Ms. Perez told [her son] to re-buckle, but he refused to listen and climbed into the driver’s seat of the vehicle. Then as she turned her head to look out the window towards the gas station (opposite of the location), she heard a loud boom. Ms. Perez looked back at [her son] and noticed his eyes were looking in opposite directions.
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Kids and guns! What are ya gonna do?
UD predicts that in a few years, along with adorable Dog and Baby videos, we’ll have our choice of Gun and Baby videos, where four year olds play Find the Hidden Glock and blow their heads off. Only in America, land of 390 million guns.
[Yesterday,] a [Massachusetts state] trooper stopped to help two cars pulled over in the breakdown lane. State Police said it appeared the two cars were refueling but the trooper noticed eight-to-10 people in the cars were wearing full military-style uniforms. Some had long rifles, some had pistols, and some had both. The trooper asked for driver’s licenses and proper licensing for the guns, but the group did not provide either.
Was his doctor (who he shot to death along with most of the doctor’s family) treating him for mental disorders related to the concussions? Was he obviously mentally ill? If so, how did he get the gun? Do they sell guns to mentally ill people in South Carolina?
His proud alma mater, South Carolina State, hasn’t yet taken down his hero page.
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‘I can say he’s a good kid,’ [Adams’ father said]. ‘I think the football messed him up.’ Football and an entire state sagging under the weight of its weaponry. Football and weaponry and mental illness and I’ll bet Adams was transmitting for some time to a number of people that he was messed up. Nothing like 21 guns per person for the deeply paranoid. Even if people tried keeping him away from guns, in South Carolina that would have been impossible.
I wonder if he issued threats. All of this will come out, and we’ll all read about it, because in a country where heavily armed uninteresting madmen kill dozens of people every week, this killing titillates: a rich prominent doctor; a high body count including children; an NFL football player. South Carolina: Ground zero for Strange brew, see what’s inside of you: Guns, god, football.
And what drugs – prescription, non-prescription – was the shooter on? All of this will come out.
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And as to the shock the local police chief is expressing – “This doesn’t happen here.” – weawy? Depends on what you mean by “here,” don’t it? Here as in the teeny tiny town where it happened, or here as in all over South Carolina, one of the ten most dangerous states in the country.
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His sister confirms that he had been for some time “aggressively” unbalanced. Yet another instance of the truth Nathan Heller not long ago uttered: Going berserk with guns has become a way of American life.
Yeah, Roof was twenty-one years old too – just like our latest massacrist – when he sat in a chair and point blank killed a group of black Bible students. 22-year-old Elliott Rodger didn’t like women, so he shot and killed a bunch of women. Latest guy’s thing was Asians (information is preliminary, but UD‘s going to presume this motive). Mentally unbalanced hate-monger young ‘uns armed to the teeth: What a grand American achievement. Couldn’t have done it without the NRA.
Betty Baucom McConnell said she witnessed the events from her front door.
‘I couldn’t believe it,’ she told KODT-TV.
‘It looked like the wild, wild west. I couldn’t get my phone to work. I tried to go live.
‘I didn’t know what to do,’ McConnell said. ‘The police did a great job.’
McConnell said she was enjoying a birthday dinner at home when she heard gunshots outside.
‘[I] looked out the front door and there was this lady in front of my house with a gun and she was trying to get in my daughter’s car and my daughter was at the door hollering at her to “get away from my car”,’ McConnell said.
‘Next thing I knew she pulled out the gun and she got in her stance and she was shooting at the police and police was shooting back at her.’
There is a disturbing reason Republicans in Congress are giving for refusing to break with President Donald Trump: They fear for their lives.
According to Rep. Jason Crow (D-CO), this is a major reason why more House Republicans aren’t voting to impeach [or, more recently, convict] Donald Trump in the wake of the attack on the Capitol.
“The majority of them are paralyzed with fear,” Crow said in a Wednesday MSNBC appearance. “I had a lot of conversations with my Republican colleagues last night, and a couple of them broke down in tears — saying that they are afraid for their lives if they vote for this impeachment.”
Tim Alberta, Politico’s chief political correspondent, found in his own reporting that “Crow was right.”
Hundreds of millions of firearms are housed in American garages, basements, and attics. Delusions and disinformation still flow through social media. For a long time, however, mainstream politics has been barricaded from violence not only by the moral resistance of decent people—but also by the pragmatic calculations of even cynical politicians that violence does not pay.
That pragmatic calculation has been weakening. In 2018, the present governor of Montana won a House race after he violently attacked a journalist for asking him an unwanted question. More and more politicians campaign with firearms at their side. The taboo on political violence, already weaker in the United States than in many peer democracies, is weakening further. Among other things, Trump’s impeachment trial offers an opportunity to reassert that taboo, to denormalize mayhem and murder as the route to power.
So it’s not only Trump who is on trial. It’s his methods—and all who aspire to adopt his methods as their own in the political contests ahead.
If the National Rifle Association weren’t so busy infighting and stealing from itself and all, it would be in a position to take note of the story out of the Scranton suburbs, where a maddening, incessant noise problem was solved by a gun.
Neighbors in adjoining houses – a single man in one house, a married couple in another – had been screaming across their lawns at one another for some time – insults, obscenities – until the ill will among them really escalated during a recent big snowstorm.
“The Goys were shoveling the snow from their parking spots, shoveling the snow across the road, and throwing the snow onto Spaides’ property,” [neighbors] said in their statement.
… Spaide asked the couple to stop, sparking a heated exchange of words. James Goy apparently threw a tool at Spaide that he had been using to clear snow from his car…. When James Goy approached Spaide with a raised fist, Spaide reportedly retreated into his house and fetched a gun…
[D]espite seeing Spaide with a gun, James and Lisa Goy continued shouting names at him from the middle of the street.
Wow. He must have really been angry. Popped them multiple times, then went inside and got another gun and did it all over again.
Then he killed himself, natch.
So– thank God he had a gun! I mean, guns! The neighbors had had it up to here with the shrieks and obscenities. Now, if you visit that street on the outskirts of Scranton, things are back to normal.
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Spaide’s second gun was an AR-15 – cuz nothing finishes off the neighbors – already maybe dead from his pistol? – like an AR-15. People who argue that civilians don’t need AR-15s have clearly never been there, in the thick of snow-removal battle, against unarmed neighbors.
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
