not identified the victims of the attack, but one victim was identified: Rabbi Eli Schangler, who had been a key organizer of the Chanukah celebration where the shooting took place. The international organization Chabad, which represents a branch of ultra-Orthodox Judaism, identified Schlanger as one of their spiritual leaders.

Called Hanukkah by the Sea, the event was held to mark the beginning of the Jewish holiday observed from sundown on Sunday until Monday, December 22. More than 1,000 were at the beach when gunfire broke out, said Lanyon. He called the attack a “terrorist incident” and said the perpetrators used “long arms,” referring to long guns such as shotguns or rifles, to carry it out.

During this terrible incident, there did emerge a hero from the crowd in the form of a fruit shop owner by the name of Ahmed al Ahmed who jumped up from a crouched position behind a parked car and tackled one of the evil suspects, who had just fired his weapon toward something out of view. Following a short struggle, the man disarmed the suspect, pushed him to the ground and turned the weapon on him, at which point the suspect stood up and walked in the opposite direction.

Unlike the United States, mass shootings in Australia are rare. Unfortunately, researchers have recorded dramatic upticks in antisemitism incidents in the country since the October 7, 2023, assault by Hamas terrorists on Israel triggered the war in Gaza, along with spikes in hate incidents against Muslim groups.

In response, the Australian government appointed special envoys lsat year to address antisemitism and Islamophobia in its communities. However, attacks have continued to happen since then. “In July, an arsonist set fire to the door of a synagogue in Melbourne, another major Australian city, seven months after a different synagogue in the same city was burned by criminals in a blaze that injured one worshipper.”

The Brown shooting has been apparently carried out by a 24-year-old suspect from Wisconsin, authorities have indicated. The person of interest was found with a revolver and a small Glock handgun in his room at a hotel in Coventry, Rhode Island.

The shooting left two students dead and nine injured at the Ivy League school in Providence. What the hell possessed this young man to walk into a classroom and indiscriminately shoot up the place, killing two strangers? Time will hopefully tell.

This rash of mass shootings in this gun-happy country actually comes today on the 13th anniversary of the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting that took the lives of 20 children and 6 adult educators. I doubt this shitty president will ever mark this solemn anniversary with some principled remarks.

Again, where is the outcry to pass sensible gun legislation after so many mass shootings involving these weapons of mass destruction? A majority of Americans do endorse such legislation, but our NRA-backed politicians in Washington certainly do not! It’s time they get the boot in upcoming elections, as well s Democrats who are in the pocket of the National Rifle Association. You would think after 20 innocent lives were slaughtered in the Sandy Hook shooting, lawmakers would have done their damn jobs, but no, the atmosphere did not change at all.

We are a cursed nation – full of crazy people who love to shoot their guns off in the direction of other people whom they hate.

And I was going to say, “Happy Chanukah” to all of those who celebrate. What a terrible beginning to the holiday, I say.

Have a good week.

And so it went!

Here is Forest Hills on a wintry Sunday morning.

And So It Goes

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!

And So It Goes

Today is Wednesday, August 27, 2025. The school year hasn’t even truly begun yet, and today, we have a shooting in Minneapolis that has left two children dead and nearly 20 other people injured, while the suspect is deceased from a self-inflicted gunshot wound, according to local officials. This tragic story is reported in an online MSNBC article entitled “Two children dead, 17 injured in shooting at a Catholic school in Minneapolis,.” by Erum Salam.

The name of the school is the Annunciation Catholic School in Minneapolis where two innocents, ages 8 and 10, were killed where they sat in the pews during Mass, police said. Seventeen others were injured – 14 of whom are children, including two who are in critical condition.

Late Wednesday afternoon, Minneapolis Police Chief Brian O’Hara said, “All remaining victims are expected to survive.” But that report is little consolation to the families who lost their loved ones to perennial gun violence today.

The shooter was identified as a 23-year-old whose name I will not print here. It seems as if this troubled young man produced a manifesto and had posted videos online referencing suicide and “extremely violent thoughts and ideas,” according to law enforcement officials. These sources said the assailant left behind an apology to her family and a handwritten sketch of a church’s layout, thought it wasn’t apparent that the sketch was of the school she struck.

