On June 1, 2022, a disgruntled patient opened fire at his doctor’s office in Tulsa, Oklahoma, killing four before turning the gun on himself. Michael Louis, 45, had received surgery the month before for back pain, but found no relief. Enraged, when his doctor failed to ease his suffering, he bought a .40 caliber Smith and Wesson semiautomatic handgun on May 29th, then an AR-15 style assault rifle just three hours before the shooting.
By now we’ve all heard of the tragic events at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas last week, on May 24th, where Salvador Ramos killed 19 fourth-graders and two teachers, after shooting his grandmother. Ramos used two AR-15 assault-style weapons on his rampage, which he had purchased within days of his 18th birthday the week prior. It’s taken far too long for accurate details of the crime to emerge, with conflicting, not to say contradictory, reports about Ramos’ entry to the school, and a mystifying 40-minute delay in active response by law enforcement before terminating the gunman as a threat, exposing an astounding level of incompetence.
Election Day 2022 promises to be quite a stunner, a supercharged day which is, ultimately, unpredictable. Held November 8, the day features multiple activations of Uranus, the planet of the shocking and unexpected, disruption, turmoil, revolution and change, including a conjunction by the Moon and oppositions from the Sun and Mercury. As well, it’s the day of the Sun/Mercury conjunction, and the Sun/Moon opposition, which just happens to be a total Lunar Eclipse!
The latest in a string of seemingly endless mass shooting hate crimes unfolded in Buffalo, New York on Saturday, 14 May 2022, when 18-year-old suspect Payton Gendron unleashed a hail of bullets from his modified AR-15 weapon at a Tops Friendly Market, killing 10 and wounding three others. Nine of the dead were black and specifically targeted for their race by Gendron, who is white and had released his White Supremacist manifesto online days before the shooting, then live-streamed the initial stages of the massacre from a camera mounted on his helmet. Clad in body armor, Gendron drove 200 miles from his home near Binghamton to exterminate individuals he feared were “replacing” whites as America’s majority, and had made the trip at least twice earlier to select additional targets, which included a nearby black church and an elementary school.
Serbian tennis phenom Novak Djokovic may have thrown a spanner into his quest for a new world record as the winningest Grand Slam champion of all time. Djokovic is in a three-way tie with Roger Federer and Rafael Nadal, with 20 titles each, but he may have stubbed his toe with his COVID anti-vax stance, which may prevent him from competing in the Australian Open, beginning January 17. Australia’s response to the coronavirus pandemic has been notoriously strict, with county-wide lockdowns and stringent protocols on entering the country.
On October 21, 2021, police were called to the set of “Rust”, a western being filmed in Bonanza City, New Mexico. An accidental shooting with a prop gun, discharged by star Alec Baldwin, had killed the film’s cinematographer, Halyna Hutchins, and wounded director Joel Souza. The cause of the incident is still under investigation, but somehow, live ammunition was loaded into a real revolver, not blanks in a prop gun. While setting up the next shot, with the gun pointed at the camera and the cinematographer, the weapon discharged; Baldwin’s statement is that he had cocked the gun, based on Hutchins’ instructions, but did not pull the trigger.
