Friday, April 16, 2021

 It’s the end of the week and what a week it’s been. I swear, we got past the idea that an unknown disease might kill us so we decided to do it ourselves. I hate to be that flippant, but this is definitely a laugh-to-keep-from-crying situation. Unfortunately, I’m not all that funny.

 Anyhow. We had yet another mass shooting yesterday, bring the number up to 147 this year and 45 since the beginning of March. Now, to be clear, a mass shooting doesn’t mean everyone shot was killed or even anyone shot was killed. No, that’s a different metric, and we’ve had 11 mass murders this year. And just in case you thought this was a new phenomenon, we had 660 shootings last year, up from 419 in 2019. USA! USA! USA!

 The latest entry happened in Indianapolis when a 19-year-old man decided people at a FedEx facility needed to die and opened fire, killing eight and wounding five. One of the five is in critical condition. The shooter was a former employee named Brandon Hole who, at 11 p.m. last night, drove up to the facility and started shooting. He killed four outside before moving into the warehouse, shooting the rest and killing four more. An interesting note is employees at work in the facility weren’t allowed to have their cell phones on the floor, so they couldn’t call the police or notify loved ones.

 By the time police got there, Hole had already killed himself. As of right now, there’s no known motive for the shooting and the killing weapon has only been described as a “rifle.” Hole was actually known to authorities after the FBI investigated him last year. His mother said he planned on “committing suicide by cop.” He was investigated and had a shotgun confiscated and that was all there was to it since, well, they really couldn’t find anything. As of right now, that’s all we know though reports say a “significant number” of the shooting victims were Sikhs.

 Speaking of shootings, cops in Portland killed a man this morning in Lents Park on the east side of the city. The cops got a call that someone had seen a “white man holding a gun” and arrived to find a shirtless man standing in the middle of an intersection. They shot him and the police have yet to report if a gun was found at the scene.

 By this afternoon, a group of protestors had gathered. It didn’t take long for a clash to kick up with the fuzz, and there’s been plenty of evidence that the Portland Police Department has been overly heavy-handed in dealing with people exercising the First Amendment rights to protest. Apparently, the PPD reacted to the “aggressive” crowd of around 100 with munitions but the crowd was said to settle down after the cops left the scene.

 This comes on the heels of an investigation on the shooting of supposed Antifa activist Michael Reinohel by Portland police last year. Reinohel was accused of shooting pro-Trump protestor Jay Danielson. The cops claim Reinohel shot first but there’s some question whether his gun had been fired.

 We also learned yesterday that the Chicago police and distract attorney lied about the shooting of 13-year-old Adam Toledo last month. The law claimed the youngster had a gun on him when they shot. While he did have a gun during their chase, he’d laid the gun down and had his hands raised when the police shot him. This was all revealed on the killing cop’s bodycam. Like the Portland PD, the Chicago fuzz has been accused of overly aggressive tactics.

 Have a nice weekend.