October 3rd, 2025
‘For some students and parents, the repeated lockdowns — three in just over a month — have become too much.’

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.

October 3rd, 2025
‘Gordon’s statement did not mention firearms, which are used in the vast majority of Wyoming’s suicide deaths.’

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.

September 28th, 2025
‘”Why would someone bring a firearm to a kid’s soccer game? We thought that was really weird,” [one] father said.’

The rest of America thinks you’re really weird for posing the question.

September 28th, 2025
AKA…

the weekend!

September 24th, 2025
Massive Amounts of Weaponry: You’re never too young!

Big gun shop moving right next door to two day cares! What could go wrong?

September 22nd, 2025
‘[P]arents … now question how their children were allowed to play ball amid constant background gunfire.’

Hoowhee Texas! You think YOU love guns! You ain’t been to Texas!! Gunshots morning afternoon and night; and in Katy in particular they put a shooting range across the street from a kids’ baseball complex.

Here’s a typical game:

We started at 8 a.m. and the gunshots have been going off since then,” said [one parent].

“We had a game at 8 and could hear rifles and shotguns going off at times throughout the whole game. Even leaving the park after the game, shots were going off,” another parent added.

But don’t nobody say nuthin cuz it’s the fuckin sound of freedom. Smell of napalm in the morning blast of gunfire all day kinda thing. Heartbeat of America. Baseball and bullets. Don’t get better than that.

Sure, they hit the coach. Fine, the coach was airlifted out. BFD. “There was bullets flying everywhere. It wasn’t one shot. There’s bullets flying everywhere off the poles, onto the field. It’s just unbelievable.” You expect a little carnage in Texas, and, you know, at least it wasn’t one of the kids and at least no one was killed.

September 21st, 2025
‘”I would like to think and hope that you can have large nightclubs that don’t generate shootings,” [Milwaukee Alderman Robert] Bauman said.’

Yeah, datz where we are.

September 21st, 2025
‘The range is where you should always wear your spiciest shirts, IMO. What is anyone gonna do? You’re literally there with cases full of guns and ammo. My pink tie dye “I ❤️ Abortion” shirt is one of my normal range shirts, and I shoot in rural Kentucky.’

UD‘s having a hell of a good time reading this thread about leftwing gunnies.

September 21st, 2025
Maher gets it right.

“Was [Kirk’s assassin] on the left? I don’t know … It is a fool’s errand to try to say that these nuts who do these things are [on] any team… This kid doesn’t belong in either party. He belongs in a straitjacket. He’s an outpatient who should not be out.”

Which reminds UD of something else she’s been thinking about. The missing link in these kills done by people 16-25 is their parents. Many of the killers are still living at home, and in many cases their parents know perfectly well that their kid is nuts. Their response to this dawning horror is denial plus hiding: They don’t want it to be true; and they don’t want anyone outside the home to know it’s true.

Many of these homes are already really gunny, with dad deciding it’d make the kid better if they went to the ranges together… You’d be amazed how many parents of violent demented children decide more guns and more shooting is the answer.

Or maybe the parent enjoys his own rage against society being acted out by the kid. Things get squirrely here.

The larger theme of moronic negligence resounds throughout the land, as in the husband who took a business trip, leaving his spectacularly insane wife alone in the house with her four little daughters. She slaughtered all of them with one of many guns her husband decided were fine to keep unlocked with a maniac in the house. One of the girls survived long enough to suffer great pain for a few days.

September 20th, 2025
A higher grade of massacre.

A country club in New Hampshire! A departure from hookah lounges in Louisiana.

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

At least half a dozen people were taken to Nashua area hospitals with injuries that were not gunshot-related, sources told News 9 Investigates. Many were injured in the chaos of the shooting.

That’s one thing UD‘s been thinking about lately. In toting up our daily American shootings, we concentrate on the kill rate; we don’t focus much at all on the physically and emotionally injured that lie scattered about these scenes.

Oh, the nut in Nashua (he seems to have been another armed psychotic, but we’ll see) only managed to blow one person away; forget it; move on to today‘s bloody mess… We forget the maimed for life, the traumatized, the old people who snapped their legs trying to run, the children crushed by adults. We never bother thinking at all about, say, the owners and staff of businesses – like country clubs! – that labor every day to sustain an environment of calm, beauty, and sociality… sure, even of snobbery… and the whole point of the enterprise is its non-chaos, its safety from the shooting gallery out there. Regard them this morning, after one hundred people ran screaming from a killer on their trim verdant lawn: Glass everywhere, bright red blood on the bright green grass, Adirondacks upended and pulled apart, yellow police markers and tape, abandoned phones and games… It’s the last scene of the Great Gatsby, except that this is a group scene; it’s not just some rich guy gunned down in his magnificent pool on his magnificent estate. It’s a whole raft of wealthy suddenly wrenched from a subdued and beautiful setting into the savage insanity that is Anytown USA.

Watch for these would-be safety zones to look more and more like (ha) armed camps.

September 20th, 2025
Take your gun and ELIMINATE them.

https://www.the-journal.com/articles/rocky-mountain-gun-owners-event-still-scheduled-in-lewis-arriola-after-community-concern

Advertisement, Rocky Mountain Gun Owners.

September 20th, 2025
Even the name of its county is gun-related.

It’s 24/7 guns in Chambers, AL, where “half time” in high school baseball games means the moment when ambient shooting becomes unignorable.

September 19th, 2025
‘[H]is department is now looking into whether the club should have been open at 5 a.m.’

One of America’s most violent cities. A motorcycle club. Open all night. What could go wrong?

September 19th, 2025
ABC10: Where the news happens right on our doorstep!

Or, uh, window.

September 19th, 2025
‘Suicides among the terminally ill tend to provoke conversations about the lack of alternative options like physician-assisted suicide, says Laura Prater, an assistant professor at The Ohio State University. “Why are we more willing to let folks kill themselves with a firearm than choose to more peacefully end their lives with family members by their side?” she asked.’

The crisis of suicides among older adults is inextricably linked with guns. Older Americans use a gun in a suicide attempt significantly more often than younger people. And guns are the most lethal method of attempting suicide.

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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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