#massshooting — Public Fediverse posts
Live and recent posts from across the Fediverse tagged #massshooting, aggregated by home.social.
-
Another test lawsuit launched accusing ChatGPT of failing to detect threats of possible violence or crime.
OpenAI sued by family of shooting victim in the April 2025 mass shooting at Florida State University. The lawsuit alleges that OpenAI’s ChatGPT enabled the attack. https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/openai-sued-chatgpts-alleged-role-guiding-fsu-shooter-rcna344443 #AI #ChatGPT #OpenAI #Violence #Crime #LLMs #LocusofResponsibility #Lawsuit #SafeGuards #MentalHealth #Investigation #MassShooting
-
Florida has launched a criminal investigation into OpenAI after ChatGPT allegedly advised FSU shooter Phoenix Ikner on weapons and casualty counts before the 2025 mass shooting. https://english.mathrubhumi.com/news/world/chatgpt-charged-murder-openai-florida-fsu-shooting-n19t01wm?utm_source=dlvr.it&utm_medium=mastodon #ChatGPT #MassShooting #Murder #CrimeNews
-
Thunder Western Conference semifinals Game 2 shirt revealed https://www.rawchili.com/4994258/ ##wednesday #App|Subscribe #ArcadiaLakePavilionvideo #day #download #game #koco #LosAngelesLakers #MassShooting #NBA #OklahomaCityThunder #PaycomCenter #shirt #sidewalk #TShirt #UcoCampus18YearOldWoman
-
Thunder Western Conference semifinals Game 2 shirt revealed https://www.rawchili.com/4994258/ ##wednesday #App|Subscribe #ArcadiaLakePavilionvideo #day #download #game #koco #LosAngelesLakers #MassShooting #NBA #OklahomaCityThunder #PaycomCenter #shirt #sidewalk #TShirt #UcoCampus18YearOldWoman
-
Thunder Western Conference semifinals Game 2 shirt revealed https://www.rawchili.com/nba/727542/ #App|Subscribe #ArcadiaLakePavilionvideo #Basketball #day #download #game #koco #LosAngelesLakers #MassShooting #NBA #OklahomaCityThunder #PaycomCenter #shirt #sidewalk #TShirt #UcoCampus18YearOldWoman #wednesday
-
Gardeners across Oklahoma prepare for cold snap https://www.allforgardening.com/1753779/gardeners-across-oklahoma-prepare-for-cold-snap/ #18YearOldWoman #ArcadiaLakePavilion #ColdSnap #day #Degree #frost #garden #gardener #gardening #koco #MassShooting #MeteorologistJosephNeubauer #oklahoma #plant #TruckDriver #UcoCampus #video
-
Gardeners across Oklahoma prepare for cold snap https://www.allforgardening.com/1753779/gardeners-across-oklahoma-prepare-for-cold-snap/ #18YearOldWoman #ArcadiaLakePavilion #ColdSnap #day #Degree #frost #garden #gardener #gardening #koco #MassShooting #MeteorologistJosephNeubauer #oklahoma #plant #TruckDriver #UcoCampus #video
-
The #DOJ sued #Colorado on Wednesday over a #state #law banning #HighCapacityMagazines, which was passed after a 2012 #MassShooting at a movie theater in Aurora, CO. It was the second lawsuit in two days that the #Trump admin has filed against #GunControl policies in the #Democratic-controlled state.
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/05/06/us/politics/doj-colorado-lawsuit-guns.html?smid=url-share
-
Vice President JD Vance makes brief OKC stop for RNC fundraiser
SECURITY SHUT DOWN PARTS OF DOWNTOWN. THIS IS WHAT A VICE PRESIDENTIAL VISIT LOOKS LIKE. DOWNTOWN OKC IS…
#UnitedStates #US #USA #airforce #airlineedmond #arcadialake #briefoklahomacity #competitor #devontower #Downtown #fast-movingstop #fewhour #JamesDavidVance #jdvance #massshooting #part #police #rncfundraiser #spiritpilot #vance #vicepresident #vicepresidentjdvance #VP
https://www.europesays.com/2968662/ -
2 killed & 3 injured in #shootings near a shopping mall north of Dallas, police say
A man shot 5 people in #Texas on Tuesday, killing 2, at a shopping mall north of #Dallas, police said.
Carrollton Chief Roberto Arredondo said it was not a random act of gunfire & that the victims knew the attacker, who was later arrested after a short chase on foot.
