Category: News

It’s been almost 60 years since Bill Russell became the first Black head coach in the NBA. In the years since, there have been 260 regular coaches that have come and gone, and only 1 in 3 have been Black. Most of them haven’t lasted more than three years in their first job—they also haven’t gotten a chance to have another head coaching position. But the times they are a-changin’. Currently, 15 of the 30 head coaches in the NBA are Black. And it’s about time.

Boston’s Ime Udoka, Sacramento’s Mike Brown, Portland’s Chauncey Billups, Dallas’ Jason Kidd, Orlando’s Jamahl Mosley, Washington’s Wes Unseld Jr., New Orleans’ Willie Green and Los Angeles’ Darvin Ham are the eight newest full-time head coaches in the NBA. They join Detroit’s Dwane Casey, Phoenix’s Monty Williams, Cleveland’s J.B. Bickerstaff, Philadelphia’s Doc Rivers, the Los Angeles Clippers’ Tyronn Lue, Houston’s Stephen Silas and Atlanta’s Nate McMillan, who were all head coaches last year.

“It means a lot,” Brown, who will take over as head coach in Sacramento next season after finishing the current season as the assistant coach for Golden State, said.

“When my son, and my oldest son’s about to have his first son, when they turn on the TV and they see people that look like them leading an NBA team on the sidelines, it can be inspiring. For me, carrying the torch and then passing it to the next generation is something that I think about often — not just for my family, but for others out there.”

The last time there were this many Black head coaches in the NBA was the 2012-13 season. There has been no explanation as to why it took almost 10 years to get back to that number, but there are some theories.

“This is not a sports issue,” Nate McMillan, the head coach for the Atlanta Hawks said back in February. “It’s a society issue that the opportunities sometimes certain people, they don’t get the opportunities because of the color of their skin.”

He also gave credit to Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban for making sure the organization has not only a Black head coach (Jason Kidd) but other Black people in the room. Aside from Kidd, there are three prominent Black people in the organization: Cynt Marshall (chief executive officer), Nico Harrison (general manager and president of basketball operations) and Michael Finley (assistant general manager and assistant vice-president of basketball operations). Marshall is the first Black female CEO in the history of the NBA.

“I think that’s just what Mark has done is really open his mind to interviewing people and giving them an opportunity where they have the skills to fit into those positions. They’ve done well and I think that’s great,” said McMillan.

According to the site Statista, 73.2% of the players in the NBA are Black, and that’s not including ones who identify as more than one race because it doesn’t do an interracial breakdown. In a league where almost three-quarters of the players are Black, it only makes sense that the head coaching staff be reflective of what you’re seeing on the court. Not just for optics, but for a general kind of understanding that may not exist otherwise.

While Steve Kerr is a great example of an white ally who “gets it,” there are certain experiences that he just won’t understand on anything other than a deep level of empathy. But a coach like McMillian or Ime Udoka, head coach of the Boston Celtics, will understand in a different way. When things happen in Black America, a Black coach is going to be able to do more than empathize—they will be able to sit in that space with their players.

“I don’t understand what took so long, to be honest,” Jaylen Brown, guard for the Celtics said in an AP article.

That’s the real question here. Why did it take so long for half of the league’s coaches to be Black? In February 2019, NBA Commissioner Adam Silver, Chief People and Inclusion Officer Oris Stuart and President of Social Responsibility and Player Programs Kathy Behrens met with Rick Carlisle, Indiana coach and president of the National Basketball Coaches Association. After that meeting, the NBA Coaches Equality Initiative was created to address the inequity.

“For many years qualified young coaches of color like Ime Udoka, Jamahl Mosley, Willie Green, Wes Unseld Jr., Darvin Ham and Stephen Silas, to name just a few, were not getting consistent opportunities to interview for NBA head coaching positions,” Carlisle said. “The last two years changed everything. The league office has tirelessly made franchises more aware of the qualifications and journeys of these talented young coaches. This increased awareness has led to qualified coaches of all backgrounds having greater opportunity to interview and the numbers speak for themselves.”