The Minneapolis police chief said at a news conference that the assailant wore black clothing and was armed with legally purchased weapons, including a rifle, shotgun, and pistol. She fired dozens of rounds through windows as she targeted her innocent victims for no apparent reason.

Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey called the attack “an act of evil,” and said he is “so deeply saddened, and I’m so sorry to the families I know who are suffering right now.”

Today’s shooting is the most recent of several notable violent incidents in the Minneapolis area this year. In June, Minnesota state Rep. Melissa Hortman and her husband, Mark, were killed in what officials have described as a politically motivated attack at their home. This attack also resulted in the death of the couple’s golden retriever.

This latest assault on innocence by a gun-loving person who showed signs of mental duress (the shooter was identified as a trans woman, which will cause such an uproar in MAGA world that it will drown out any kind of empathy for the victims of this suicide-prone assailant) just highlights the urgent need to address bringing up an assault rifle ban in Congress. Of course, now that we have a dotard in the White House, this won’t happen when lawmakers come back after their none-too-deserved recess over the summer! It’s average Americans who need to press their legislators to pass sensible gun control legislation in the fall. And to give anyone running for office a litmus test on this subject.

Because of the serious nature of what happened today, I will suspend writing about my day. Who needs to hear my bullshit anyway?

All of these families have been impacted forever by this one evil incident! No one should expect to send their children to any school to be shot! No one! What is fucking wrong with this country? We just revel in gun violence and that’s a fucking, crying shame! There are more guns here than people. Ponder that raw fact, people!

It’s time to fucking do something about this!

Tomorrow I will not be writing my blog because I will be attending our artistic friend “Ralph’s” movie based on his satiric musical skewering the current occupant of the White House called Dictator for a Day which was turned down by Amazon Prime because of the fucking censorship going down in this country because of our sitting dictator. But I will not write where this event is happening for fear that some Dump law enforcement guy is keeping notes on this event because it criticizes the president to no end! We all know this guy has a sense of humor up his ass!

And so it went!

And So It Goes

Today is Tuesday, December 17, 2024. Questions are being asked today about that 15-year-old school shooter – it was incorrectly reported that she might have been 17 yesterday – in Madison, Wisconsin, that left two people dead, a staff member and a student, at the private Christian school where this latest outrage took place. An online article by Dakin Andone entitled “What we know about the Madison, Wisconsin, school shooter” outlines the latest information authorities have on the very young killer.

For obvious reasons, I’m not going to post the young woman’s name – why should I glorify a horror like this by posting the assailant’s name then! Anyway, six others were injured in the shooting, police said, including two students hospitalized in critical condition. Let’s hope those wounded are able to recover from their wounds – at least physically. Psychologically, it’s another matter altogether. This event will stay with these poor victims the rest of their lives. Who really knows the psychological toll this type of event will have on these individuals?

Investigators into the shooting are trying to determine the shooter’s motive here. Police Chief Shon Barnes has indicated that it “appears that the motive was a combination of factors.” He declined to provide more details.

It now appears that a “document” was shared widely on social media by the killer. Police are also examining the shooter’s activity online, Barnes told reporters.

Police have said the shooter used a handgun to carry out the deadly attack – a weapon whose history is being traced by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms (ATF) and Explosives, Barnes said.

The family of the young shooter is cooperating with police, Barnes said yesterday. Police, together with the district attorney’s office, will “want to look at if the parents may have been negligent” in providing their daughter with an illegal firearm. Barnes indicated that, “at this time, that does not appear to be the case.”

Both federal and Wisconsin law generally make it illegal for someone younger than 18 to possess a firearm, so how did this young preteen get ahold of such a weapon then? State law similarly makes it illegal for any person to intentionally sell, loan, or give a dangerous weapon to someone younger than 18.

A more recent development in these terrible shootings is that prosecutors have now taken steps to hold parents accountable for providing their children the firearms they would go on to use in school massacres, testing the limits of who could be deemed responsible.

Two such cases followed school shootings at an Oxford, Michigan, high school in 2021 and a Winder, Georgia, high school in September.