#law #GunControl #GunLaws #MassShooting
https://apnews.com/article/carrollton-texas-koreatown-ktown-mall-shooting-36abd6f0e4c8561df9ed0a3ab343468a -
ChatGPT Gave Me Chilling Advice—as I Simulated Planning a Mass Shooting
-
ChatGPT Gave Me Chilling Advice—as I Simulated Planning a Mass Shooting
-
ChatGPT Gave Me Chilling Advice—as I Simulated Planning a Mass Shooting
-
ChatGPT Gave Me Chilling Advice—as I Simulated Planning a Mass Shooting
-
ChatGPT Gave Me Chilling Advice—as I Simulated Planning a Mass Shooting
-
Victims Allege OpenAI Is Responsible for Mass Shooting
-
Victims Allege OpenAI Is Responsible for Mass Shooting
-
Victims Allege OpenAI Is Responsible for Mass Shooting
-
Victims Allege OpenAI Is Responsible for Mass Shooting
-
Victims Allege OpenAI Is Responsible for Mass Shooting
-
Wednesday, April 29, 2026
Russia's Tuapse oil refinery disaster deepens after new drone strike -- Russia has a new missile: here's what we know about the S-71K -- Russia preparing to recruit thousands of foreign fighters in 2026 -- Russian Iskander missile storage facility in occupied Crimea hit, Ukraine's Special Forces release video ... and morehttps://activitypub.writeworks.uk/2026/04/wednesday-april-29-2026/
-
Several people were injured after a gunman opened fire at a social security office and a courthouse in central Athens, Greek authorities said. Police are searching for the suspect, reportedly an 89-year-old man. https://english.mathrubhumi.com/news/world/gunman-opens-fire-at-two-sites-in-athens-several-wounded-suspect-on-the-run-q8yumdhe?utm_source=dlvr.it&utm_medium=mastodon #Greece #MassShooting #LatestNews
-
Governor General travelling to Tumbler Ridge, B.C., months after deadly mass shooting
https://web.brid.gy/r/https://globalnews.ca/news/11817351/governor-general-tumbler-ridge/
-
https://www.europesays.com/news/20453/ 5 suspects in custody in Mall of Louisiana shooting in Baton Rouge that killed 1, injured others: officials #18952425 #BatonRouge #Headlines #MallOfLouisianaShooting #MassShooting #News #TopStories
-
Authorities Prevent Former Officer from Carrying Out Planned Attack at New Orleans Festival
📰 Original title: New Orleans mass shooting plan was thwarted by network of law enforcement. Here’s what we know
🤖 IA: It's clickbait ⚠️
👥 Usuarios: It's clickbait ⚠️View full AI summary: https://killbait.com/en/authorities-prevent-former-officer-from-carrying-out-planned-attack-at-new-orleans-festival/?redirpost=4cd0628c-2001-4b35-94e8-43014640a737
-
A former NC law enforcement officer was arrested with a handgun & 200+ rounds of ammo at a Florida hotel — allegedly headed to commit a racially motivated mass shooting at a major Louisiana festival. Christopher Gillum, who is white, had allegedly expressed explicit threats to harm Black people. His own family reported him missing and tipped off police. Jazz Fest draws 460,000+ attendees. A tragedy was potentially averted — but the threat exposes an urgent and ongoing crisis of racially motivated violence in America. Stay informed.
https://apnews.com/article/new-orleans-festival-mass-shooting-arrest-f2b60f1e8415c9177c04c230ce930c76
#JazzFest #NewOrleans #HateCrime #RacialViolence #MassShooting #Arrested #Louisiana #CivilRights #BreakingNews #StayAlert -
A former NC law enforcement officer was arrested with a handgun & 200+ rounds of ammo at a Florida hotel — allegedly headed to commit a racially motivated mass shooting at a major Louisiana festival. Christopher Gillum, who is white, had allegedly expressed explicit threats to harm Black people. His own family reported him missing and tipped off police. Jazz Fest draws 460,000+ attendees. A tragedy was potentially averted — but the threat exposes an urgent and ongoing crisis of racially motivated violence in America. Stay informed.
