It’s so cute to see the weapons our kids choose for their early college years. As Carlton’s social confidence at Arkansas State University grows, UD looks forward to following his progress from the AK-47 to the M16 and then maybe the Vz58.

[A William and Mary adjunct professor] reportedly flaunted a gun in front of his [twelve year old] son and 10 of his son’s friends. [He apparently] got annoyed with the noise the boys were making, went in the room where the boys were and pulled out a gun.

Scathing Online Schoolmarm hopes not. Whatever they are pouring over the cache is likely to degrade the value of their evidence against a guy who “[f]or close to 30 years, he has been a community safety officer supervisor at UC Santa Cruz.”

SOS thinks the Santa Cruz police department means pore.

The culture clash in this story about a man who has apparently been stashing an arsenal of guns and ammo in the walls of his mobile home as he prepares for some massive theft is noteworthy. For thirty years Mr Assault Rifle has been hiding out among the peace-loving hippies of UC Santa Cruz. Good cover.

… to an American problem.

Symbolically, a spate of horrible crimes at and around UC Santa Cruz is indeed disturbing. East coasters tend to idealize – and to some extent satirize – that laid-back, foresty, beachy campus, home of the Grateful Dead archive. But recent assaults on students, and – most recently and horribly – the murder of two police officers, has changed that.

In looking for reasons, UD finds evidence of drug markets (some seem to have been shut down).

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

The reported on-campus rape was a hoax. The woman made it up and may be prosecuted.

Yet another arsenal hauled onto an American university campus. Last one of these we looked at was courtesy of an eighteen year old woman who drove to Elon College to I guess uh talk – with a little backup – to her boyfriend. Now here’s a guy at North Carolina State – he works in the vet school – who’s got all kinds of shit, some of it loaded, on campus. Let’s see…

Authorities said O’Connell, a necropsy medical support technician at the College of Veterinary Medicine, consented to the police search Friday of his employee locker, where police found an unloaded Colt Delta Elite 10mm handgun and a loaded Taurus .357 Magnum revolver.

A subsequent search of a locked cabinet in O’Connell’s office turned up two axes and a dagger, and police searching his truck found a new Colt AR-15 rifle that was still in the box.

Poor baby is going through a divorce. Y’all understand.

The next time an American gun enthusiast tells you there’s no correlation between gun ownership and suicide (and many of them will tell you this), you could mention that the Israeli army disagrees.

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

This column goes one better on the subject.

But let’s suppose science could establish that people who obtain firearms do indeed increase their death rate (or the death rate of their family members) from suicide. So what?

Buying a car may shorten your lifespan, since traffic accidents are a major killer. Building a backyard swimming pool creates a potential fatal hazard to you and your loved ones. But nobody says the government should interfere with such decisions.

Personal safety is a far more central matter of individual autonomy than those choices. A mentally stable person living in a crime-ridden neighborhood should be free to judge whether she’s more at risk from street criminals than from a spell of intense depression.

One imagines survivalist Nancy Lanza reading that last line and feeling relieved.

In April of 2010, journalism student George Hines organized a protest [against the no-guns-on-campus policy at the] University of Alaska campus in Anchorage. He argued that the Board of Regents’ policy violated his second amendment right. When discussions between the Board and Hines broke down, he and 20 other students gathered on the Anchorage campus, weapons in hand.

Y’all go ahead with your AR-15 assault rifle raffle! I swear it’s just the cutest thing!

Our cars.

Our entertainment.

Our home security systems.

America!

A 6th grade student brought an unloaded handgun to West Kearns Elementary School [in Utah] Monday.

The 11-year-old boy allegedly told other students his parents encouraged him to bring a gun to school for protection following the shootings at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut on Friday.

The boy reportedly pulled the gun, a .22-caliber pistol, out of his backpack during recess Monday morning.

“At recess, he pointed a gun to my head and said he was going to kill me,” said Isabel Rios, one of the boy’s fellow 6th grade students.

Folk rhyme, 1912.

Lizzie Borden took an axe
And gave her mother forty whacks.
When she saw what she had done
She gave her father forty-one.

Folk rhyme, 2012.

Nancy Lanza took a Glock
And gave a target forty pocks.
When she saw what she had done
She gave the Glock unto her son.

Since the start of 2012, there have been at least fifty shootings in a Walmart store or parking lot…

They’ve just bought them and they can’t wait to use them.

[E]ven though most of us are not conscienceless psychopaths, when we make investing decisions we often act as if we are. This observation casts an interesting light on Joel Bakan’s award-winning 2004 documentary “The Corporation.” In that film, Bakan argued that because corporate managers believe they must maximize shareholder wealth, a corporation is a “psychopathic creature” that “can neither recognize nor act upon moral reasons to refrain from harming others.” To the extent this is true, shareholders themselves may be largely to blame. As University of Toronto law professor Ian Lee puts it, “if corporations are in fact ‘pathological’ profit-maximizers, it is not because of corporate law, but because of pressure from shareholders.”

The makers of Bushmaster guns – the gun of choice for today’s compleat carnage connoisseur – are as we speak suffering a sudden de-psychopathologization among American investors.

No worries, though. They’ll take the business to overseas investors.

… that appeared in Inside Higher Education.