January 31st, 2018
Nothing to see here! Nothing to see here!

Ya, so a nineteen year old Virginia Tech freshman was arrested for possession of an AR-15; he was also looking to buy 5,000 rounds of ammunition, and had already bought “a former police vehicle outfitted with special bumpers.” Plus he was “researching bulletproof vests.” But the university is fine with it, fine! No need to alert the campus. Let’s all calm down, people. The guy represents absolutely no threat. And it’s not as if VT has any particular cause to worry about this sort of thing…

January 8th, 2018
A Kinsley Gaffe…

brings down another one.

January 6th, 2018
Tailgating, American-Style!

Parking lots outside stadiums and other major event spaces represent prime hunting ground for gun-hungry thieves, who can weave through cars trying door handles until they find one that’s unlocked.

December 17th, 2017
A Truly Disarming Professor!

A 26-year-old woman reportedly pulled a loaded handgun from her pocket Tuesday when her Front Range Community College instructor confronted her about cheating on a test.

Fort Collins police said student Brittany Schoonover reportedly pulled the gun from her pocket and “racked the slide” — the process of moving a round into the chamber of a semi-automatic handgun manually — when her instructor confronted her outside a classroom, arrest records show.

… The instructor told police he feared for his life and the lives of other students, but he was able to disarm Schoonover and call for help, according to arrest documents. Other specific information about how the instructor disarmed her was not available Wednesday.

Mandatory faculty workshops in how to disarm students threatening you with semi-automatic handguns are on their way. Training will also feature helpful hints, such as: Never walk away from a student until she gives you permission to do so.

[The student] brandished the handgun when her instructor began walking away – to prevent him from leaving.

December 11th, 2017
NOBODY’S universities do guns like the universities of Texas!

It’s an academic bloodbath down there. If you’re looking for the heavy-hitters, look no further than Texas Tech, where a wee freshman of nineteen years just blew a campus cop away – shot the guy to death in cold blood, holding the gun inches from his face.

This is one of the few guns-on-Texas-campuses stories that rose to national attention. The threats, the gun play, the fraternity weaponry — these are so routine as to pass unnoticed.

If you really want to get noticed – a student with a gun on a campus in Texas – you have to have a very big gun, you have to be on the football or basketball team, you have to threaten to kill multiple people, you have to have drugs on you, you have to be part of a conspiracy, you have to flee the police, you have to ditch the gun… You have to do a lot of shit to be worth paying attention to if you’re a college student with your gun out at a Texas university.

So props to Zaycoven Henderson, one of our Sacred Aggies, for accomplishing all of that, and getting all the press attention he and his gun-mad school so richly deserve.

Just a few hours earlier, Henderson was honored at the A&M team football banquet.

You don’t want the recent history of A&M. Trust me. You don’t want the background on A&M.

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

You know, when a few Texas professors, disgusted by the state-wide gun-love, resign or take jobs in safer states, they’re called pussies or whatever. But in Texas, the shits really are trying to kill us. And they’ve got amazing, amazing, guns. And they’re our students.

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

Here’s Zaycoven’s hagiographic page at Texas A&M. In the first photograph, he’s doing the classic WHERE’S MY RIFLE? TOSS IT DOWN TO ME. play.

Take the page down?

Nah.

It’s Texas A&M.

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

Have to go to the local paper for local responses. From a comment thread. Parenthetical remarks from UD:

rippy Dec 11, 2017 5:33am
Welcome to Aggieland Jimbo!

[That’s the new greedy coach they just hired for a zillion dollars.]

pragmatist Dec 11, 2017 5:51am
It is a big challenge to operate a successful program when you depend on young folks who have grown up with little or no guidance in terms of right vs wrong. Don’t know this guy’s history, but it is a safe bet his only male leadership came from football coaches. Coaches, at their best, can do very little to point an 8th grader in the right direction and once the kid gets off course, it is hard to self-correct. It takes a real Dad and a real Mom.

Tragic and far too common but there is no room for this guy at A&M.

