‘[A gun control advocate in Mississippi] said Tuesday that he often reminds his colleagues in other parts of the country that “what they go through don’t even compare to what we have to go through in the South. Because in the South, guns is like having a bottle of water [sic]. Everybody got it. And then it’s a right-to-carry state. It’s a castle doctrine state. It’s constant gun shows every other week in Mississippi somewhere. So guns are just bloody in Mississippi…. Get us all together. You bring in alcohol. Then you bring in all the crazy drugs they got these days, and you got a state where everybody got at least 10 guns. What you asked for? You asked for violence.”’
If they’re killing/injuring twenty people every weekend in bars and at big public events, why go there? It isn’t news if it’s just routine.
I mean, local coverage, sure; but why should the NYT waste its time on something as common as the common cold? UD doesn’t think you should reward states with no gun laws by paying attention to them. Their political class has created a wasteland, which is certainly a mark of shame for our country. But we’ve established these facts. The rest is just one vile stupid slaughter after another.
Now UD is a different matter. She’s not pretending to “report” on this shit. She pays attention because the rest of us need constantly to abuse ridicule and revile our sickest, most suicidal, most homicidal, gunny states. Otherwise, nothing changes.
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Man, I was wondering when we’d hear from Louisiana! Good ol’ murdering LSU.
The state has “the single worst rate of gun deaths in the country,” and when you look at Leland High School’s homecoming gathering on Friday you can see how it got there. Most mass shootings manage to kill five or six; but the little folk of Leland and environs (the shooters probably range in age from 14-18) have already killed eight and injured at least twenty. They are definitely setting the mass shooting standard for the nation, and because they’re so young and because Mississippi basically has no gun laws they have decades of slaughter ahead of them.
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“No triggers, no warnings that something like this would take place,” says a local official, and what a hoot. No triggers or warnings except for the fact that everyone over 12 in your state shoots off guns and you’re fucking notorious for the bloodshed all over Mississippi. Other than that, nothing to indicate a problem.
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Wow! There’s more!
Two separate shootings were reported Saturday, Oct 11, related to Mississippi campuses, one at Jackson State University and another at Alcorn State University.
The two shootings follow three separate Friday night shooting incidents related to high school football events in the state.
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‘Mississippi’s gun death rate in 2024 was 116% higher than the national average.‘
This weekend, they’ve been showing you how they do it. And they still have Sunday!
Tensions over public shoreline access erupted into felony charges for a Narragansett resident of the town’s pricy Anawan Cliffs neighborhood, who is accused of allegedly menacing fishermen with a drone, hitting golf balls in their direction, taking their sweatshirts and then flashing a loaded firearm.
[The man] faces felony charges for assault and possession of a large-capacity magazine.
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Golf balls, drones, and guns -
Fun for everyone!
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Enjoy!
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Full article available here.
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[A Florida boater,] frustrated by the wake [some] children were creating in the water near his vessel … [pointed a gun at them and said he would] “shoot them and watch them bleed out.”
One can’t help seeing the mordant grins on the faces of America’s fast-growing gun suicides as these people glance, on their way out, at one lucrative, self-congratulatory, and predictably failed effort to reduce gun suicides.
In 2016, The American Foundation for Suicide Prevention teamed up with the National Shooting Sports Foundation to reduce suicide by 20% by 2025. (“Firearms were the leading cause of suicide among males and females in 2022. The rate of firearm-related suicide among males increased 31% after reaching a low of 10.3 deaths per 100,000 in 2006 to 13.5 per 100,000 in 2022.” By 2024, we see a “staggering” suicide rise.)
This article provides the gory details, but the main thing you need to know is that there is rather… uh… a glaring gap between the interests of anti-suicide crusaders and gun sellers.
The now-ended project did succeed in generating money for the two groups; and of course it enabled their leaders to use phrases like scaled implementation.
A guy who barely survived the Montgomery AL shootout says “he came downtown because there were so many people out and he wanted to join the fun, but that night of fun turned into something he described as a ‘warzone’ that he’s thankful to have survived.”
And he does pose the question. About guns. The killers were fifteen, sixteen, years old, and it was so easy for the brainless shits to get guns.
‘More people died by gunfire in Alabama [in 2023] than in New York State, which has nearly four times Alabama’s population.’
It’s that ol self-killer instinct, folks. Wyoming has it too. Guns guns guns guns until everyone gets ten! AK47s, AR15s, give em out like candy until everyone kills everyone in a blitz and then the cops kill the killers.
But WHY, Wyoming? A la what Alabam?