Commissioner Silver is aware of the inequity still facing the NBA. Many basketball organizations still don’t have Black people in the front office. Legendary basketball player Michael Jordan is the only Black principal owner of a sport’s franchise, the Charlotte Hornets. The Hornets currently have an open coaching spot, and hopefully it’ll go to another Black coach.

For Mike Brown, “the dream” is to get to a point where 50% of head coaches being Black isn’t something worth talking about. If the league keeps up its current hiring practices, maybe it could happen.

“What’s the opposite of a gun?”

That’s the question at the heart of a powerful—and perpetually timely—poem by Brendan Constantine, based on his own teaching experience. It begins with him describing how he led his students through a poetry exercise called The Opposites Game, in which the students were asked to come up with the antonym of each word in a line of a poem by the famously reclusive 19th-century poet, Emily Dickinson.

“My Life had stood – a Loaded Gun,” was the line, and students easily came up with the opposites for the first six words. But when they got to “gun,” the students paused.

For a moment, very much like the one between
lightning and its sound, the children just stare at me,
and then it comes, a flurry, a hail storm of answers –

And then came the heated debate among the kids about the nature of a gun through an exploration of what it isn’t:

A flower.

A pillow.

A book.

A song.

A prayer.

A baby.

Or what’s that person who delivers babies? A midwife? Yes, a midwife.

Their discussion is beautiful and haunting, interweaving the profound innocence of children and the absurdity of the way we fight over guns in this country. The arguing. The shouting. The clubs forming.

Nothing’s decided, she says. We’re not done here.

Ha. Indeed.

Poetry has a way of getting to the heart of an issue in a way that rhetoric simply cannot. Constantine’s words go beyond the tired tropes trotted out by Americans on barstools, social media and the floor of Congress, laying out hard truths about American gun culture through the eyes of children.

“The Opposites Game” was made into a TED-Ed short film by Anna Samo and Lisa LaBracio, with Brendan Constantine reciting the poem aloud while it is illustrated in stop-motion. Watch:

Nothing’s decided…We’re not done here. That’s the truth of the matter, isn’t it?

We can’t even agree on what a gun is, much less what it isn’t. For some people a gun equals terror. For others, a gun equals freedom. Some see guns as weapons of war, some as tools for hunting, some as methods of intimidation, some as toys for target practice. Some look at a gun and see the faces of the kids killed in school shooting after school shooting. Some look at a gun and see safety and security.

Round and round we go, never deciding, never done. This poem was written years ago, with tens of thousands of gun violence deaths occurring in the U.S. since then, but feels like it could have been written this week.

And the enigmatic last line:

Your death will sit through many empty poems.

As one of the filmmakers said in an interview, “The whole poem is building up to this last sentence, and emotionally you understand exactly what it means, but you can’t put it into words.”

And that’s OK. We’ve heard more than enough words about guns in this country anyway.

Pets are wonderful, loving, innocent creatures that add so much pure joy into our lives.

They also have an unruly penchant for eating things they shouldn’t be eating, find heinously bad places to go potty and are weapons of mass destruction when it comes to shoes, fragile knickknacks and furniture. If you’ve had a pet, then you have at least one story involving one of these sins, if not all three.

No matter how egregious the act, it’s pretty hard to stay mad. After all, much of the time animal misbehavior is merely a natural reaction to stress or boredom. Plus, one look at their sweet little faces is all it takes for anger to be subdued. Most of the time.

A Reddit user recently asked pet owners, “What’s the worst thing your pet has ever done?” and boy, some critters really know to act out. Whether its fur babies or feathered friends or scaly companions, pets are capable of some truly horrific-slash-hilarious antics. We love them anyway, of course.

Below are 22 of the best responses from traumatized pet owners. And though their stories don’t necessarily paint the best picture of their beastly bestie, it’s certainly an amusing read, if not an all-too-relatable one.