[Sad little “pragmatist” hasn’t bothered to check that Zaycoven comes equipped with a father and a mother. And pragmatically speaking, I wonder why Aggie coaches recruit people like Zaycoven. The commenter fails to speculate about why many … questionable people end up on his football team. Do they show up and push themselves forward? Or are they feverishly sought?

“No room for this guy at A&M.” UD always finds this a touchingly delusional sentiment. Our pure school – where Johnny Manziel was so recently God – shudders and passes on morally impure people like Zaycoven.]

Dec 11, 2017 7:00am
Would you look at that. I’ll be willing to bet this kid was recruited solely for his athletic ability and not his character. Another legacy of Sumlin …that goes with the washed up Heisman winner [Manziel] and a new field. Neither of which spells National Champion.

[Implicitly, this commenter expresses the pathetic faith-in-the-new-coach thing. Bad old coach (Sumlin) did this; he was responsible for the now-embarrassing Manziel too. But new god Jimbo will make everything beautiful again.]

November 14th, 2017
“The crazy thing is that the neighbor has been shooting a lot of bullets lately, hundreds of rounds, large magazines,” [Brian] Flint said. “We made [town officials] aware that this guy is crazy and he’s been threatening us.” Living near the gunman was “hell,” Flint said, and the man was a known felon who often harassed him and his neighbors.’

Well but this is America, and if all you’ve been doing is shooting off bullets left and right in preparation for your mass killing, be our guest.

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

Cristal Caravez, who lives across a ravine from the road where [the killer] and his first victims lived, said she and others heard constant gunfire but couldn’t say for sure it was him firing.

“You could hear the yelling. He’d go off the hinges,” she said. The shooting “would be during the day, during the night, I mean, it didn’t matter.”

She and her father, who is president of the homeowners association, said neighbors would complain to the sheriff’s department, which referred the complaints back to the homeowners association.

“The sheriff wouldn’t do anything about it,” Juan Caravez said.

What kind of a neighborhood is this? A mentally ill person in and out of jail for assault who constantly shoots off his guns – and no one does anything?

November 8th, 2017
Roadgunner Shuttle Service

When everybody’s got a gun
Every day is lots of fun!

November 5th, 2017
Only about fifty people worship there, and he killed around thirty.

So that’s a pretty amazing percentage, even by US massacre standards.

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

“[T]oo many moments of silences.”

In a time of insanity and disgrace, this is what principle looks like.

October 22nd, 2017
If you’re starting to miss all the Stephen Paddock excitement…

… keep your eye on the University of North Florida! So far this semester two little tykes – one nineteen, and one just a wisp of an eighteen year old – have been blasting their guns around campus in that… you know… kinda random? kinda pissed off? way that promises some real action! And here’s the best news of all: One of the shooters had a gun safe in his dorm room! Already working on an arsenal, right there on campus.

Some would argue that Texas Tech is the place to watch, what with their tyke actually killing someone with his weapon – a campus policeman, so I guess not all that random – but they overlook the fact that UNF has in one semester produced two shooters, one of them with (let’s say it again) a gun safe in his dorm room.

Massacre-wise, UD‘s putting her money on UNF.

October 15th, 2017
‘Well #VSU homecoming was lit until somebody got shot smh’

This tweeter expresses surprise (smh: shake my head) that one of America’s most violent campuses – Virginia State University – features violence. It was homecoming; there was a hiphop concert; the evening featured gunfire, injury, and a bunch of fights.

October 14th, 2017
A little counterpoint, if I may, between the editorial staff of the Texas Tech newspaper…

… and a Lubbock insurance blogger.

[TT]:

With the Las Vegas shooting happening so far away from here, it’s easy to separate ourselves from the idea that [a nineteen year old Texas Tech freshman – Hollis Daniels – could be a cold-blooded murderer].

[IB]:

The FBI recently released 2016 data for crime in the United States. Lubbock was ranked as the 2nd most dangerous city in Texas with 825.4 violent crimes reported per 100,000 residents.

[TT]:

It feels like our little West Texas world has been darkened by the threat of a shooting.

[IB]:

[T]he violent crime rate in Lubbock is 88% higher than the average across Texas.

[TT]:

[A]s Red Raiders, we are closer than ever and will continue to support each other.