Read Nietzsche! says WY. Look under N for Nihilism! says AL. Life’s worth shit down here says AL. Life sucks in the Sagebrush State says WY. Read Better Never To Have Been and then shut the fuck up or I’ll blow your head off.
A huge open shoot-out in the center of the city wreaks death and life-threatening injury, but the police chief is here to tell you that the city is safe. He’s fucking crazy, as the state AG makes clear in his comment:

You can’t do much when your state has virtually no control over its millions of guns, many of them, like the ones last night, in the hands of fifteen year olds. Almost all of the shooters were 14-16. So you might as well do what Bama’s doing. Nothing. I mean, I assume the city has a crew that hoses down the rivers of blood. I assume they’re doing that.
Gun death at a hookah lounge in one of the most dangerous cities in insanely dangerous Louisiana. Who could have predicted this tragic turn? Especially on a weekend night?
But how much, really, is too much? This Texas high school begins to look like an armed camp, with many guns carried in every day. Parents are upset, demand action, blah blah. But it’s Texas. You wanna live where everybody, starting around age fourteen, doesn’t carry a loaded gun everywhere, move to Massachusetts.
Yeah why should Wyoming’s governor bother mentioning the primary reason his state has the highest rate of elderly suicides in the country? Virtually all of the guys use a gun.
Cuz walk five feet in any direction in Wyoming and you’ll trip over a gun. The state has more guns than almost anyplace else in the world, ‘cept maybe Mogadishu.
And that’s why it’s got world-class suicide rates. But you wouldn’t want to be impolite enough to say the word or anything.
The rest of America thinks you’re really weird for posing the question.
Dr. Bernard Carroll, known as the "conscience of psychiatry," contributed to various blogs, including Margaret Soltan's University Diaries, for which he sometimes wrote limericks under the name Adam.
New York Times
George Washington University English professor Margaret Soltan writes a blog called University Diaries, in which she decries the Twilight Zone-ish state our holy land’s institutes of higher ed find themselves in these days.
The Electron Pencil
It’s [UD's] intellectual honesty that makes her blog required reading.
Professor Mondo
There's always something delightful and thought intriguing to be found at Margaret Soltan's no-holds-barred, firebrand tinged blog about university life.
AcademicPub
You can get your RDA of academic liars, cheats, and greedy frauds at University Diaries. All disciplines, plus athletics.
truffula, commenting at Historiann
Margaret Soltan at University Diaries blogs superbly and tirelessly about [university sports] corruption.
Dagblog
University Diaries. Hosted by Margaret Soltan, professor of English at George Washington University. Boy is she pissed — mostly about athletics and funding, the usual scandals — but also about distance learning and diploma mills. She likes poems too. And she sings.
Dissent: The Blog
[UD belittles] Mrs. Palin's degree in communications from the University of Idaho...
The Wall Street Journal
Professor Margaret Soltan, blogging at University Diaries... provide[s] an important voice that challenges the status quo.
Lee Skallerup Bessette, Inside Higher Education
[University Diaries offers] the kind of attention to detail in the use of language that makes reading worthwhile.
Sean Dorrance Kelly, Harvard University
Margaret Soltan's ire is a national treasure.
Roland Greene, Stanford University
The irrepressibly to-the-point Margaret Soltan...
Carlat Psychiatry Blog
Margaret Soltan, whose blog lords it over the rest of ours like a benevolent tyrant...
Perplexed with Narrow Passages
Margaret Soltan is no fan of college sports and her diatribes on the subject can be condescending and annoying. But she makes a good point here...
Outside the Beltway
From Margaret Soltan's excellent coverage of the Bernard Madoff scandal comes this tip...
Money Law
University Diaries offers a long-running, focused, and extremely effective critique of the university as we know it.
Anthony Grafton, American Historical Association
The inimitable Margaret Soltan is, as usual, worth reading. ...
Medical Humanities Blog
I awake this morning to find that the excellent Margaret Soltan has linked here and thereby singlehandedly given [this blog] its heaviest traffic...
Ducks and Drakes
As Margaret Soltan, one of the best academic bloggers, points out, pressure is mounting ...
The Bitch Girls
Many of us bloggers worry that we don’t post enough to keep people’s interest: Margaret Soltan posts every day, and I more or less thought she was the gold standard.
Tenured Radical
University Diaries by Margaret Soltan is one of the best windows onto US university life that I know.
Mary Beard, A Don's Life
[University Diaries offers] a broad sense of what's going on in education today, framed by a passionate and knowledgeable reporter.
More magazine, Canada
If deity were an elected office, I would quit my job to get her on the ballot.
Notes of a Neophyte