When junior Alex Acuna walks into John F. Kennedy High School in Silver Spring [Md.] to start his school day, he feels safe. But in the back of his mind, he says he’s also thinking that walking into the school means it could be his “last day alive.”
When junior Alex Acuna walks into John F. Kennedy High School in Silver Spring [Md.] to start his school day, he feels safe. But in the back of his mind, he says he’s also thinking that walking into the school means it could be his “last day alive.”
UD‘s county still hasn’t transformed its public schools into armed camps, with metal detectors and police everywhere, cuz it thinks it’s too classy for that sort of thing. Everybody else is doing it, but Bethesda? Chevy Chase? These are among America’s most affluent, most educated, blahblahblah…
So change has to come from the parents, not the deluded county council, which seems prepared to see students die on the altar of its self-regard.
A petition, in the wake of gun possession and gun fight incidents in just the last two weeks, is now circulating.
A fifteen year old student packed heat at the school; mere days before, a fight involving a pretty large number of Bethesda Chevy Chase high school students plus gunfire took place in the middle of Bethesda. As administrators/security begin to crack down, they will certainly discover that the gangs at the school and/or isolated mentally disturbed students bring guns to campus on a regular basis.
But will there be a crackdown? Does BCC have, like, a principal? Is this person doing anything?
Authorities said they found 47 weapons, including the gun from Ferguson’s ankle holster, and more than 26,000 rounds of ammunition at the home.
What can I say. In America, that’s how you define a successful gathering of college students.
Friday for a change a little more lockdown…
Sorry. Her widower has told anyone who will listen that she had severe, longstanding, mental illness marked in particular by profound clinical depression. I’m sure it’s true that no one was capable of imagining she’d shoot bullets directly into the heads of her four children; but just as surely her husband, and her close friends like you, were aware that she manifested the perfect confluence of symptoms for suicide/attempted suicide. Anyone with eyes in her head would have taken one look at the loaded weapons in that house and tried to remove them.
I hear you. In Wyoming, even with no weapons inside, she only needed to stroll to the sidewalk in front of her house and ask any of the passersby dripping with Destroyer Carbines if she could borrow one for a sec. But this unusual behavior might at least have tipped off her two older daughters that mommy was really losing it now and they should flee.
UD‘s sick, in this blood-soaked country, of people, post-massacre of the innocents, looking everywhere — nasty mysterious God, the lethal difficulty of childrearing — but at the fucking guns.
And, you know, he hit this and that.
He was president of the North Orange County Bar Association (“Join us on Wednesday, October 23rd @ 5PM, at Madero 1899 (formerly Matador) in Downtown Fullerton for an in depth look at Restraining Orders.”), and his face still shines proudly from their Past Presidents webpage. Drinks like a fish. Took one of the 47 and shot his wife to death while watching Breaking Bad. Still a judge pulling down a salary but for some reason they’ve taken him off the bench.
According to police radio transmissions, a caller reported around 10 a.m. that a group of roughly 20 kids were fighting on the street in front of Chase Avenue Urban Park before they heard one gunshot, after which the group scattered… [A video shows] two male teenagers fighting one another while other male teenagers watch. Other members of the group join the fight and begin yelling and hitting one another. As the group continues to fight, the teens move into the street. At one point during the fight, one person can be heard yelling to others to back up and another can be heard saying “it’s loaded.” A gunshot is heard, but isn’t seen on the video, and the group scatters.
Happened a couple of hours ago.
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Update: The mob with at least one gun fired was largely made up of students from Bethesda Chevy Chase high school – a school that used to have a good reputation.
Update: Shooters arrested. Meanwhile, parents able to afford private school withdraw their kids from armed-gang-location BCC.
It’s coming! Are you ready? Are you getting excited?
Now that Spring Break is all about guns, beach towns across America are mustering troops and building beach-adjacent jail cells (not kidding), plus preparing to reroute traffic, close beaches, charge $150 for parking, etc etc etc.
When even dinky Presidents Day has ’em shooting up a storm, y’all know that a whole week of Spring Breakoutthebullets is gonna be a challenge. The really big venues, like Miami Beach, have released a bunch of slick ads the last couple of years featuring younguns looking at the camera and wondering why everyone hates them and their Rugers. Even ultimate trash location Panama Beach is starting to say whoa.
With his bullet-size-matters black shirt and his firepower ever-ready, this resident of a pleasant, planned community in Florida chats with the police as he enters, handcuffed, one of their cars.
They picked him up because his obnoxious honking at a guy in front of him in a parking lot – a guy who was simply waiting while someone pulled out of a spot – drew the guy out of his car. In a casual, polite way, the guy asked if the honker would be patient and stop honking at him. All of this was captured on security cameras.
The honker pulled out his handgun and aimed it right at the guy’s face. While screaming unspecified “vulgar” things.
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I think the big-bullet guy is this dude. Retired to Florida for sun and gun.
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Welp, the last of her kids that Tranyelle Harshman shot in the head (after which Harshman killed herself) has now, after suffering for a few days, died.
Tranyelle, notoriously mentally unbalanced, killed all four of them pointblank with a handy household gun that her family saw no reason to take out of the house despite her madness. “Though his wife had been undergoing treatment for her fragile mental state for several years, she hadn’t been able to move past it, [her husband] said.”
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No, hubby up and took a temporary job in California, leaving Tranyelle alone in their rather isolated Wyoming house – just her, her insanity, four little kids, and a Glock.
A Glock? Whatever. Maybe she used an AK-47 and really blasted the babies’ brains out. Why haven’t the authorities identified the firearm?
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Welp again: This is BIG news, and outlets all over the country have what to say about it, but virtually no one – and absolutely no one in gunny, astoundingly suicidal, Wyoming, has anything to say about a quadruple familicide made easy peasy with unlocked loaded guns fully available to a maniac.
Let us look at how our fellow Americans are rendering this event. “Olivia gained her angel wings yesterday,” announced the family at number four’s demise and OH MY. There are easy and hard ways to gain them, I guess, and God decided Olivia would do it the hard way, absorbing an agonizing slug from her own mother, and then laboring under a swollen bloody brain for days until her heart collapsed.
God wanted you for an angel. You, your sister, your other sister, and your other sister. And your mother?
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It’s the Godswerve. A lunatic with a gun bloodies up the house and — cue angels.
Exactly like gun-fanatic madman Olin Johnson, who took one of his billion household firearms and blew his wife and himself away.
Immediately after the bloodbath, his Mormon community invited everyone to a celebration of his life, asking that they bring “goodies to share” and “warm memories.”
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Or think of Andrew Humiston, 15 year old massacrist – killed 5! family members and only missed a sixth because she played dead – who took one of his father’s conveniently located guns to kill everybody. What was God on about, letting Andrew stalk and slay one screaming pleading family member after another? Why did the rest of the Humiston family lovingly note, in everybody’s obit, that they are survived by their murderer?
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All of these atrocity-reactions are best seen as bizarre subcultural self-comfortings, communities of people absolutely insistent on looking away from the carnage and swerving pronto to the angelic order. UD doesn’t begrudge them whatever all is forgiven God works in mysterious ways thing gets them through it; but how can the rest of us, how can a whole country bleeding from guns, play along? The focus has to be on the idiocy and negligence that put those death-dealers in the hands of maniacs.
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Update: So many other examples.
“Going berserk with guns has become an American way of life.”
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