https://apnews.com/article/new-orleans-festival-mass-shooting-arrest-f2b60f1e8415c9177c04c230ce930c76
#JazzFest #NewOrleans #HateCrime #RacialViolence #MassShooting #Arrested #Louisiana #CivilRights #BreakingNews #StayAlert -
Former Chapel Hill officer arrested in Florida over alleged plot targeting New Orleans festival
📰 Original title: Former police officer arrested for allegedly planning mass shooting at New Orleans festival
🤖 IA: It's not clickbait ✅
👥 Usuarios: It's not clickbait ✅View full AI summary: https://killbait.com/en/former-chapel-hill-officer-arrested-in-florida-over-alleged-plot-targeting-new-orleans-festival/?redirpost=a1d2e99a-2e45-418f-a7f4-bdefb6eb5f1b
-
US authorities probe possible ChatGPT involvement in university shooting
👀
-
https://www.europesays.com/people/34973/ Erdogan vows new measures after deadly Turkey school shootings | National News #afp #aggression #Crime #crimes #HumanRightsAbuses #IssuesInEthics #justice #MassShooting #NationalSecurity #police #Politics #RecepTayyipErdoğan #SchoolShooting #SocialIssues #Terrorism #Violence #ViolentCrime
-
https://www.europesays.com/people/34790/ Erdogan vows new measures after deadly Turkey school shootings | News #afp #aggression #Crime #crimes #HumanRightsAbuses #IssuesInEthics #justice #MassShooting #NationalSecurity #police #Politics #RecepTayyipErdoğan #SchoolShooting #SocialIssues #Terrorism #Violence #ViolentCrime
-
RE: https://journa.host/@fulelo/116435662566252654
Another tragic case Darwinian* #GunControl occurred in Shreveport, #Louisiana. In this case it was also a #MassShooting. 😔
* #DarwinianGunControl is the *only* form of Gun Control that is not opposed by the #NRA.
-
RE: https://journa.host/@fulelo/116435662566252654
Another tragic case Darwinian* #GunControl occurred in Shreveport, #Louisiana. In this case it was also a #MassShooting. 😔
* #DarwinianGunControl is the *only* form of Gun Control that is not opposed by the #NRA.
-
RE: https://journa.host/@fulelo/116435662566252654
Another tragic case Darwinian* #GunControl occurred in Shreveport, #Louisiana. In this case it was also a #MassShooting. 😔
* #DarwinianGunControl is the *only* form of Gun Control that is not opposed by the #NRA.
-
RE: https://journa.host/@fulelo/116435662566252654
Another tragic case Darwinian* #GunControl occurred in Shreveport, #Louisiana. In this case it was also a #MassShooting. 😔
* #DarwinianGunControl is the *only* form of Gun Control that is not opposed by the #NRA.
-
RE: https://journa.host/@fulelo/116435662566252654
Another tragic case Darwinian* #GunControl occurred in Shreveport, #Louisiana. In this case it was also a #MassShooting. 😔
* #DarwinianGunControl is the *only* form of Gun Control that is not opposed by the #NRA.
-
A Louisiana father killed eight children, including seven of his own, in a Shreveport domestic shooting before dying in a police pursuit, officials say https://english.mathrubhumi.com/news/world/louisiana-mass-shooting-father-kills-children-domestic-attack-us-mr6wunrq?utm_source=dlvr.it&utm_medium=mastodon #Louisiana #MassShooting #BreakingNews #USNews #DomesticViolence
-
If all politicians can offer is nothing more than thoughts and prayers after every mass shooting they may as well have pulled the trigger themselves.
#massshooting #louisiana #gunviolence #nra #republicans #MAGA #shreveportshooting #trump #news
-
If all politicians can offer is nothing more than thoughts and prayers after every mass shooting they may as well have pulled the trigger themselves.
#massshooting #louisiana #gunviolence #nra #republicans #MAGA #shreveportshooting #trump #news
-
If all politicians can offer is nothing more than thoughts and prayers after every mass shooting they may as well have pulled the trigger themselves.
#massshooting #louisiana #gunviolence #nra #republicans #MAGA #shreveportshooting #trump #news
-
At a news conference outside the residence where one of the #shootings occurred, officials appeared stunned, requesting patience & prayers from the community as they sorted through multiple crime scenes.
“I just don’t know what to say, my heart is just taken aback,” #Shreveport Police Chief Wayne Smith said. “I cannot begin to imagine how such an event could occur.”
#terrorism #MassShooting #criminal #law #GunControl #GunLaws
-
The gunman later died after a chase with officers who fired at the suspect, Bordelon said. The suspect stole a car while leaving the scene of the #shootings & was followed by police.
Ofcls said they were still gathering details at the crime scenes south of downtown #Shreveport — the 2 homes & a 3rd location. Some of the #children shot were related to the suspect.
“This is an extensive scene unlike anything most of us have ever seen,” he said.
