What the fuck is wrong with people?

A 69-year-old war veteran and former missionary was arrested over the weekend on the suspicion of killing a 22-year-old Cuban immigrant who mistakenly arrived in his driveway because of faulty GPS directions.

Gwinnett County jail records obtained by The Atlanta Journal Constitution indicated that Phillip Walker Sailors was charged on Sunday with the murder of Rodrigo Abad Diaz.

Friends who were in the car with Diaz told WSB-TV that they were trying to pick up a friend on the way to ice skating on Saturday but their GPS directed them to the wrong address. The friends said that they waited in the driveway for a few minutes before Sailors emerged from the house and fired a gun into the air.

Gandy Cardenas, who was in the car, recalled to WAGA that the homeowner made no effort to speak to the group before opening fire.

“He didn’t talk to them, he just started shooting,” Cardenas explained. “The first shot was in the air.”

At that point, Diaz tried to turn the car around to leave, but Sailors fired another shot, striking the immigrant on the left side of the head. The group, which included a 15 and an 18 year old, said that Sailors held them at gunpoint until police arrived.

So that’s one 22-year-old shot in the head while attempting to flee, three teenagers who witnessed their friend being shot in the head, one war veteran who could spend the rest of his life in prison and one elderly woman (he’s married) who, in a flash, lost her husband.

Nope, I still don’t see why people love their guns so much.

Hey, let’s get high, go out back and shoot some shit!

Two men were arrested in Ohio on Wednesday after their target practice with an AK-47 assault rifle accidentally shot up a woman’s home and nearly hit a officer who was responding to reports of gunfire.

Mary Kuruc told WEWS that her daughter discovered a bullet hole in the siding of their Montville Township home and other holes inside the house. After calling 911, Montville Police Sgt. Matt Neil began investigating and the home was hit again.

“We noticed a second bullet hole, followed the trajectory of it and noticed the bullet landed in the microwave,” Kuruc recalled.

Neil found himself in the line of fire as he tried to track down where the bullets were coming from.

“When I get about a half mile back in the field up on a hill, gunfire started again, and started hearing rounds go over my head,” the officer explained.

Neil called for backup and police discovered two men who thought they were safely shooting at paper targets, but the bullets were skipping off the ground and riddling the suburban neighborhood.

“They were drinking alcohol, they had some drugs on them and they were just outside, in their backyard shooting paper targets,” Neil said. “They felt because they were shooting at a downward angle, that it would have been OK.”

Police suspect that “dozens” of shots were fired and have asked other residents to come forward if their homes were hit.

Two men, 53-year-old Mark Bornino and 45-year-old R. Daniel Volpone, were arrested and are facing felony charges. Police seized an AK-47 with two high-capacity magazines, three handguns, over 700 rounds of ammunition and some marijuana.

I have to say, Obama was at his best in today’s speech. Like most conservatives, he’s emotionally engaged when he sees bad shit happening to people he can relate to. He said our primary job as a nation “is to protect our kids.”

Here’s the list of executive orders he signed.

Shelby Lynne:

Krugman:

OK, now for the really bad news. Anyone looking at these negotiations, especially given Obama’s previous behavior, can’t help but reach one main conclusion: whenever the president says that there’s an issue on which he absolutely, positively won’t give ground, you can count on him, you know, giving way — and soon, too. The idea that you should only make promises and threats you intend to make good on doesn’t seem to be one that this particular president can grasp.

And that means that Republicans will go right from this negotiation into the debt ceiling in the firm belief that Obama can be rolled.

At that point he can redeem himself by holding firm — but because the Republicans don’t think he will, they will play tough, almost surely forcing him to actually hit the ceiling with all the costs that entails. And look, if I were a Republican I would also be betting that he’ll cave.

So Obama has set himself and the nation up for a much uglier confrontation than we would have had if he had set a negotiating position and held to it.

Update: I should mention that on one issue, the estate tax, the problem is apparently with the Senate; there are, unfortunately, some heartland Dem Senators who are extremely solicitous of the handful of super-wealthy families in their states, so that Obama’s people don’t think they can get a majority for higher taxes here. It’s bizarre: states like New Jersey have far more large estates, not just total but per capita, than states like Montana, but it’s the Senators from the latter that are eager to preserve the inherited privileges of the few.

Also, Noam Schieber: …”the strategic consequences are disastrous.”

So how was your Christmas? Get any really neat presents?

If you never saw this, pull up a chair and watch the whole thing. It’s held up pretty well through the years:

But if it is, it’s breaking my heart. It was allegedly written by a seven-year-old who wrote it during the lockdown, and was killed. But people are nuts and do all kinds of fucked-up things when a tragedy happens, so I just don’t know:

Charlie Pierce:

We are our brother’s keeper. The bell tolls for all of us. These very old — and, yes, Bryan, very Christian — concepts really do undergird our experiment in self-government. We all have an investment in the institutions through which we apply these concepts to each other and to ourselves. We have to nurture those institutions and guard them, because they are so very much more easily destroyed than they are to build. And, yes, dammit, we have to pay for them, and we have to pay the salaries of the people who work for them, because we are their keepers, too, and because the bell tolls for them the same way it tolls for all of us.

Resist, then, the forces who tell you that the creation and maintenance of that commonwealth is too expensive or too complicated, or that it is an appeal to a time now lost to technology and modernity and the glories of free trade. Resist the frauds and mountebanks who seek to prosper from fragmentation and isolation, and who tell you that your “freedom” exists in a place outside of that creative process of self-government, and that, in fact, the institutions produced by that process are the enemies of that “freedom.” Resist, as strongly as you can, the people who seek to profit by isolating you in your homes, and in your anger, and in your wounded sense of aggrieved entitlement, and with all your guns.

We, The People. Those words are not an accident. They come before everything else in the document. Yes, even before the Second Amendment, they come, and there is a reason for that. When we commit ourselves to the American experiment — and our military does this formally, but we all do so when we accept the freedoms and benefits of that experiment — we commit ourselves first to We, The People, and the public institutions that are the manifestations of our political commonwealth in our daily lives.

The news is still rolling in, worse by the minute. An entire class of kindergartners is “unaccounted for.” The bell tolls, on and on.