Last report I saw was the suspect left an "AK47 type rifle" with a scope, at a vantage point 300-500 yards from Trump's location at the time.
Now granted journalists don't tend to know a damn thing about firearms, or ask good follow up questions so who knows, it could be a DMR type of rifle like an SVD that the uninformed would mistake for an AK.
But if it's just a standard 7.62 x 39 AK pattern rifle, scoped or not, that's ... very optimistic at that range.
Something definitely broke in society around that time though, and "access to guns" only describes an outlet or mechanism, and not the underlying problem.
Pre-1968, civilians could buy full auto machineguns. At one point in the 1930s the Sears catalog would send a full auto Tommy Gun straight to your house via mail order with no background check. And yet in those eras the idea of a grand spectacle suicide/homicide event would have been absolutely unthinkable, even among the most disposessed in society.
The root problem is something more like cultural narcissm, for lack of a better word.
The concept of a deep cynical anti-hero move like publicly murdering pseudo-random aquaintances is a relatively modern problem. Maybe we need to do a better job suppressing "main character vibes" and narcissism, the acting out and sociopathy that is prevalent now.
Imagine thinking that platform only "went bad" recently.
Jamar Chase is a big fucking baby
These Bengos games are always a rock fight.
Pretend you like, and are interested in the meaning of, her unnecessary wrist tattoo. That's good for at least 5 minutes of conversation.
Wife: "I bet he's thinking about other women."
Husband: "Marvel 'nerds' are now just normies."
I have often said (to mostly deaf ears) that Fantastic Mr. Fox is probably his best film, and one of my favorite films period. Glad to see it so high on one of these lists.
Purely strategically, the best bet is for NATO to fund and lend/lease materiel to Ukraine sufficient to make the Russian effort protracted and expensive. Maybe Ukraine can solidify some territorial gains in Russian oblasts enough to have bargaining chips. From there it is just a game of finding acceptable off-ramps. Maybe a treaty gets signed that trades territory back to something like the "original" borders circa the beginning to the current conflict.
Russia clearly doesn't care about personnel losses (and historically never has). But maybe if it drags on, the conflict will become economically and politically costly enough that Putin is looking for offramps.
This sounds awesome. It uses the native YouTube app? Or YouTube in the TV web browser?
I think they're thinking the more probable scenario is that Russia does it. But let's hope they don't.
Yes I'm not saying there was zero violence in society. There were things like Al Capone's St. Valentines Day Massacre, Bonnie and Clyde, the Kansas City Union Station shootout, etc. but these were extreme outliers in society at large and were international news because of it.
What is relatively new is the concept of an average student or worker becoming disgruntled and deciding to mass murder peers in a singular incident, usually with some grandiose manifesto attached to it.