-
8 #children between the ages of 1 & 14 are dead after a #MassShooting in #Louisiana, police say
A gunman in Louisiana killed 8 children in domestic-related #shootings at 2 different homes early Sunday, police in #Shreveport said.
The victims ranged in age from 1 to about 14 years old, said Shreveport police spox Chris Bordelon. A total of 10 people were shot.
#terrorism #criminal #law #GunControl #GunLaws
https://apnews.com/article/shreveport-mass-shooting-louisiana-15098626d4c868b2bbc8a957a6a6ead8 -
Mass shooting in Ukraine’s capital leaves 6 dead before police kill gunman https://www.byteseu.com/1947766/ #58YearOldAttacker #ApartmentBlock #body #capital #CrowdedStreet #gunman #hostage #Kyiv #MassShooting #negotiator #people #place #police #Russia #Ukraine
-
https://www.europesays.com/dk/62478/ Outpouring of grief as Turkey buries school shooting victims #BayramNabiŞişik #ElliotRodger #KahramanmaraşSchoolShooting #MassShooting #ŞanlıurfaSchoolShooting #SchoolShooting #Stockholm #Sweden #Turkey
-
51RA
They stamped his body in sections beneath white factory lamps.
The men on the line did not know his name, though some of them felt it move in the machines before ever they heard it. They knew only that the air in Bay 4 had changed over the past few months. It had become charged in some way difficult to explain without sounding foolish. Small things accumulated. The press would shudder once before starting, as if waking from unpleasant dreams. Finished receivers, lined in neat rows, sometimes gave off a smell like struck flint though no spark had touched them. More than one worker complained of hearing what sounded like breathing through ear protection, a slow, deliberate inhalation and release beneath the pounding of stampers and the whine of torque drivers. Most laughed it off. Factories had their noises, their quirks, their little ghost stories. Men who spent ten hours a day amidst repetitive thunder began to hear all sorts of things.
But Owen Kreel had worked the line for seventeen years, and he knew the difference between a bad bearing, a loose panel, and something for which there was no mechanical name.
The first time he truly noticed it, a lower receiver had come down the conveyor and stopped directly before him, though the belt was still moving and the others behind it continued their slow approach. That should not have been possible. Nothing stopped without jamming the line. Yet there it sat, black and unfinished, rocking ever so slightly as though it had arrived under its own intention. Owen stared at the serial engraving panel, waiting for the code to blink into the screen above his station.
Instead, for the briefest instant, he thought he saw letters already there.
S I R A
Then the belt jerked. The receiver slid on. The monitor filled with ordinary production data. Owen said nothing.
That night, he dreamed of a great hall filled with rifles standing upright like candles. Not piled, not racked, but planted muzzle-up in a black floor that shone like church stone after rain. Between them walked a tall figure in a long coat, his hands clasped behind his back, moving with the calm assurance of a bishop inspecting graves. Owen never saw his face clearly. Only the cheekbones, the severe brow, the mouth that seemed always on the edge of pronouncing sentence. The figure paused before one rifle and laid two fingers against the barrel almost lovingly. At once, all the others turned—not physically, for they had no heads to turn, but inwardly, spiritually—toward that touch, as brambles turn to light. Owen woke with his heart hammering so violently he thought for a moment that someone had been pounding on his chest from the inside.
By dawn, he had persuaded himself it was nothing.
That was before the first shooting of autumn.
The television over the breakroom refrigerator showed the same images all afternoon: parking lot tape fluttering in a cold wind, ambulances, a woman collapsed against the hood of a cruiser, children being led in a line with their hands on each other’s shoulders. The model name of the rifle was spoken and respoken by anchors with grave expressions and professionally moderated sorrow. Owen stood among the others holding a paper cup of coffee gone lukewarm in his hand. Nobody said much. A few cursed the killer. A few muttered about mental illness. One man began, reflexively, to complain about how the media would twist it, but even he could not summon conviction. On the screen the camera cut to a close-up of investigators carrying evidence bags. One bag contained part of a shattered black receiver.
Owen spilled his coffee.
There, just for a second, under the harsh bloom of the news camera, visible through blood smears and fingerprint powder, was a marking like a scratch or flaw in the metal. A tiny hooked incision near the serial block. Owen had seen it before. Three days earlier, at his own station, on a piece he had assumed defective and sent back down the line.
He told himself it could not be the same one.
But after that he began to see the mark everywhere.
