Another Day In Gunmerica, Con't

Another day in Gunmerica Saturday as an armed man with an AR-15 killed eight and injured seven more at a Dallas-area outlet mall before a police officer arrived to "neutralize" the shooter.

 

Authorities responded to the Allen Premium Outlets to investigate a shooting Saturday afternoon that killed eight victims and sent others to hospitals, with a victim as young as 5 years old.

The Allen Police Department said one of its officers responded to the outlet mall for an unrelated call, when they heard gunshots just after 3:30 p.m.

That officer "engaged the suspect and neutralized the threat," police said.

There were nine people who died, including the shooter. Seven were pronounced dead on scene, while two others died at the hospital.

The Allen Fire Department transported nine victims, but others may have been transported by other agencies or driven to a hospital by friends or family.

Police said there are three victims in critical condition and four in stable condition.

A spokesperson for Medical City Healthcare said eight victims ranging from 5 to 61 years old are being treated at their facilities.

There were multiple agencies that responded to secure the scene, including the Allen Police Department, Collin County Sheriff's Office, FBI, and ATF.

Police said there is no active threat at this time, and they believe the shooter acted alone.

"We were outside the Converse store and we just heard all this popping," said Elaine Penicaro, who was shopping with her daughter. "We kind of all just stopped, and then a second later, just 'Pop, pop, pop, pop, pop,' and there were sparks flying like it was right in front of us."

 

A five-year-old victim, and we will do nothing. If anything, the message in permitless, open carry Texas is the victims who died did so because they didn't exercise their own 2nd Amendment rights in a building where guns were prohibited.

That's surely what people who witnessed the massacre will be told by police, friends, and family. "Maybe if you were armed and trained that five-year-old would still be alive today. Maybe you need to be the person who acts next time. You need to be the good guy with the gun from now on."

Just another day in Gunmerica. Texas Republicans have done nothing but offer thoughts and prayers and that's all they'll ever do the next time a massacre happens.

 

For his part, President Biden wants Congress to send him an assault rifle ban, but this will never happen as long as Republicans keep being elected, and voters decide to change that.

Sunday Long Read: The Woman Who Won

More than 35 years ago in 1986, a woman named Barbara Lowe became a five-time winner on Jeopardy! and then she vanished from the program's massive archives. The episodes were considered lost until recently as our Sunday Long Read from Claire McNear at the Ringer details, and the story of Lowe is a byzantine tale of quiz show drama. Well, partially.

 

For decades, whispers have circulated among game show aficionados about a mysterious Jeopardy! contestant from 1986. She went by Barbara Lowe and won five games in a row, which at the time—in just the second season of the reboot hosted by Alex Trebek—was the upper limit for returning champions. Later that year, when the show aired its Tournament of Champions contest with the best recent players, for which five-day champs automatically qualified, Lowe was nowhere to be found. Then, bizarrely, her episodes seemed to be wiped from the face of the earth.

In the 1990s, Game Show Network re-aired Season 2 of Jeopardy!; eagle-eyed fans noticed that the five episodes featuring Lowe were unceremoniously skipped. When the show launched a 24-hour streaming radio program and a Pluto TV channel that broadcast old episodes, Lowe’s episodes still failed to appear. In markets where affiliate stations play reruns on the weekends, Lowe’s episodes are omitted, again and again.

But the why of that matter, and what exactly happened during those games to incur the enduring wrath of the nation’s foremost quiz show, has long proved elusive. This is particularly bedeviling to Jeopardy! superfans, for whom detailed knowledge of operas, world capitals, and even television ephemera looms large. There are few corners of pop culture where facts and certainty are as celebrated as they are on Jeopardy! Yet one day in 1986, something happened—and nearly 40 years later, no one could say what. For the show’s most devoted fans, hunting for clues about Lowe—Jeopardy!’s biggest mystery and, some claimed, its greatest villain—became a calling unto itself.

Now, for the first time, Lowe is ready to open up about what happened, having caught wind of her place in Jeopardy! lore when one of those superfans tracked her down to see whether maybe, just maybe, she might have recordings of her games. She says she didn’t have the heart to tell him that when she’d moved a couple of years earlier, she’d thrown out a stack of VHS tapes that included her Jeopardy! appearances.

“He said that my episode is regarded as the holy grail of episodes,” Lowe tells The Ringer. “I was absolutely hysterical about it. I thought, ‘That’s insane.’”

And yet Lowe’s episodes were finally found late last year. The discovery of the lost tapes and Lowe’s first interview addressing her experience answer some questions and raise a host of new ones for the people who spent decades looking for the footage. Why were her games shrouded in secrecy for almost four decades? Was there really bad blood between the show and the five-time champ? What transpired during her time on set? And how did this saga come to take on a life of its own?

 

This one's not quite as mysterious as people make it out to be, but it's still a good story.