April 7th, 2025
I guess there must be a handbook…

… for public schools to use in issuing statements to parents when – as so often happens – students are found on campus with loaded guns. Either you call the weapon an “inappropriate item,” or you gesture vaguely in the direction of “police activity.”

Fort Worth ISD sent … a letter … to parents, reading in part, “our campus was briefly placed on lockdown due to police activity near the school.” The letter did not mention why there was police activity or explain that there were guns recovered. 

Three guns, from three tykes.

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

UD proposes further euphemisms:

Extremely short words that have other meanings: GAT. ROD.

Extremely obscure words no one will recognize: HARQUEBUS. CULVERIN.

April 7th, 2025
‘[C]ourts are split on whether the government may restrict 18- to 20-year-olds from buying or carrying guns.’

What’s shocking is that 18 year old cutoff age. It seems unfair and arbitrary, in a country where millions of 15-17 year olds currently buy/carry/trade/threaten with/injure with/kill with guns, to suddenly disenfranchise this large group of citizens. In the present American context, an 18 year old with a gun is a seasoned marksman. It’s absurd to think of disarming 18-20 year olds.

April 6th, 2025
‘[T]he email [to parents] from the district … said staff acted swiftly after responding to a report of an “inappropriate item” found inside the school.’

The Milwaukee public school system comes up with a new phrase for “loaded gun.”

April 4th, 2025
‘Davis began behaving erratically and saying things that “didn’t make sense.” Davis had a .357 Revolver, an AK-47, and two other firearms on him while at his father’s house. Unable to calm him down, the family contacted his mother to come and pick him up. Davis’ father drove down Birchwood Drive to meet up with Davis’ mother. Davis got into Smith’s car with his guns.’

A family member known to be mentally ill goes out of control and is desperately handed off by his father to his mother — WITH FOUR WEAPONS ON HIM INCLUDING AN AK47.

“[E]very country contains mentally ill and potentially violent people. Only America arms them,” writes Adam Gopnik. And man this story out of Maine makes that pretty graphic, don’t it. Son killed his mother in the car, then exited and took up a position along the road and starting shooting at passing vehicles. Killed one person and badly injured two before he decided it was time to kill himself. (With the AK47. That’s gotta hurt.)

Shades of Adam Lanza’s mother, who believed giving her violently insane son lots of guns would be therapeutic.

You kinda wonder under what conditions these people would call the police. Or an ambulance. If he had twelve guns on him? Body armor? IEDs?

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

What is with these people? Gotta be a death wish.

And meanwhile, civilizationally, it’s really not a good look. “Not even the most primitive of societies can compete now with our new predictable savagery.”

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

“This is something that you don’t see very often, even though we saw it in Bowdoin not too long ago,” said a police spokesperson. LOLOL.

April 2nd, 2025
‘The report noted that legally, there was little the shooter’s parents could do, given that the weapons were purchased and owned legally in a state with few restrictions.’

Yes. Tennessee made it real easy.

April 1st, 2025
Aurora CO is just one of those towns.

Its greatest fame is the 2012 theater shooting; but in smaller ways it keeps its hand in the gun massacre game, as in the mother who puts a loaded weapon in her elementary school-aged child’s backpack.

[T]he child was showing the gun to classmates when another student notified an adult… Aurora officials announced the 39-year-old mother of the student, later identified as Zoe Cherelle Cantrelle, was issued a summons for child abuse and failing to safely secure a firearm. Both are misdemeanors.

March 29th, 2025
‘Vehicles and homes were damaged by gunfire, according to [a police spokesperson], who said the neighborhood became “chaos.”‘

Pretty little street of half million dollar houses in Tacoma, Wash., including a senior living village! Sweet how old and young (one of the dead was sixteen) meet on this all-American bullet-riddled court. “Several shell casings are scattered throughout the street and two weapons have been located.” In the autumn, scattered leaves; in the spring, scattered casings…

And Granny just stumbled over an AK47!

March 29th, 2025
This blog scours the national news to bring you little stories that might not make the big outlets but that nevertheless tell us something precious and true about our country.

STATEN ISLAND, N.Y. — A 27-year-old man repeatedly discharged a gun on a residential street in his home community of Charleston, authorities allege.

Nicholas Scozzari was arrested three days after the episode, which lasted about a half hour starting around 4:15 a.m. on March 9 in the vicinity of his home on Sonia Court near Bloomingdale Road, according to the criminal complaint and police.

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

Oh, what a beautiful mornin!

March 26th, 2025
What does it take to get fired from the Jackson Mississippi…

… police department?

Good ol’ Jackson.

March 26th, 2025
“While we are all concerned about safety, merely having more gun laws on the books is not the answer.”

An official from a Mississippi gun group flatly states that restrictive laws have no effect on injuries and deaths from firearms. She doesn’t give a shit that states with gun control rank highest on safety, while states like hers, Mississippi, with virtually no gun control, rate – er – dead last (except for White Power Wonderland Idaho).

I think when your state, for decades, ranks last or almost last on all measures of education, health, and welfare, a weird inversion sets in, and your abject failure becomes a point of pride. Ole Miss did it again! No other state has our sweet synergy of ignorance, paranoia, and hoplophilia. Y’all come down, y’hear?

March 25th, 2025
‘How a bustling nightclub was allowed to operate without a liquor license in Midtown for months is a question that is now playing out in multiple civil lawsuits.’

RIP Baby’s — but at least they got to shoot people with lots of guns before they had to close.

March 22nd, 2025
Fat, drunk, and stupid is no way to go through life, Entire New Mexico Legislature.

In the wake of New Mexico’s latest bloodbath, the governor notes that the “legislature will adjourn today without having a passed a single bill to address juvenile crime or ban assault weapons. Their inaction is appalling and unacceptable.”

March 22nd, 2025
“Part of me wanted to write that this is something you never really think is going to happen in your city, but that actually feels deeply untrue.”

The mayor of Las Cruces NM gets points for honesty, as one of those obviously mass murder generating events generates mass murder in her crime-ridden city. Collect a crowd of very young idiots at some idiotic illegal event involving cars and alcohol, and watch the bullets fly.

The violent crime rate [in NM] was twice the national average in 2023, according to the Council of State Governments Justice Center… By August of 2024, violent crime in [Las Cruces] was up 46 percent compared to the same period in 2023.

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

Sure you want the skinny on America’s dumbest, grungiest, state? Go here if you dare.

March 21st, 2025
‘This was her last grasp at the rope, if you will, to hang on.’

Yeah, that’s why a house full of loaded guns was just the ticket.

March 21st, 2025
look mommy me BIG judge! me BIG guns mommy

BIG guns!

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UD REVIEWED

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.
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