How often do people threaten to shoot strangers over parking spaces in Europe? Prompting the question is this item from the Houston Chronicle on the arrest of a Corpus Christi woman:
Rossie Dennis, 60, was arrested for on a warrant for aggravated assault with a deadly weapon, the Corpus Christi Police Department reported on Facebook.
Dennis was arrested for an incident that occurred around noon on November 24, according to the CCPD post. Screenshots of a video were posted on Reddit saying the incident occurred at an H-E-B in the Annaville neighborhood in Corpus Christi.
CCPD says when they arrived at the parking lot they were told that Dennis pointed the gun at the victims and threatened to shoot them over a parking space. It’s not clear how many people were in the vehicle, but the Reddit post claims it was a woman and a six-month-old child.
An exasperated E.J. Dionne ponders the fuidity of the meaning of “pro-life” in light of recent events (Washington Post):
On Tuesday, four high school students — ages 14, 16 and 17 — were fatally shot in Oxford, Mich., by a 15-year-old classmate firing a 9mm pistol with 15-round magazines.
Less than 24 hours later, a Supreme Court majority that seems on the verge of weakening the nation’s gun laws heard arguments in a case that could lead to tougher restrictions on abortion.
Please tell me: What can the words “pro-life” possibly mean when the same people who want to constrain abortion are eager to make it easier for Americans to obtain and carry deadly weapons?
There were no reports of guns found among the 33 protesters arrested for blocking the street near the Supreme Court Wednesday morning. Statistically, among the hundreds of protesters in favor of overturning Roe v. Wade and those against, some own firearms.
The Post’s Dana Milbank found the anti-abortion/pro-life protesters “louder and full of rage.” A group took turns invading the space reserved for the pro-Roe protest
… and took turns drowning out the speakers there with a pole-mounted bullhorn at ear-shattering volume:
“Maybe some of you should have been aborted, you wicked, nasty disgusting, ungodly — I don’t even want to call you women! You are bloodthirsty animals!”
“This is what happens when you allow women to emasculate men! God hates you!”
“In the name of Jesus Christ, shut your vile, sick mouth!”
They heckled a Black speaker: “Go to Chicago! Black-on-Black killing is off the charts! … You don’t mind taking the White man’s dollar when he wants to kill babies!”
[…]
“You deserve capital punishment! … You deserve what’s coming to you! … You’re a vile, anti-God, anti-Christ sicko!”
It’s not hard to imagine some of them armed and equally exorcised over a supermarket parking space.
Dionne continues:
How is it “pro-life” for a nation to accept school shootings as a routine part of our daily news feeds? Can it possibly be “pro-life” to pretend that because no law will ever end all such shootings, it’s not worth trying to pass anything that might at least make them less likely?
We take for granted a conservative ideology rooted not in intellectual consistency but in the politics of culture wars that hold abortion rights as an abomination but gun rights as inviolable. And we wonder why the shootings continue.
Heaven forbid the U.S. should be more like Europe (or Australia, gun-toting Rep. Madison Cawthorn suggests) where mass shootings, school shootings, shootings at all are a rarity, not an everyday occurrence. No, freedom-loving patriots need their guns and to carry them everywhere to protect themselves (and their parking spaces) from the vilest, wickedest, nastiest, ungodliest sickos on the face of the Earth: other Americans.
Rather than restrict access to firearms (an abomination), schools now teach children how to barricade their classrooms, cover the windows, line up along the wall, and arm themselves with whatever is at hand to throw at any active shooter who enters. Rather than tolerate reasonable restrictions on firearms (an abomination, remember), we’ll propose arming teachers so they can shoot their students.
Dionne concludes:
Here’s what we’re facing: conservative jurists ready to expand states’ rights when it comes to limiting or banning abortion but equally prepared to block states from enacting gun laws aimed at protecting the right of their people to live beyond their teenage years.
I cannot touch Dahlia Lithwick’s contempt for the court’s conservative majority. Lithwick welcomes conservatives dropping all pretense about overturning Roe v. Wade. The gaslighting soon will be over:
There will be no more fake solicitude for women making difficult choices, no more pretense that pregnant people really just need better medical advice, and no more phony concerns about “abortion mills” that threaten maternal health. There is truly something to be said for putting an end to decades of false consciousness around the real endgame here, which was to take away a woman’s right to terminate a pregnancy—rape, incest, abuse, maternal health no longer being a material factor. At least now we might soon be able to call it what it is.
Read her commentary for yourselves and weep for the insane asylum this country has become, a place where guns have rights and women do not. The betting line is that the Roberts court means to force women back into the second-class place God intended. This, even as conservatives armed to shoot their neighbors scream about saving the unborn and cry tyranny over mask-wearing and vaccine mandates. Until Covid chokes off their last breaths.