1.

“My dog dug up my neighbors cable line on Super Bowl Sunday when they had a big crowd coming over.” -@Living_Departure_265

2.

“My parrot has learnt to swear and will not stop. The weirdest thing is that I don’t even know how he learnt to swear. Maybe he overheard the neighbors or something.” -@Pizza-pen

3.

“As a kitten, she managed to get hold of, and tear to pieces, a dried flower my mother took from my grandmother’s funeral as a keepsake. Literally irreplaceable.” -@Catstrudle

4.

“My dog, then teething, chewed through and broke the beanbag chair he used to sleep on; which was filled with styrofoam pellets, each about 3mm dia. Tens of thousands of them. There is no effective way of picking them up due to their attraction to static and propensity to fly at the slightest change in the wind. The vacuum cleaner just pushed around more than it picked up. It took ~3 hours to clean up. We were finding pellets for years in random places.” -@Darthfloyd

5.

“I used to have this ball python. I wake up one morning and take him out of his cage because he’s looking restless. I throw him on my bed and lay back down. He’d often crawl on me and curl up for warmth. On this particular occasion he came sniffing around my face right as I yawned. When I did, a small tear came out of my eye, which he licked. A second later he latched onto my eyebrow like it was some furry little rodent. I sat right up, holding the four foot snake straight off my face. He let go after a few seconds and we didn’t talk for the rest of the day. Left two bloody holes right on my eyebrow. Jerk.” -@Stevel-Knievel

6.

“Baxter once pooped in the refrigerator and ate an entire wheel of cheese. I wasn’t even mad, it was amazing.” -@ryclarky

7.

“My boxer knocked over a statue of the Virgin Mary. Her head broke off, and my dog was running around with the head.” – @Motherinlawdouche

8.

“As I lay down for a much needed nap the other day, I heard a crash in the living room go out to check what fresh hell…my Calico had climbed a desk and knocked over a small shelf containing a case of small silver thumbtacks alllllllll over my living room. I made it about 5 steps in before I realized I was surrounded by tacks.” -@slumvillain

9.

“I filled a cup to the brim with fruit punch and walked away to put the bottle back into the fridge. When I turned back around I saw my blind cat standing on the dining room table feeling the cup with his paw…he winds up and swats it off the table. Got fruit punch everywhere.” -@colethefatcat

10.

“Back in 2014, my parents owned this vase that had been passed down 4 generations to the youngest in the family. It sat on top of the cabinets, like higher than the refrigerator. Our family went on a 4 day vacation to Disney World and had our neighbor feed our 2 cats. On the 2nd day of our vacation, my father gets a text saying that our vase shattered on the floor and both our cats were next to where it once sat. We believe our cats were able to jump up there with the help up [by] climbing on our air fryer we left on the counter.” -@mittiens

11.

“We bought our first house and the first time we left our dog alone he ate through the trim surrounding all the doors, the drywall behind it, and almost through the exterior. Needless to say I wasn’t pleased.” -@Fuzzy-Ad5756

12.

“I’m a caffeine addict and I admit it. I start out every day with an energy drink and pop Diet Mountain Dew all day. In college I was very, very broke and at one point was down to about 14 ounces left in a 2 liter of Mtn Dew poured into a cup. My cat came to check out what I had, sniffed at it and I guess the popping bubbles tickled her nose and she sneezed directly onto the surface of it.”-@LatterTowel9403

13.

“Got a new dog and wanted them to be happy and acclimated to a new home. Gave them a pig ear to chew on (already a fairly disgusting treat) and they happily take it. A short time later, where did the dog go? On my bed, chomping away on the pig ear, with a large pile of drool and pig ear bits, now quite possibly a permanent part of my sheets. Not the way I wanted to start off a relationship with a new dog. Silver lining, my sheets smelled like bacon for a while even after washing them!” -@ItsGotHeart

14.

“My beta killed 3 fish in a week.” -@Tox1cShark7

15.

