HIGHLAND PARK, Ill. — A day after a gunman opened fire on a Fourth of July parade in this city, local officials painted a picture Tuesday of a lone shooter who planned the attack for weeks, dressed in “women’s clothing” to conceal his identity and blended in with the terrified crowd to escape.

Police are holding Robert E. Crimo III, 21, a local rapper, who they called “a person of interest” in the shootings in which six people were killed and more than 30 injured Monday. The killings terrorized the usually serene Chicago suburb of 30,000 on a day when crowds nationwide gathered to celebrate the nation’s history.

Officers arrested Crimo “without incident” after a chase, Highland Park’s police chief told reporters Monday evening as nearby towns canceled festivities, fearing more violence. Police said Tuesday that they think Crimo legally purchased his weapon, described as “similar to an AR-15,” and randomly fired more than 70 shots at the crowd. A second rifle was found in his car, police said.

This session, the newly-ripened conservative supermajority of the Supreme Court of the United States decided it was time to lift up their robes and piss on the 21st century and reality. The half-dozen justices, John Roberts, Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito, Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh, and Amy Coney Barrett, looked out at a nation, no, a world that demands progress, that demands care, that demands a government that can act to help people, and said, "Nah. Fuck that." And their reasoning essentially came down to, in every case, "Because we can."

We have a gun crisis in this country. The Supreme Court said that the only thing that mattered was that more people have easier access to guns. We have a policing crisis in this country. The Supreme Court said that it's more important to protect cops from being sued or charged with crimes and that you don't need to worry about being told your Miranda rights anymore. We have an ongoing pandemic that has killed over a million people in this country. The Supreme Court said that public safety takes a back seat to whatever stupid bullshit makes people decide not to get a vaccine. We have an electoral crisis in this country. The Supreme Court said that gerrymandering away fair representation is a-okay.

And then the Court decided, in two cases, that the whole separation of church and state wasn't real because Christians need to have group prayers at school and schools that discriminate against LGBT people need to get our tax dollars. The former one there is where Gorsuch, lying about the facts of the case, told students who feel pressured into praying to suck it up, which would probably get him a cane up his ass from Benjamin Franklin, which would be some actual originalism.

And then the Court decided that a fetus has more rights than the woman it's attached to, and so fuck 50 years of Roe v. Wade. It's time to turn that motherfucking clock back to the 1950s. Alito insisted that Roe was the cause of chaos because anti-choicers were sad about it, and he used as an excuse, among others, that states had anti-abortion laws 150 years ago, which is so fucking dumb that it boggles the goddamn mind. It didn't matter that the Court, in throwing it back to the states, created two different legal statuses for women and girls in the country. It didn't matter that the Court created two different countries, essentially, if not 50 different ones. "We can do this, so we will," they said, "because fuck you, liberals." Which, to be fair, makes more sense than anything in the goddamn decision.

And then the Court decided that, despite a climate emergency that will wreck the earth, the Environmental Protection Agency really can't protect the environment, even though the statue that established it said that it explicitly could. In the case over setting standards for systems to reduce emissions at power plants and elsewhere, Roberts wrote, "Yeah, I don't like that so here's a thing I made up to overturn it and eat shit because these other five crazy pricks will go along with me. Just be grateful we didn't completely outlaw the EPA." So, yeah, enjoy that "air" and "water" while you can.