… to an American problem.

Symbolically, a spate of horrible crimes at and around UC Santa Cruz is indeed disturbing. East coasters tend to idealize – and to some extent satirize – that laid-back, foresty, beachy campus, home of the Grateful Dead archive. But recent assaults on students, and – most recently and horribly – the murder of two police officers, has changed that.

In looking for reasons, UD finds evidence of drug markets (some seem to have been shut down).

**********************

The reported on-campus rape was a hoax. The woman made it up and may be prosecuted.

Yet another arsenal hauled onto an American university campus. Last one of these we looked at was courtesy of an eighteen year old woman who drove to Elon College to I guess uh talk – with a little backup – to her boyfriend. Now here’s a guy at North Carolina State – he works in the vet school – who’s got all kinds of shit, some of it loaded, on campus. Let’s see…

Authorities said O’Connell, a necropsy medical support technician at the College of Veterinary Medicine, consented to the police search Friday of his employee locker, where police found an unloaded Colt Delta Elite 10mm handgun and a loaded Taurus .357 Magnum revolver.

A subsequent search of a locked cabinet in O’Connell’s office turned up two axes and a dagger, and police searching his truck found a new Colt AR-15 rifle that was still in the box.

Poor baby is going through a divorce. Y’all understand.

The next time an American gun enthusiast tells you there’s no correlation between gun ownership and suicide (and many of them will tell you this), you could mention that the Israeli army disagrees.

******************

This column goes one better on the subject.

But let’s suppose science could establish that people who obtain firearms do indeed increase their death rate (or the death rate of their family members) from suicide. So what?

Buying a car may shorten your lifespan, since traffic accidents are a major killer. Building a backyard swimming pool creates a potential fatal hazard to you and your loved ones. But nobody says the government should interfere with such decisions.

Personal safety is a far more central matter of individual autonomy than those choices. A mentally stable person living in a crime-ridden neighborhood should be free to judge whether she’s more at risk from street criminals than from a spell of intense depression.

One imagines survivalist Nancy Lanza reading that last line and feeling relieved.

In April of 2010, journalism student George Hines organized a protest [against the no-guns-on-campus policy at the] University of Alaska campus in Anchorage. He argued that the Board of Regents’ policy violated his second amendment right. When discussions between the Board and Hines broke down, he and 20 other students gathered on the Anchorage campus, weapons in hand.

Y’all go ahead with your AR-15 assault rifle raffle! I swear it’s just the cutest thing!

Our cars.

Our entertainment.

Our home security systems.

America!

A 6th grade student brought an unloaded handgun to West Kearns Elementary School [in Utah] Monday.

The 11-year-old boy allegedly told other students his parents encouraged him to bring a gun to school for protection following the shootings at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut on Friday.

The boy reportedly pulled the gun, a .22-caliber pistol, out of his backpack during recess Monday morning.

“At recess, he pointed a gun to my head and said he was going to kill me,” said Isabel Rios, one of the boy’s fellow 6th grade students.

Folk rhyme, 1912.

Lizzie Borden took an axe
And gave her mother forty whacks.
When she saw what she had done
She gave her father forty-one.

Folk rhyme, 2012.

Nancy Lanza took a Glock
And gave a target forty pocks.
When she saw what she had done
She gave the Glock unto her son.

Since the start of 2012, there have been at least fifty shootings in a Walmart store or parking lot…

They’ve just bought them and they can’t wait to use them.

[E]ven though most of us are not conscienceless psychopaths, when we make investing decisions we often act as if we are. This observation casts an interesting light on Joel Bakan’s award-winning 2004 documentary “The Corporation.” In that film, Bakan argued that because corporate managers believe they must maximize shareholder wealth, a corporation is a “psychopathic creature” that “can neither recognize nor act upon moral reasons to refrain from harming others.” To the extent this is true, shareholders themselves may be largely to blame. As University of Toronto law professor Ian Lee puts it, “if corporations are in fact ‘pathological’ profit-maximizers, it is not because of corporate law, but because of pressure from shareholders.”

The makers of Bushmaster guns – the gun of choice for today’s compleat carnage connoisseur – are as we speak suffering a sudden de-psychopathologization among American investors.