“My dog was still a puppy and has never seen a baby bird. One night I was taking her for a walk and there was a baby bird on the ground. It was chirping and it really caught her attention (probably cause it sounded like her squeaky toys). I started reaching for the bird so I could try and put it back in its nest but my dog jumped towards the bird. I just heard a loud squeak and silence. My dog’s expression changed when she realized what she had done. The rest of the night she was not herself, I’m sure she felt really bad.” -@justanotherperson218

16.

“He (dog) broke my mother’s nose with his big head by jumping around too excitedly.” -@mortokes

17.

“A few nights ago, in the middle of the night, my monster cat brought in a live pigeon through the cat door and released it in the living room. Feathers EVERYWHERE.” -@effieokay

18.

“I have a roomba. I set it to clean at 7:30 AM every morning… because I am always out the door for work by then, and my dog has just been walked. One morning, apparently, the 7 AM walk was not enough, and my dog shit on the floor. Then, like a good little robot, my roomba took off. I came home to poo circles all over my carpet and a dead roomba.

TL;DR–My dog teamed up with a robot to create an abstract art piece made out of feces.” -@SleepsontheGround

19.

“Whilst walking my friend’s dalmation, Stripey, one summer’s day in a park filled with happy picnickers and laughing children, she spotted a birthday party. A river separated the party from us and, underestimating her love of food, I kept her off the [leash]. I’m not sure how she even saw the birthday cake wrapped in tinfoil but she leaped into the river before I could stop her. She tore apart the tinfoil like a savage and devoured the cake before quickly moving on to the BBQ where she managed to eat every sausage, burger and chicken leg she could see whilst the birthday boy watched in terror. I stood awkwardly on the other side of the water, shouting her name and apologizing profusely but she only listened when she’d decided her meal was over after which she swam calmly back over the water and pranced into the distance whilst the entire family stared me down. I am sorry, birthday boy, I hope your day wasn’t too badly ruined.” -@Tanyabee

20.

“One time I was running to the basement to grab an ingredient I had forgotten to add to dinner. Like an idiot, I kept the burner and hot pan going because I figured that running to the fridge in the basement would only take a minute. Instead, I tripped over my dog before reaching the first step and tumbled down into the basement. I stared up to see my dog looking down and smiling as I scrambled frantically to run back upstairs before my stupid dinner set the entire house on fire.” – [deleted]

21.

“Maybe not ‘worst’ for me, but definitely for my mom. She pissed off the cat… kicking her out of the bedroom before bed because she hates animals sleeping on her bed or next to her…Apparently in the morning, she was running late for work. Rushed to put on her shoes and found vomit in one of them. Out of all her shoes, and of all the times in the day, the cat had decided to revenge-puke in the ones she wears to work almost every day.” -@badguywindow

22.

“My 55lb dog ate an entire tray of pot brownies.” -@karmavorous

Imagine getting a free sofa from someone, taking off the sofa cushion covers to wash them and finding a huge amount of cash hidden inside.

Most of us would freak out. Then we’d try to figure out what to do. Is it wrong to keep money that came in a piece of furniture? Does it depend on the amount? I mean, a few quarters that fell out of someone’s pocket is one thing, but tens of thousands of dollars is entirely another.

A woman in Colton, California, was faced with that exact scenario recently when she brought home a free, used sofa from Craigslist. Vicky Umodu had just moved into a new house and was looking for items to furnish it when saw a listing on Craiglist from a family who was clearing out the property of a relative who had recently passed away, KABC-TV reported. They were giving the furniture away for free.

“So, I clicked on it, and the first thing I came up with was this family that wanted to give a sofa, and everything in their bedroom set,” Umodu told KABC. “I said maybe it’s a gimmick, so I called them.”

She found out it was a legitimate ad and snagged a beige flowered sofa and two matching chairs. But when she got home and started examining the furniture, she felt something strange in one of the cushions. She thought perhaps it was a heating pad, but when she opened up the cushion she found a bunch of envelopes. And in those envelopes, she found cash—a whopping $36,000 worth.