Not on every unit. That would have been simple. This was worse. It appeared only on certain pieces, and never exactly the same way twice, yet always with the unmistakable coherence of a signature. Sometimes it looked like a hooked thorn. Sometimes like a stylized numeral. Sometimes like the vertical of an I crossed by accident. Once, after a twelve-hour shift, he found himself tracing it on a fogged bathroom mirror before realizing his finger had moved without instruction from his mind.
His wife, Mara, asked him twice that week if something was wrong. Owen told her he was tired. It was the season, he said. Mandatory overtime. Election noise. The world being what it was. He did not tell her about the dreams, nor that he had begun waking with words in his mouth that felt old and metallic, as though he had been sleeping with bullets under his tongue. He did not tell her that at work, when the riveters screamed and the line thundered and all the men bent in rhythm to the making, there were moments he felt less like a laborer than a priest attending some dreadful liturgy.
Soon he could no longer ignore the sense that the rifles were not being manufactured.
They were being prepared.
It was around this time that the old man came into the gun shop.
The shop stood forty miles from the plant, out past a line of cornfields already gone brown and a stand of bare trees black against the lowering sky. Owen had gone there before, though never with any real pleasure. He told Mara he was looking for parts for a deer rifle inherited from his father, which was not entirely false. In truth he had gone because he had started to feel that if there was an answer anywhere, it might lie not in the factory but in the places where the finished bodies came to rest before entering the hands of their owners. If there was a haunting, perhaps it deepened at the point of choosing.
The bell over the door gave a dull, funereal clatter as he entered. The shop smelled of old wood, solvent, rubber mats, and a faint undernote of mildew. Rifles lined the walls in patient ranks. Glass cases held pistols like relics. A television in the corner played a hunting show with the sound turned off. Behind the counter stood a young clerk with a trimmed beard and an eagerness in his face that made him look almost childlike. Near the back, seated beside a rack of black semi-automatics, was an old man in a dark coat with a cane laid across his knees.
Owen noticed him at once not because he moved, but because he did not.
He sat absolutely still, as if he had been there for years. His face was narrow and bloodless, his hair a thin silver swept behind the ears, his eyes hooded but very bright. There was something ecclesiastical about him, though not in any comforting sense. He looked like a minister defrocked for cruelty, or a judge who had confused punishment with righteousness so long ago he no longer remembered the distinction.
The clerk asked if Owen needed help.
“Just looking,” Owen said.
The old man smiled without showing teeth.
“That is how it begins,” he murmured.
Owen turned. “Excuse me?”
The clerk either had not heard him or pretended not to. He busied himself with a receipt printer that had suddenly begun to chatter.
The old man lifted one hand from the cane and gestured toward the rifles behind him.
“Most people believe they choose these,” he said. His voice was soft but had an odd carrying power, each word landing with careful weight. “But objects have their devotions too. They wait for the hand fitted to them. They have a patience greater than ours.”
Owen should have left then. Instead he found himself stepping closer.
“I know you,” the old man said.
“No,” Owen replied, though the denial came weakly.
“Not by name. By trade.”
A pulse began to throb in Owen’s neck.
The old man’s gaze shifted to the nearest rifle on the rack, a black carbine with a rail system like exposed vertebrae. “There are houses in the world,” he said, “and there are lineages. Men think they invent lineages because they stamp their trademarks into steel. It is the other way round. The lineage chooses its workshops. It passes from forge to forge, flag to flag, century to century. Sword, musket, repeater, carbine. Each age gives it the body it deserves.”
Owen swallowed. “What are you talking about?”
At that the old man looked at him fully, and the eyes were so pale they seemed almost colorless.
“I am speaking,” he said, “of Sira.”
The name entered Owen like cold water poured down the spine.
He took a step backward. “Who told you that?”
The old man’s smile broadened very slightly. “He did.”
From the wall behind him came a soft metallic tick, as though one of the rifles had shifted on its peg.
The clerk looked up at last. “You okay, sir?”
Owen glanced toward him, grateful for the interruption, but when he looked back the old man had not moved by so much as a breath.
“What is Sira?” Owen asked, before he could stop himself.
The old man considered him. “A principality,” he said at last. “A hunger. A masculinity severed from mercy. The ecstasy of force. He has worn many names. Mars in polished marble. Tyr in frost. empire, nation, defense, honor, destiny. He likes whatever title men use when they want to kill without having to call it killing.”
Outside, a gust of wind struck the building and made the front glass shiver in its frame.
“He is not the gun,” the old man continued. “Do not make that mistake. The gun is only his favored mask in your age. He resides wherever metal extends grievance faster than conscience. But certain forms suit him especially well. Repetition suits him. Modularity suits him. Civilian devotion suits him. A thing built not only to fire, but to signify. To reassure. To threaten. To complete a certain kind of broken man by giving his fear a skeleton.”