No worries, though. They’ll take the business to overseas investors.

… that appeared in Inside Higher Education.

A US private equity firm is selling off its stakes in the firearms company that made the AR-15 rifle that was used to shoot dead 20 children in a Connecticut primary school last week.

Cerberus Capital Management said on Tuesday it was preparing to sell off its investment in gunmaker Freedom Group following mounting pressure from California’s teachers’ pension funds.

They manage teachers’ pension funds, and teachers have expressed eagerness that their investment firm no longer use the $751 million they give the firm to do business with the Bushmaster boys.

*****************************

What’s gotten into the teachers? What is there about feathering their nests from the slaughter of other teachers that bothers them?

******************************

And what about your university?

Profit should be the primary goal of their investment offices, but not at the expense of their broader purposes. If a schoolteachers union or university endowment or nonprofit foundation truly cares about stopping the next mass killing, then they should not provide capital that produces the instruments of such destruction.

Eliot Spitzer:

Every student at a university should ask the university if it is invested in Cerberus.

*****************************

People seem to be voting with their feet in other ways on guns, too.

It’s a beautiful day in the neighborhood as Ohio University discovers how far one of its custodians was able to stretch his salary.

Well, even if you don’t make much, there’s always a way to swing for that AK-47, etc., etc., you’ve had your eye on; because what’s the use of making a threat when it’s an empty threat?

He was afraid he was going to get fired because he lost the “keys issued as part of his job.”

No doubt a custodian who loses keys is a fine steward of a home military arsenal. Nothing to worry about there; and no doubt OU is overreacting by having him arrested for threatening to bring one of his many guns (Or wait – don’t they bring all of their guns to the scene these days? At the very least you’ll need your assault weapon to kill twenty people per minute, and then your handgun to kill yourself.) to work if the university tries to fire him.

As I say, what good is a threat if it’s an empty threat?

Guns undermine … community. Their pervasive, open presence would sow apprehension, suspicion, mistrust and fear, all emotions that are corrosive of community and civic cooperation. To that extent, then, guns give license to autocratic government.

Also corrosive of freedom, Firmin DeBrabander points out, since the sight of them frightens us, makes us anxious about what we say and do.

And get used to seeing just as many rifles and shotguns as handguns.

In Stillwater, about 65 miles north of Oklahoma City, the owner of the Stillwater Armory gun shop said the new [open carry] law has brought about a subtle change in buying habits. Customers with small handguns that are easy to conceal have been buying larger weapons, with longer barrels and with magazines that hold additional rounds, as they prepare to wear their guns unconcealed.

Open carry handguns, rifles, and shotguns are powerfully iconic of the cultural divide between Elizabeth Warren and Grover Norquist, between Americans who identify with an American community embodied in representative government, and Americans who are what DeBrabander calls “extreme individualists,” for whom any form of common life founded on some degree of mutual trust seems to be meaningless, threatening.

***********************

UD‘s friend Alan Jacobs says the same thing.

But what troubles me most about … the general More Guns approach to social ills — is the absolute abandonment of civil society it represents. It gives up on the rule of law in favor of a Hobbesian “war of every man against every man” in which we no longer have genuine neighbors, only potential enemies. You may trust your neighbor for now — but you have high-powered recourse if he ever acts wrongly.

Whatever lack of open violence may be procured by this method is not peace or civil order, but rather a standoff, a Cold War maintained by the threat of mutually assured destruction. Moreover, the person who wishes to live this way, to maintain order at universal gunpoint, has an absolute trust in his own ability to use weapons wisely and well: he never for a moment asks whether he can be trusted with a gun. Of course he can! (But in literature we call this hubris.)

Is this really the best we can do? It might be if we lived in, say, the world described by Cormac McCarthy in The Road. But we don’t. Our social order is flawed, but by no means bankrupt. Most of us live in peace and safety without the use of guns. It makes more sense to try to make that social order safer and safer, more and more genuinely peaceful, rather than descend voluntarily into a world governed by paranoia, in which one can only feel safe — or, really, “safe” — with cold steel strapped to one’s ribcage.