January 27th, 2024
‘[P]olice have been called to Club Marcella 45 times this year [2023]. One call was for a deadly shooting, 14 calls were for assault and 8 calls were for threats.’

But you wouldn’t want to mess with the special magic that is guns, gangs, and late night clubs… Let’s do nothing and see if things improve…

After all, the club’s gone to a lot of trouble to keep guns out.

 [There are] up to 20 guards on duty, two armed guards outside, two pat-downs at the door, a metal detector and more than 80 surveillance cameras.

And yet the lads keep getting in with guns!

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

Hold on. Maybe Buffalo is ready to act…

After the fourth shooting at or around Club Marcella this year, the City of Buffalo has shut down the popular nightclub. [The shootings all took place] … in less than a year. On January 29, a security guard was shot in the parking lot. Two weeks later on February 12, one person was killed and two others were injured in a shooting inside the club. The third happened in October.

See? That’s all it takes to shut an American night club down.

January 25th, 2024
Lying, pulling rank; plus speed, alcohol, and guns…

… The only thing missing, for the compleat Republican leadership scandal, is three-way sex.

January 20th, 2024
“I don’t condone what my daughter and her friends did, but I feel like the teacher could have handled the situation in so many other ways,” said Ashleigh, one of the kids’ mothers. 

Could have used one of her smaller handguns.

December 27th, 2023
Listen, in memory of Lenka Hlávková, massacred in the prime of life by a madman with a gun…

… to the tranquil music she studied and loved.

One of many lost.

December 21st, 2023
A maniac with a gun…

… first kills his father, and then fifteen or twenty people (some of the injured will die) on the campus of Prague’s Charles University. He was a student there. He killed himself as police neared.

Used a big ol’ sniper rifle and did a Charles Whitman – picked everyone off from a rooftop.

December 20th, 2023
“[T]here have not been any instances of gun violence in Curtis Bay in more than 4 months, due to an increase[d] police presence and engagement with residents.”

Wow! Four months without shootouts in the street! The city of UD’s birth is really knocking it out of the park.

December 19th, 2023
‘Working at a Dunkin’, you can be rewarded for serving guests and keeping them running!’

No better way to do that than point three guns at them and tell them they’re going to die.

Look at ’em scoot!!

December 19th, 2023
‘Terry Fitzgerald, one of several plaintiffs named, said in the lawsuit that he often walked through neighborhood parks, around lakes and trails “carrying his concealed weapon.” He said he stays away now because he cannot defend himself.’

No more going outside in crime-ridden Nebraska for me! Too dangerous out there.

December 19th, 2023
‘[T]here have been fights between folks in the crowd at the Griffin vs. Spalding basketball games in recent years. … Back in October, a 15-year-old student was shot and killed after the same rivalry match in football.’

No fans allowed to a high school football game in Georgia. Guns keep going off.

December 14th, 2023
‘The core of the gun-rights movement—and the firearms market—is made up of white men who live in suburbs or rural areas. These buyers are among the least likely to encounter gun violence, but the most likely to die by their own hand using a firearm.’

This is a subtle and sensitive examination of the gun suicide epidemic, featuring Bob Owens, whose death was hypertypical.

[A] journalist who was friends with Owens said that many gun owners [like Owens] are afraid to tell doctors about their mental-health struggles, because they worry someone will take their weapons away.

Eh bien. UD’s heart goes out to these silent, lost, sufferers, but their logic’s a bit skewed. Surely they know they are overwhelmingly unlikely to need their twenty firearms for self-defense; surely they know (or at least intuit?) that those guns are far more likely to be used by someone in their home for suicide.

They may even know that the act will be impulsive – one drunk self-hating night; the failure to complete some task or other; a bad fight with your wife. Gun, stage left.

And it wouldn’t even be about taking the weapons away. It would be about temporarily locking them up until a crisis passed. But even that…

What does one say about flagrantly suicidal people who refuse to go to doctors and refuse to put away their guns?

December 10th, 2023
‘I know if you’ve been bad or good; and if it’s bad, I’m gonna blow your fucking head off.’

Christmas in Oklahoma.

December 8th, 2023
C’mon. They’d have to cancel the show EVERY YEAR.

While Las Vegas is no stranger to gun shows, staging one in the same city as a highly visible shooting that occurred just days earlier is heartless and prioritizes the opportunity to profit from the sale of deadly weapons above the basic decency and respect of honoring those lost and those who continue to recover from the tragedy. 

December 8th, 2023
Let’s review, shall we?

Every day, 120 Americans die at the end of a gun, including suicides and homicides, an average of 43,375 per year. According to the latest available analysis of data from 2015 to 2019, the US gun homicide rate was 26 times that of other high-income countries; its gun suicide rate was nearly 12 times higher. Mass shootings, defined as attacks in which at least four people are injured or killed excluding the shooter, have been on the rise since 2015, peaking at 686 incidents in 2021. There have been 632 mass shootings in the US in 2023 as of early December, including the Las Vegas shooting, and at the current pace, the US is set to eclipse the 2021 record this year.

December 7th, 2023
Amy Bishop massacred her colleagues.

Yesterday’s crazy person with a PhD targeted students. But same deal: Both professors were pissed off with the school, and, this being the United States, both had zero trouble getting guns. And so it goes.

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

Actually, no. Our most recent maniac with a gun also targeted professors.

December 6th, 2023
‘UNLV mass shooter was career college professor.’

Just down the street from the Harvest music festival massacre.

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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.
Notes of a Neophyte

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