That’s the spirit of Tech and everyone associated with this university, and that will never fade away.

[UD]:

Everyone?

October 12th, 2017
Thanks, Mom! Thanks, Dad!

There are a couple of things you need to know if you’re going to survive a culture where huge numbers of people – some as young as nineteen, a rather volatile age – carry and, at the drop of a hat, shoot, guns.

1. If you are loving parents who worry that your drug-addled, illegal-gun-toting nineteen year old is becoming suicidal, do not call the university he attends and ask for a welfare check. Things could get dicey, and he could pull out his gun and shoot off the head of one of the people checking on him. Then you get to spend the rest of your life and all the money you have trying to keep your pothead kid from graduating to the harder stuff (“An anesthetic such as sodium thiopental or pentobarbital is used to induce unconsciousness, pancuronium bromide [Pavulon] to cause muscle paralysis and respiratory arrest, and potassium chloride to stop the heart.”) In order to avoid this outcome, call the local SWAT team, not the campus cops. SWAT teams are better at approaching babies with berettas.

2. This is directed to university staff: As the Scientologists put it, Go Clear. Shake your head of cobwebs and understand with piercing precision where you are and what’s going on. Situational Awareness is another way of putting this.

Let’s start with where you are. You are in the state of Texas, where people start sucking glock about the same time they start sucking teat. Guns are in the DNA. They are in the bloodstream. Concepts like “minimum age,” “legal,” and “illegal” are quaint nothings. For your own protection, assume that everyone, as soon as they can walk on their own, carries. Under no circumstances assume that the skinny, well-dressed, tow-headed little freshman from a prominent family in Seguin who is standing just to your right while you type up his report does not carry.

Unless you want to die, you will have to adopt a new attitude toward college freshmen at NRA Blue Ribbon schools like Texas Tech. You will have to deal with them as the cold-blooded killers that some of them are. Protecting yourself against the freshman class of Texas Tech University is a matter of life and death. That’s the new reality of legal and illegal, infant, baby, toddler, pre-teen, and teen (“Snap, Crackle, Pop Pop Pop Pop Pop Pop Pop Pop!!”), campus carry.

And a word to Texas Tech professors: …. : ….

Ah, forget it.

October 11th, 2017
‘A student at Texas Tech who claimed to be Daniels’ lab partner in Astronomy class said he seemed “absolutely normal.”‘

Sure.

I mean … I guess by Texas gunny standards
a nineteen year old university freshman who
– left alone with a random policeman –
takes out his weapon and shoots the man’s
head off — and before running away
coldly removes the body cam from the
corpse he just created — is absolutely
normal.

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

He really told that guy, huh?

Don’t mess with Texas.

October 10th, 2017
Can’t Wait to Do it Again!

Member of the freshman class,
Texas Tech. Smiling cop-killer.

Don’t mess with our young ‘uns!

They’ve got guns and some of them will
blow your head off and lock down the campus.

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

Time to dust off Amazing Grace one more time.

That song is getting a real workout.

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

And it’s true what they say! More guns really do make us safer!

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

Cut the little one some slack.

According to the warrant, [the shooter] told … officers that “he was the one that shot their friend.” He also told officers he “f***** up” and he “did something illogical.”

Texas Tech does offer logic, but the wee lad with the gun hadn’t had a chance to take it yet. Maybe next semester.

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

Great timing, by the way. Yesterday, Texas Tech’s president gave a big ol’ speech on how great the school’s doing, but it can do even better! Today one of its new admits kills a campus policeman in cold blood. Talk about stealing someone’s thunder.

October 9th, 2017
A Texas Tech policeman pisses off a 19-year-old freshman who was found to have drugs in his room.

So the kid whips out his gun and blows the policeman’s head off.

Guns Up!

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

UD thanks Charlie.

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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.
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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.
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It’s [UD's] intellectual honesty that makes her blog required reading.
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There's always something delightful and thought intriguing to be found at Margaret Soltan's no-holds-barred, firebrand tinged blog about university life.
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Margaret Soltan at University Diaries blogs superbly and tirelessly about [university sports] corruption.
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