Owen wanted to laugh, or curse, or walk out, but all three impulses failed in him. “Who are you?”
“A witness,” said the old man. “Too late, as witnesses usually are.”
Then, leaning forward slightly:
“And perhaps a coward. I have seen him before.”
The shop lights flickered. For one impossible instant every rifle in the place seemed to deepen in color, black turning to a kind of abyssal sheen that swallowed reflection. Owen smelled hot oil and something else beneath it—something like a battlefield after rain.
“When?” he asked.
The old man tapped the cane once on the floorboards.
“Whenever men discover that industry can manufacture destiny.”
The clerk finally intervened, smiling uneasily. “Sir, are you shopping for anything in particular?”
Owen blinked. The old man was simply an old man again, thin hands folded over his cane, expression faintly amused.
“No,” Owen said hoarsely. “No, I think I’m done here.”
He left without remembering the walk to his truck.
That night the dream returned, but now the hall of rifles was a cathedral. The black floor stretched farther than sight, and the planted weapons rose in long aisles beneath an unseen vault. At the far end stood Sira.
He was not monstrous in shape. That was the most dreadful thing. He possessed the severe beauty of authority, tall and lean, clad in something like a military coat cut with liturgical elegance. His face was gaunt, his mouth composed, his eyes dark hollows lit by a disciplined fire. He looked neither young nor old. He looked inevitable. Around him there clung no chaos, no slobbering demonic frenzy, but order—perfect, ceremonial, merciless order.
When he spoke, his voice was the sound of boots in a corridor, of bolts sliding home, of a crowd falling silent before a podium.
You have helped build my chapels, he said.
Owen tried to run, but in dreams one rarely runs well.
The rifles all around him began to whisper.
Not loudly. Not with words at first. Only a susurrus like men reciting vows under their breath.
Then one voice separated itself from the rest, and Owen realized with horror that it was his own.
He woke with his throat raw and his hands clasped together as though in prayer.
His wife was already up.
He could hear the TV in the kitchen serving up the news.
There had been another shooting.
#AmericanViolence #AR15 #cursedObject #darkFiction #darkSymbolism #demonicPossession #GothicHorror #GunViolence #hauntedWeapon #horrorWriting #industrialEvil #literaryHorror #MassShooting #modernGothic #politicalHorror #principalityAndPower #propheticFiction #psychologicalDread #shadowFigure #Sira #socialCritique #supernaturalHorror -
51RA
They stamped his body in sections beneath white factory lamps.
The men on the line did not know his name, though some of them felt it move in the machines before ever they heard it. They knew only that the air in Bay 4 had changed over the past few months. It had become charged in some way difficult to explain without sounding foolish. Small things accumulated. The press would shudder once before starting, as if waking from unpleasant dreams. Finished receivers, lined in neat rows, sometimes gave off a smell like struck flint though no spark had touched them. More than one worker complained of hearing what sounded like breathing through ear protection, a slow, deliberate inhalation and release beneath the pounding of stampers and the whine of torque drivers. Most laughed it off. Factories had their noises, their quirks, their little ghost stories. Men who spent ten hours a day amidst repetitive thunder began to hear all sorts of things.
But Owen Kreel had worked the line for seventeen years, and he knew the difference between a bad bearing, a loose panel, and something for which there was no mechanical name.
The first time he truly noticed it, a lower receiver had come down the conveyor and stopped directly before him, though the belt was still moving and the others behind it continued their slow approach. That should not have been possible. Nothing stopped without jamming the line. Yet there it sat, black and unfinished, rocking ever so slightly as though it had arrived under its own intention. Owen stared at the serial engraving panel, waiting for the code to blink into the screen above his station.
Instead, for the briefest instant, he thought he saw letters already there.
S I R A
Then the belt jerked. The receiver slid on. The monitor filled with ordinary production data. Owen said nothing.
That night, he dreamed of a great hall filled with rifles standing upright like candles. Not piled, not racked, but planted muzzle-up in a black floor that shone like church stone after rain. Between them walked a tall figure in a long coat, his hands clasped behind his back, moving with the calm assurance of a bishop inspecting graves. Owen never saw his face clearly. Only the cheekbones, the severe brow, the mouth that seemed always on the edge of pronouncing sentence. The figure paused before one rifle and laid two fingers against the barrel almost lovingly. At once, all the others turned—not physically, for they had no heads to turn, but inwardly, spiritually—toward that touch, as brambles turn to light. Owen woke with his heart hammering so violently he thought for a moment that someone had been pounding on his chest from the inside.
