… University Bloomington. Odd hour and day for a sighting, a lockdown. Five, six, on a Sunday morning.

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Students fighting; one had a knife and used it. Non-lethally.

It’s never too soon to start learning. If tradition means anything to you.

Legendary tradition.

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Duke pays Coach K, the genius who thought this photo-op up, ten million dollars a year. By some standards, he’s the highest paid college coach in America.

Expect him to earn twelve or thirteen million next year.

… (see background here), we are going to need armories and we are going to need shooting ranges, by way of preparing campus police for crowd control.

Crowd control, in the current context of big-time university sports (start at 1:56), increasingly means keeping people inside the stadium or arena until the game is over.

One way to do this would be to use your tanks and guns to intimidate people into staying. Occasionally, you might have to fire (non-lethal) materials.

Ideally, these armories/shooting ranges would themselves be arenas and stadiums, so that university security personnel could get a realistic sense of crowd, uh, containment.

One central location UD proposes for a national armory of this sort would be Cleveland State University’s Wolstein Center. Like many excitedly built university stadiums (CSU was excited because one of its teams did well one year, and the trustees decided that before you knew it CSU would be king of the world, so they needed a new stadium), this one is an empty, money hemorrhaging mess.

After getting the latest year-end financial report, which again showed a $1 million loss, [CSU] trustees today said the university has to examine all options, even those as improbable as demolishing it.

But whoa! How about renting it out to universities all over the country (world?) for practice? With Berkeley having recently rejected an eight-ton armored truck as “not the best choice for a university setting,” we can anticipate industry offering a line of university-appropriate heavy weaponry – tanks in soft shades, with quotations from Virginia Woolf on them… Some of these could be gathered at Wolstein for use by any university interested in learning how to keep students in their seats.

CSU’s big competition is Florida Atlantic University. FAU is not only located in Florida rather than Ohio, but has a much bigger empty stadium (30,000 vs. 13,000 seats). CSU will have to act fast to secure market share.

OSU can see the trend as well as anyone else. When you’ve given everything your university has to football, it’s pretty important that people go to the games.

But people aren’t going to the games.

Which makes you, a university, a school, really, rather than a playing field, look pretty fucking stupid.

What to do?

Current stop-gap measures are incentive-based (see post below): Give students who stay in the stands two thousand dollars. If students promise to stay at least until halftime give them free drinks, free burgers, a stuffed toy, Legos.

But people tend to resent, after awhile, being infantilized. They tend to catch on to what’s happening.

This is where the Ambush vehicle comes in. The moment students start pouring out of a stupid pointless game, just roll that baby to the middle of the field and slowly, slowly, ever so slowly, revolve her turret… Give fans a good view of the big guy (one of the players?) up there on her “roof-mounted shielded traversing gun turret able to fit a 7.62 mm medium or 12.7mm heavy class machine gun.” They’ll get the message without your having to fire one shot!

Wussy little Berkeley ain’t biting yet.

Last year, when University of California-Berkeley campus police tried to buy an 8-ton armored truck, university officials canceled the order, saying such a vehicle was “not the best choice for a university setting.”

But give it time. You know how guys are when it comes to having the best toys.

AR-15’s at the Farmer’s Market.

… USA!!

… Second Amendment rights.

… overlooked.  Brain injury, drunk driving, gun-play — the sorts of activities significant numbers of high-profile-sports student athletes engage in — these things get less attention than bogus courses and friends with impermissible benefits, etc.

UD isn’t sure why, given the obviously greater drama of that first list… Maybe it’s because some of that stuff hasn’t happened yet, as it were (eventually some players will probably die of football-inflicted brain injuries…), and while the other stuff (drunk driving, gun-play) does happen here and now  it usually  doesn’t end up actually killing anyone.   Plus millions of Americans play with their guns and get drunk and get into fights and all.  Big deal.

The other stuff, the academic stuff, can have all sorts of NCAA implications, which can hurt team performance, etc.  It can hurt eligibility.

Thus Luke DeCock, a Kansas City  Star writer, notes how bizarre it is that the latest fuckup on a University of North Carolina sports team is in trouble for hanging out with a professional agent and possibly taking gifts from him and all, but no one seems to care that a gun was found just outside the car he was driving when he was recently arrested.

Drive around with a 9 mm handgun and nine rounds of ammunition … and you’re asking for real trouble. That was also found outside Hairston’s car, and while the police said Wednesday they don’t anticipate any additional charges against Hairston, there’s still no explanation for the gun. That’s the really worrying thing about this entire episode.

NCAA violations very rarely put lives at risk. Guns kill.

There have been 14 homicides in Durham in 2013 already. It’s an unchecked epidemic of violence, too much of it taking place in the same neighborhood where Hairston and his friends were arrested.

As DeCock writes:

Not to be deliberately obtuse, but while rental cars and parking tickets have added a whiff of conspiracy to P.J. Hairston’s troubles, isn’t the bigger issue that a gun was found outside the car the North Carolina basketball star was driving when he was arrested?

 

Apparently it’s being obtuse to believe that the weaponry student athletes are carting around is more disturbing than the mysterious Yukon SUVs they’re driving. I mean, unavoidable bottom line here seems to be that we don’t much care whether they kill themselves or even us; we care that their team remains eligible.

I think this is how you get to Aaron Hernandez.

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).

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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.

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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.