Y’all go ahead with your AR-15 assault rifle raffle! I swear it’s just the cutest thing!
Y’all go ahead with your AR-15 assault rifle raffle! I swear it’s just the cutest thing!
What your tax and tuition money is paying for.
What your tax and tuition money is paying for.
What your tax and tuition money is paying for.
What your tax and tuition money is paying for.
What your tax and tuition money is paying for.
What your tax and tuition money is paying for.
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.
Just because it’s grading period all over America.
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.
Haredi parties Shas and the United Torah Judaism have responded to a request to bar them from the elections on the basis of excluding women from their party ticket: “The parties function, as demanded by the halacha (Jewish law), with clear segregation between men and women for reasons of modesty. Men have one role and women another role. This segregation does not exclude women, nor discriminate against them nor deem them less worthy than men.”
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.
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What’s gotten into the teachers? What is there about feathering their nests from the slaughter of other teachers that bothers them?
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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.
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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?
For all of the upheaval and veiled threats from the power conferences, Emmert’s NCAA will almost certainly hold together. It’s awfully hard to walk away from a legally sanctioned price-fixing scheme — even when it’s in your own best interests to do so.
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.
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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.
The writer has overlooked one other reason Lanza chose an elementary school.
Maybe he went to a school full of women and children (no men died) because he wanted the easiest, most vulnerable targets he could find. A skinny little guy withdrawn from and clearly terrified of the world, he began by shooting a sleeping woman, and went on from there.
Most powerful and damaging weaponry imaginable; most powerless people.
