A family holiday party in Tores, Brazil on December 23, 2024, turned fatal, resulting in the deaths of three members, and the hospitalization of three others, from arsenic poisoning. Dead are sisters Maida da Silva, 58, and Neuza Silva Dos Anjos, 65; and Neuza’s daughter Tatiana, 43; a third sister, Zeli Silva, 60, Maida’s husband Jefferson, and Tatiana’s son Matheus, 10, were hospitalized with severe injuries but survived.
On Monday, 16 December 2024, shooting suspect Natalie “Samantha” Rupnow, 15, discharged a 9mm handgun in a study hall at the Abundant Life Christian School in Madison, Wisconsin, killing two and wounding six others, before turning the gun on herself. The incident, sadly, is hardly isolated, but it is unusual. The vast number of mass shootings are perpetrated by males, using assault-style rifles; women constitute only 5% of mass shooters, and with both victims also female, this becomes an “all-female” cast of characters.
On 15 September 2024, history repeated itself with a second assassination attempt against former US president and current GOP presidential nominee Donald Trump, golfing at his Trump International Golf Club in West Palm Beach, Florida. Shots were heard on the course at approximately 2 PM EDT, and Secret Service agents quickly whisked Trump out of harm’s way. Details are still sketchy, but it seems the shots fired were from advance Secret Service agents, who noted a gun barrel protruding from a wooded fence line area as they scouted the course two holes ahead, roughly 400 yards beyond where Trump was playing. Shots were fired at Ryan Wesley Routh, 58, who never actually saw Trump or discharged his weapon before he abandoned his AR-15-style rifle in the bushes and fled the course. He was apprehended several hours later.
Ah, back to school! I remember it well – the bookbags and lunchpails that had to conform to what was currently “cool” to avoid merciless taunting; catching up with what friends did over the summer break; the new pens, pencils, notepads and markers; readjusting to subpar school cuisine; the new clothes that were another potential pitfall of derision; and of course, the mass shootings.
No, wait – that one’s new. Well, new-ish; it’s been a quarter century since Columbine inaugurated a whole new rite-of-passage for American schoolchildren, replacing dodgeball with dodgebullet, and each year since, it seems we just keep upping the ante.
“As a man soweth, so shall he reap.” – Galatians 6:7
Former US president Donald Trump, foremost promoter of political violence in America, was injured in an unsuccessful assassination attempt during a campaign rally in Butler, PA on Saturday, 13 July 2024. Nicked in the ear and bloodied by a shooter some 150 yards away, Secret Service agents quickly swarmed on the 2024 GOP presidential nominee, covering him bodily until word came that the shooter was down. At that point Trump was taken to an armed vehicle and whisked from the scene. Several attendees were injured, and one man died, as well as the shooter.
On 10 April 2024, news came of the death of sports legend O.J. Simpson, once known as one of the greatest running backs in NFL history. The Buffalo Bills star, a celebrity on and off the field, was the first player to rush for more than 2000 yards in a single season, winning the NFL MVP award in 1973. Known as “the Juice” in reference to his OJ initials, after retirement in 1979, Simpson went on to a marginally successful acting career, appearing in “Roots,” “The Towering Inferno,” “The Cassandra Crossing” and three films in “The Naked Gun” series, as well as several dozen film and TV roles.
Of course these accomplishments, noteworthy as they are, were totally eclipsed by the real-life drama Simpson became embroiled in after he was arrested and tried for the brutal murder by stabbing of his ex-wife Nicole Brown and her friend Ron Goldman at her home in 1994. The case, which began with a ten-hour-long slow-motion pursuit by police viewed by 95 million people, as Simpson attempted to avoid arrest for the crime, brought out the ever-present racial divide in America, with many black people thinking he was being framed, and white people assuming he was guilty.