Don’t you wish with this latest school shooting, something finally would be done to prevent the next incident? But this is the United States of America where guns rule supreme in our streets and schools. It’s just revolting, in my humble opinion.

Today because of the shockingly warm weather, I ventured into Manhattan to first exchange our Metropolitan Opera tickets to La Boheme for another date since I discovered that Elliot and I will be away on Saturday, January 11. In another blog, I’ll mention why. So I went to Lincoln Center initially to ask for two seats for the January 18 performance, and I was able to get two new tickets without paying a farthing.

Then I took the B downtown to West 4th Street where I bought a ticket at IFC for Sabbath Queen, a new documentary by Sandi DuBowski that is a marvelous exploration of what it means to be gay and still be connected to your religion in the 21st century. I highly recommend it to all of my gay Jewish brethren because it examines – over more than two decades – the life of one Amichai Lau-Lavie, a gay Israeli man who moved to New York in 1997 and participated in the gay/drag culture back then, by donning the persona of Rebbetzin Hadassah Gross, a widow who married and outlived six rabbis. Lau-Lavie speaks quite seriously about his heritage of being born into a family of rabbis going back 38 generations, all the way to the 11th century.

Lau-Lavie also cofounded the experimental Lab/Shul which breaks with traditional synagogues in that it welcomes all faiths and those who have intermarried. His brother Benny is a powerful rabbi in Israel’s Orthodox community who renounces his more flamboyant brother for his rejection of tradition. Amichai’s mother mourns his son’s gayness, based on her belief that it means an end to the family line. Her tolerance for her son’s gayness actually softens when Amichai donates sperm to a lesbian couple and coparents their son, in which his family now views him as an honorary heterosexual.

The film is more than just a portrait of this very complex man, it questions the meaning of Jewish traditions in contemporary society which becomes its beating heart. The documentary also takes us to the very depths of the Holocaust in which Amichai’s family line is shattered. Amichai’s and Benny’s grandfather was sent to Treblinka by the Nazis, where he was killed. While his father saved his own life by jumping off a train en route to Buchenwald.

The film is very rich in its exploration of Amichai’s life journey and his later choice to become a Conservative rabbi by attending the Jewish Theological Seminary here in New York. However, while he’s studying to become such a religious leader, he learns that he cannot officiate at interfaith marriages anymore and this becomes a sore point during one of his board meetings at Lab/Shul. Does this new title change the freewheeling and radical Amichai? See the film and find out. I just found the whole venture fascinating as a gay man and a nonobservant Jew who did partake in holiday services as a much younger man. I still go occasionally to services at the Congregation Beit Simchat Torah here in New York and I even accompany my friend “Harold” to services at Rosh Hashanah. You will see in the film how services are totally different at Lab/Shul in that the traditional prayers are abandoned for something very alien to what traditionalists have grown up with.

In a review of the film, I learned that the director first met the subject of this almost two-hour documentary when working on his first film, Trembling Before God, which profiled queer Hassidic and Orthodox Jews and their problems with adjusting to their faith after coming out.

I decided to have some dinner at the Washington Square Diner after the film. What happened at the end of my meal totally blew my mind. Maybe you can say I experienced a true New York moment when toward the end of my dinner, a young woman sitting at a booth next to me asked me about the book I was reading: Crying in H Mart by Michelle Zauner that became a bestseller in 2021. The woman commented on how good the book was and I replied I just began reading it. When the check was handed to me, this Good Samaritan swept up the bill and paid for my dinner. I was totally flummoxed. First, I thought the waiter gave her my check by mistake, but she just repeated that she paid my bill. I asked her why and she said it was the holiday or something to that effect. I offered to at least leave a gratuity, and she said that was not necessary. I thanked her effusively and still cannot tell you why this perfect stranger decided to do this for me. Did she like the fact that I was reading a book that appeals to Gen Z, which is the target audience that Zauner’s book probably appeals to? I think she was only in her 20s when she wrote about how the death of her mother devastated her. I’ll never know why. All I can say is that charity is still alive after this act of supreme kindness. Maybe I should have strongly refused her offer, but then, would she still have insisted on paying the check? I will ruminate over this for a very long time.

And so it went!