“I was just telling my son, come, come, come!” she said. “I was screaming, this is money! I need to call the guy.”

So she called. The family told her that they had found some other cash hidden around their relative’s home, but only a hundred or two hundred dollars here and there. They didn’t know why the man would have stashed $36,000 in his couch, but they were grateful to Umodu for alerting them and returning the money.

So grateful, in fact, that they gave Umodu $2,200 of the money—the amount she needs to buy herself a new refrigerator.

Umodu was delighted, but she said she hadn’t expected any reward. “I was not expecting a dime from him,” she told KABC.

She was never tempted to keep the money for herself, either.

“God has been kind to me and my children, they’re all alive and well, I have three beautiful grandchildren, so what can I ever ask from God?” she said.

Clearly, the family had not intended to give away $36,000 of their family member’s money. And it’s unlikely that the relative who died had intended for his money to go to a random stranger (though who knows, stranger things have happened). Umodu did the right thing by letting the family know the envelopes of cash were in the furniture and returning the money. And now she’s got a sofa, two chairs, money for a new fridge and the peace of mind that comes with being an honest person.

You’ve probably noticed that every car you’ve ever had—unless you got your license in the ’50s—has had small black dots on the bottom of the windshield. They appear to be meaningless decorations or some kind of dot-matrix-style graphics but they have a very important job that keeps you safe and the windshield attached to the body of your car.

Windshields were originally held in place by metal trim that secured them to the car’s body. In the ’50s and ’60s, manufacturers transitioned to using an ultrastrong adhesive to keep the window in place.

That’s why, if you’ve ever had to have your window replaced, it’s a pretty simple process. All it takes is for the old adhesive to be removed so the old window can be popped out. Then, the new adhesive is applied and the new window is dropped in place in the car’s body.

u201cTRAVEL INFLUENCER ud83dudd35 The Real Reason Your Car Windshield Has Those Small Black Dots https://t.co/Icf90Oq7ba Econ L Pensikkala – Follow us ud83dudcecu201d

— Searching Tours Tickets & Activities? Tour Insider (@Searching Tours Tickets & Activities? Tour Insider)
1654430287

To keep the unappealing adhesive hidden around the edges of the windows, manufacturers created black dots from ceramic paint known as “frits.”

The dots are baked into the window to make an aesthetically pleasing transition from the thick black line that obscures the adhesive to the rest of the window. They are positioned in a halftone pattern so they get smaller as they recede from the black tinted area that hides the adhesive.

This gives the appearance that the black area is slowly fading into the clear windshield.

“This makes the windshield a structural component of the vehicle’s body,” Richard Reina, product training director for CarID.com, said according to Travel and Leisure. “The frit is black painted enamel that’s baked onto the surface of the glass, and it provides a secure point of contact between the glass, urethane adhesive, and windshield frame.”

u201cDid you know the black dots around your windshield are called frits? They actually help the window “stick” better. Who knew?u201d

— Capital Auto Glass (@Capital Auto Glass)
1641233647

The frits also play a role in manufacturing the window. They provide temperature control when the glass is being heated. The black painted glass heats up faster than the rest of the glass and the frits evenly distribute the heat to prevent unnecessary warping.

Craig Campbell, an automotive repair expert and founder and CEO at Auto Parts Guideline, says the only thing you should worry about is if the frits appear to wear off.

“This is because the adhesive is what keeps the glass in place,” Campbell said according to Travel and Leisure. “Without it, the glass could become loose and fall out of the frame. While this is unlikely to happen, it’s still something that you should be aware of. If you’re unsure of how to replace the dots, you can always take your car to a professional for help.”

Now the next time you’re at a party you can wow everyone with your incredible knowledge of car windshields. If that information goes over well, you can let everybody know what that handle is for on the roof of your car.

Some folks think it’s for holding on to when the driver gets a little crazy. In reality, it’s for helping people get in and out of the vehicle.

