Slow motion bullet impacts.

Great moments in American civil discourse: About a dozen people carrying guns, including one with an AR-15 assault rifle, milled among protesters outside an event where President Barack Obama was giving a speech Monday in Phoenix. How can it possibly be legal to bring assault rifles to presidential speeches? Holy hell.

A 88-year-old gunman— by reports a white supremacist and birther—opened fire earlier today at the Holocaust Museum. (Early reports that no one was killed have become inaccurate; a security guard has now died. TPM has running updates.) The suspect was arrested twenty-eight years ago for attempting to perform a citizen's arrest of the Federal Reserve Board. His writings have been widely circulating on the Internet.

In light of today's shooting and the George Tiller assassination, both Steve Benen and Matt Yglesias remember the Homeland Security report from earlier this year that caused so much manufactured controversy, which had warned against the threat of precisely this sort of violence from political extremists.

Happy Valentine's Day. Here are some rules for gunfighting.

North Carolina in the news! Gun sales up across the state.

Many were stocking up on things such as assault rifles, high-capacity magazines and handguns that they think would be the most likely targets of new laws, though practically everything related to shooting has been selling more quickly.

"It's been an absolute madhouse," said Trey Pugh, a manager at Jim's Pawn Shop in Fayetteville, which is selling 15 to 20 AR-15 assault rifles a day. "I'm getting guys come in and say I always wanted that gun, and give me that one too and that one and, oh, I need a gun safe, too."

Distributors are running out of assault rifles, he said, and prices are rising.

I've long felt that gun control is a losing issue for Democrats, and that the party needs to come to terms with the Second Amendment in order to make gains in the South and West—and in fact this is precisely what seems to be happening in Obama's rhetoric of "sensible" legislation tailored for local situations—but I have to admit that news of gun-lovers snapping up assault rifles in the wake of electoral defeat does give me a little bit of pause.

Three from MeFi:

* "There's Something About Mary," the amazing story of Mary McFate, a nationally known anti-gun activist who turned out to really be Mary Lou Sapone, mole for the NRA.

* Don Hodges looks at the kill screens from Donkey Kong, Pac-Man, Ms. Pac Man, Dig Dug, as well as the Defender Extra Life Bug. Bonus: The Duck Hunt kill screen.



* Another set of videos that's been hanging out neglected in my bookmarks for way too long: David Harvey's twenty-six-hour lecture series on Capital, Vol. 1.

Jon Stewart explains the obscene idiocy of the week: "Bittergate." Come for the out-of-context quote, stay for Clinton's actually patronizing country bumpkin bullshit.

Now that the writers' strike is over, it's perfectly appropriate to begin mining the headlines for script ideas. I call dibs on this one: Astronauts aboard the International Space Station apparently have access to a gun. I'll take this one too: NASA scientist suggests dinosaurs could have potentially made it to the moon. Thanks Neil for the first link, the "Biology in Science Fiction" blog I stole from Lisa's bookmarks for the second.