By dawn, he had persuaded himself it was nothing.
That was before the first shooting of autumn.
The television over the breakroom refrigerator showed the same images all afternoon: parking lot tape fluttering in a cold wind, ambulances, a woman collapsed against the hood of a cruiser, children being led in a line with their hands on each other’s shoulders. The model name of the rifle was spoken and respoken by anchors with grave expressions and professionally moderated sorrow. Owen stood among the others holding a paper cup of coffee gone lukewarm in his hand. Nobody said much. A few cursed the killer. A few muttered about mental illness. One man began, reflexively, to complain about how the media would twist it, but even he could not summon conviction. On the screen the camera cut to a close-up of investigators carrying evidence bags. One bag contained part of a shattered black receiver.
Owen spilled his coffee.
There, just for a second, under the harsh bloom of the news camera, visible through blood smears and fingerprint powder, was a marking like a scratch or flaw in the metal. A tiny hooked incision near the serial block. Owen had seen it before. Three days earlier, at his own station, on a piece he had assumed defective and sent back down the line.
He told himself it could not be the same one.
But after that he began to see the mark everywhere.
Not on every unit. That would have been simple. This was worse. It appeared only on certain pieces, and never exactly the same way twice, yet always with the unmistakable coherence of a signature. Sometimes it looked like a hooked thorn. Sometimes like a stylized numeral. Sometimes like the vertical of an I crossed by accident. Once, after a twelve-hour shift, he found himself tracing it on a fogged bathroom mirror before realizing his finger had moved without instruction from his mind.
His wife, Mara, asked him twice that week if something was wrong. Owen told her he was tired. It was the season, he said. Mandatory overtime. Election noise. The world being what it was. He did not tell her about the dreams, nor that he had begun waking with words in his mouth that felt old and metallic, as though he had been sleeping with bullets under his tongue. He did not tell her that at work, when the riveters screamed and the line thundered and all the men bent in rhythm to the making, there were moments he felt less like a laborer than a priest attending some dreadful liturgy.
Soon he could no longer ignore the sense that the rifles were not being manufactured.
They were being prepared.
It was around this time that the old man came into the gun shop.
The shop stood forty miles from the plant, out past a line of cornfields already gone brown and a stand of bare trees black against the lowering sky. Owen had gone there before, though never with any real pleasure. He told Mara he was looking for parts for a deer rifle inherited from his father, which was not entirely false. In truth he had gone because he had started to feel that if there was an answer anywhere, it might lie not in the factory but in the places where the finished bodies came to rest before entering the hands of their owners. If there was a haunting, perhaps it deepened at the point of choosing.
The bell over the door gave a dull, funereal clatter as he entered. The shop smelled of old wood, solvent, rubber mats, and a faint undernote of mildew. Rifles lined the walls in patient ranks. Glass cases held pistols like relics. A television in the corner played a hunting show with the sound turned off. Behind the counter stood a young clerk with a trimmed beard and an eagerness in his face that made him look almost childlike. Near the back, seated beside a rack of black semi-automatics, was an old man in a dark coat with a cane laid across his knees.
Owen noticed him at once not because he moved, but because he did not.
He sat absolutely still, as if he had been there for years. His face was narrow and bloodless, his hair a thin silver swept behind the ears, his eyes hooded but very bright. There was something ecclesiastical about him, though not in any comforting sense. He looked like a minister defrocked for cruelty, or a judge who had confused punishment with righteousness so long ago he no longer remembered the distinction.
The clerk asked if Owen needed help.
“Just looking,” Owen said.
The old man smiled without showing teeth.
“That is how it begins,” he murmured.
Owen turned. “Excuse me?”
The clerk either had not heard him or pretended not to. He busied himself with a receipt printer that had suddenly begun to chatter.
The old man lifted one hand from the cane and gestured toward the rifles behind him.
“Most people believe they choose these,” he said. His voice was soft but had an odd carrying power, each word landing with careful weight. “But objects have their devotions too. They wait for the hand fitted to them. They have a patience greater than ours.”
Owen should have left then. Instead he found himself stepping closer.
“I know you,” the old man said.
“No,” Owen replied, though the denial came weakly.
“Not by name. By trade.”
A pulse began to throb in Owen’s neck.