Three years ago today (June 7), Australian rapper Masked Wolf posted his breakout single “Astronaut In The Ocean” to SoundCloud, kicking off the song’s ascent to chart dominance and near-ubiquity thanks to its popularity on TikTok. Naturally, we couldn’t let Wolf hang out at Uproxx Studios without securing a performance of the track for UPROXX Sessions — and what better time to release it than on the song’s third anniversary?

Showing some love to Los Angeles with a designer Dodgers hat and a black-on-black Essentials hoodie, Masked Wolf raps the anxiety-laden lyrics directly to the camera, displaying all the charismatic intensity that has made him a star and that turned “Astronaut” into a sleeper hit.

Since its original release in 2019, “Astronaut In The Ocean” was re-released by Elektra Records on its second anniversary, climbing to No. 6 on the Billboard Hot 100, and received numerous awards nominations in Masked Wolf’s homeland, including Song of the Year, Best Hip Hop Release and Breakthrough Artist at the 2021 ARIA Music Awards.

Watch Masked Wolf’s UPROXX Sessions performance of “Astronaut In The Ocean” above.

UPROXX Sessions is Uproxx’s performance show featuring the hottest up-and-coming acts you should keep an eye on. Featuring creative direction from LA promotion collective, Ham On Everything, and taking place on our “bathroom” set designed and painted by Julian Gross, UPROXX Sessions is a showcase of some of our favorite performers, who just might soon be yours, too.

Masked Wolf is a Warner Music artist. Uproxx is an independent subsidiary of Warner Music Group.

Lil Wayne is set to take the stage at Governors Ball in New York City this weekend. He will be taking the slot previously occupied by rap trio Migos. (Furthermore, it was also just announced that this year’s festival will be livestreamed on Twitch, via the official Governors Ball channel.)

This news comes amid rumors of Migos breaking up, after fans noticed Migos member Offset and his wife, Cardi B, unfollowed fellow Migos members Quavo and Takeoff on Instagram last month. Also last month, Quavo and Takeoff released a song called “Hotel Lobby” under the moniker Unc And Phew.

When asked by a TMZ paparazzo if the breakup rumors were true, Quavo appeared to dodge the question.

Later that month, DJ Akademics also spoke with TMZ, claiming he has recently spoken with Offset and doesn’t believe a breakup is underway.

“They might be going through a small disagreement or whatever,” said Akademics. “I think that they’re angling it because, you know, Takeoff and Quavo just put out a song, so they’re kind of letting it lie, letting the questions linger or something like that… But at the end of the day, they’re family. Offset confirmed that to me, too… Come on, I just can’t see a gangster group — like, the only sign of trouble is them hitting unfollow.”

Cardi B is a Warner Music artist. Uproxx is an independent subsidiary of Warner Music Group.

One of the best things going for ESPN right now is their addition of JJ Redick and now CJ McCollum as authoritative NBA voices who go on First Take and refuse to let it slide when Stephen A. Smith (or Mad Dog or anyone else) goes off the rails.

Instead of trying to simply out-yell Smith, which is impossible to do because he is the king of sports yelling and gets you into trouble, they just very calmly pick apart his argument and it clearly drives Stephen A. crazy. The latest example of this came on Tuesday morning while discussing Darvin Ham’s Lakers press conference and where the team can go next year, with Smith saying they can be a playoff team but not much more before launching into a tangent about how he didn’t like Russell Westbrook being at Ham’s presser, which caused Redick and McCollum’s ears to perk up.

After letting Smith go for almost three uninterrupted minutes, Redick and McCollum proceeded to tag-team Smith over his “random, random take” that had Smith pressed and trying to explain himself, while McCollum wanted them to roll the tape to remind Smith of what he just said (2:58 mark of the above video for when Redick jumps in).

“So you said a random, random take,” Redick pressed. “And then you explained a bunch of things about Russell Westbrook that had nothing to do with that take. So I want clarification on something. What is your issue with Russell Westbrook being at that news conference? You did not explain that well at all Stephen A.”

