Overcast and quiet this early Tuesday on California’s coast, and despite some breaks in the cloud cover, there’s no view of the mysterious Gamma Delphinid meteor shower expected to pass earth this morning.
Somebody will shoot it with a camera, for sure.

And in the midst of all that NSA travail this week, a horrible shooting tragedy in Santa Monica was pushed to a second-tier news bit — guns are still killing people, people.

(Illustration found here).

As the crush goes on, the horror continues, even if it’s a cheerless joke:

Schools in Newtown, Conn., were placed on “lockdown” today after a phoned-in threat, a scare that one mom called a “horrible, evil thing to do” to a town still recovering from the December massacre of 20 first graders.
The schools were placed on modified lockdown, in which students were dismissed to parents or by bus, after a threat was called in to Hawley elementary school, according to schools superintendent John Reed.

Meanwhile, in Chicago the presence of firearms is an indication of shootings: At least 12 people were shot Monday, including a young woman who died after she and four others were hit by gunfire in a shooting in the Englewood neighborhood, Chicago police said.
Gun violence is such a force, maybe there’s no much we can do about it, especially if the NRA holds the purse/heart strings of the US government, and even as we approach of the six-month birthday of the Sandy Hook Elementary School massacre, guns are begetting more guns and more death — when will it end, or cease, or maybe slow down?

Wonkette nails the barrel thrust:

Perhaps you’re aware of the Most Depressing Thing on the Internet, Slate’s running tally of every US gun death since Newtown, which at the time of this writing stood at 4,850 including the six who were killed in Santa Monica in Friday’s ordinary run-of-the mill mass murder spree by a kevlar-clad neo-berserker lunatic.
Eleven people were killed that day in all; another, in Arizona, was shot by his four-year old son when the kid found an unsecured handgun in a friend’s home.
Friday, June 7th was the worst day for American gun deaths since Wednesday, June 5th, when 17 people died after being shot, or shooting themselves, which was terrific compared to the day before, when 28 died in random and not-so-random acts of Freedom.
…
Keeping with the theme of ladies and guns, Houston group “The Armed Citizen Project” is cold giving away free shotguns to fifty lucky femme fatales so they can fight the War On Women. We would be proud of ourselves if that was a joke we came up with, but actually no, it is for serious: The Armed Citizen Project website says this is, “Fighting the war on women, one free shotgun at a time.”

And a crazed killer loaded with death-equipment: “I’ll never forget his eyes. They were just so intense and so cold,” she said. “I was somebody in the way, and I was somebody to get out of the way. And that’s when he raised his rifle.”

This has become one fucked-up place, this country, this world. Let’s just see what happens today and how many will make to sundown?
Maybe, just maybe, everybody can come by the liquor store I manage and get some tequila shooters, and just let it go at that…