The old man’s gaze shifted to the nearest rifle on the rack, a black carbine with a rail system like exposed vertebrae. “There are houses in the world,” he said, “and there are lineages. Men think they invent lineages because they stamp their trademarks into steel. It is the other way round. The lineage chooses its workshops. It passes from forge to forge, flag to flag, century to century. Sword, musket, repeater, carbine. Each age gives it the body it deserves.”
Owen swallowed. “What are you talking about?”
At that the old man looked at him fully, and the eyes were so pale they seemed almost colorless.
“I am speaking,” he said, “of Sira.”
The name entered Owen like cold water poured down the spine.
He took a step backward. “Who told you that?”
The old man’s smile broadened very slightly. “He did.”
From the wall behind him came a soft metallic tick, as though one of the rifles had shifted on its peg.
The clerk looked up at last. “You okay, sir?”
Owen glanced toward him, grateful for the interruption, but when he looked back the old man had not moved by so much as a breath.
“What is Sira?” Owen asked, before he could stop himself.
The old man considered him. “A principality,” he said at last. “A hunger. A masculinity severed from mercy. The ecstasy of force. He has worn many names. Mars in polished marble. Tyr in frost. empire, nation, defense, honor, destiny. He likes whatever title men use when they want to kill without having to call it killing.”
Outside, a gust of wind struck the building and made the front glass shiver in its frame.
“He is not the gun,” the old man continued. “Do not make that mistake. The gun is only his favored mask in your age. He resides wherever metal extends grievance faster than conscience. But certain forms suit him especially well. Repetition suits him. Modularity suits him. Civilian devotion suits him. A thing built not only to fire, but to signify. To reassure. To threaten. To complete a certain kind of broken man by giving his fear a skeleton.”
Owen wanted to laugh, or curse, or walk out, but all three impulses failed in him. “Who are you?”
“A witness,” said the old man. “Too late, as witnesses usually are.”
Then, leaning forward slightly:
“And perhaps a coward. I have seen him before.”
The shop lights flickered. For one impossible instant every rifle in the place seemed to deepen in color, black turning to a kind of abyssal sheen that swallowed reflection. Owen smelled hot oil and something else beneath it—something like a battlefield after rain.
“When?” he asked.
The old man tapped the cane once on the floorboards.
“Whenever men discover that industry can manufacture destiny.”
The clerk finally intervened, smiling uneasily. “Sir, are you shopping for anything in particular?”
Owen blinked. The old man was simply an old man again, thin hands folded over his cane, expression faintly amused.
“No,” Owen said hoarsely. “No, I think I’m done here.”
He left without remembering the walk to his truck.
That night the dream returned, but now the hall of rifles was a cathedral. The black floor stretched farther than sight, and the planted weapons rose in long aisles beneath an unseen vault. At the far end stood Sira.
He was not monstrous in shape. That was the most dreadful thing. He possessed the severe beauty of authority, tall and lean, clad in something like a military coat cut with liturgical elegance. His face was gaunt, his mouth composed, his eyes dark hollows lit by a disciplined fire. He looked neither young nor old. He looked inevitable. Around him there clung no chaos, no slobbering demonic frenzy, but order—perfect, ceremonial, merciless order.
When he spoke, his voice was the sound of boots in a corridor, of bolts sliding home, of a crowd falling silent before a podium.
You have helped build my chapels, he said.
Owen tried to run, but in dreams one rarely runs well.
The rifles all around him began to whisper.
Not loudly. Not with words at first. Only a susurrus like men reciting vows under their breath.
Then one voice separated itself from the rest, and Owen realized with horror that it was his own.
He woke with his throat raw and his hands clasped together as though in prayer.
His wife was already up.
He could hear the TV in the kitchen serving up the news.
There had been another shooting.
#AmericanViolence #AR15 #cursedObject #darkFiction #darkSymbolism #demonicPossession #GothicHorror #GunViolence #hauntedWeapon #horrorWriting #industrialEvil #literaryHorror #MassShooting #modernGothic #politicalHorror #principalityAndPower #propheticFiction #psychologicalDread #shadowFigure #Sira #socialCritique #supernaturalHorror -
#ColtGray has admitted to the #shooting, according to authorities. Now 16, he has pleaded not guilty to 55 felony counts, including four counts of malice #murder. A trial date has not been set.
#law #guns #accountability #Georgia #SchoolShooting #MassShooting #parents #parenting
-
"#ColtGray, then 14, used that rifle to carry out a #MassShooting at #ApalacheeHighSchool in Winder, #Georgia, in September 2024..."
"Colt" Gray
Don't think anyone should need any more context than that