“That’s a wild thing for you to say,” McCollum jumped in with. “Him supporting his team, his organization, his coach, a fellow African-American man who got hired by the Los Angeles Lakers. This is what you said! … You said that him going to the press conference, you’re disappointed in that? Run the tape. We got the tape. That’s what you said. … Even if you didn’t mean it the way I said it, you said that he shouldn’t have been at that press conference, that’s foul.”

It really is incredible television and the new version of First Take where they bring in a rotating group of guests to spar with Stephen A. rather than just him and Max Kellerman yelling for three hours really has been terrific for the show. I hope this continues and also think the next evolution of the show is to have a stenographer in the corner like a courtroom frantically transcribing the entire show so that at any time someone can demand another person’s comments be read back to them verbatim. I think that would add an extra layer of drama to the proceedings and also be hilarious if someone was to read back Stephen A.’s wildest arguments to him in a dry, flat voice.

If you think a legitimate reason to own an AR-15 is to “shoot varmints,” you might be a redneck Senator John Thune.

Borrowing a page from fellow GOP Congressman Ken Buck, Thune told reporters he believed the deadly weapon — which has been used in 11 of the last 12 mass shootings — was the best form of defense against “prairie dogs and other varmints” which is why he’s wary any kind of gun reform. Buck stuck to a similar deflection tactic when asked about America’s painfully obvious gun problem, claiming people in his state needed AR-15s to protect their chickens from raccoons.

“An AR-15 is a gun of choice for killing raccoons before they get to our chickens,” Buck said in a video posted on social media.

In Thune’s case, the senator from South Dakota explained away the “millions” of AR-15s already owned by Americans by claiming that there are “many legitimate reasons” to own the military-style weapon.

“They are a sporting rifle,” Thune said. “And it’s something that a lot of people for purposes of going out target shooting — in my state they use them to shoot prairie dogs and, you know, other types of varmints. And so I think there are legitimate reasons why people would want to have them.”

So in case you’re a bit fuzzy on where Thune and some of his GOP colleagues stand when it comes to gun control, let’s clear it up: the right to shoot small, furry animals while cosplaying as some kind of Call of Duty character is more important to these people than saving the lives of children, the elderly, and really anyone hoping to go see a movie or get groceries or attend school without the fear of a shooting.

Donald Trump has been threatening a 2024 presidential run ever since he left office — or had the election “stolen” from him, if you believe his Big Lie, which you should not. Traditionally, candidates don’t announce they’re going to run until after the midterm elections, but Trump is reportedly growing tired of being a “kingmaker” and would prefer to be the candidate that everyone’s paying attention to.

According to a new report, Trump is weighing his options on when to announce his 2024 run, and he could pull the trigger as early as July 4. Although, there are disputes within his camp if this will actually happen because, and you might not believe this, Donald Trump is kind of a loose cannon. Via NBC News:

One question is “whether he can sort of suppress his excitement about a 2024 rematch and not, say, go ahead and put that statement out … and waits for a big event, a big speech to do it,” the second adviser said. “A betting person says he’s doing it, and he also wants to crowd out the rest of the field.”

Two people in Trump’s orbit told NBC News they had been asked informally to hold July 4 as a date for a possible announcement, but Miller — noting that Trump hasn’t yet decided to run — said it is “not true” that the day has been reserved, even unofficially, for a launch.

In the meantime, Trump has been aggressively laying the groundwork for a 2024 run by holding rallies (which Proud Boys and QAnon symbols are now banned from) and leaning hard into the conservative gun owner base by appearing at the NRA convention just a few days after the school shooting in Uvalde, Texas. While rational people called Trump’s appearance, “one of the most f*cked up things I’ve ever seen in my life,” it’s a move that’s likely to play well with Republican voters who have no interest in gun control despite the prevalence of mass shootings. Everything is fine and/or normal.

(Via NBC News)