I’m going to assume this woman – she’s only eighteen – has a psychiatric history. She seems to have taken breaking up with her boyfriend hard, since she loaded up her car with lots of weaponry and went to Elon, where he’s a student. Her parents notified the boyfriend, he notified Elon, they notified the police, and she was arrested as soon as they spotted her on campus.
How, though, does an unstable eighteen-year-old manage to load up on all those armaments?
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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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November 26th, 2012 at 9:33AM
How, though, does an unstable eighteen-year-old manage to load up on all those armaments?
Welcome to America, UD.
November 26th, 2012 at 10:39AM
She goes to a gun show. Easy peasy.
November 26th, 2012 at 11:43AM
wouldn’t be so sure that these kinds of incidents are in and of themselves signs of psychiatric illness, all too common to have domestic-ish violence to include firearms.
November 26th, 2012 at 4:55PM
Unless I missed something, the linked article says she “had a rifle, ammunition and other weapons in her car.” Since “other weapons” could include kitchen knives or mace or a baseball bat or whatever, this hardly sounds like someone “loaded up on armaments”.
One is also free to leave America, UD. Unlike, e.g., Cuba, or North Korea. Gee, I wonder if things like freedom and guns are related in some way?
November 26th, 2012 at 5:06PM
Shane: Check out my ten-part series on guns at Inside Higher Ed for my take on guns in America.
http://www.insidehighered.com/blogs/university_diaries/professor_meets_gun
November 26th, 2012 at 5:49PM
I wonder if things like freedom and guns are related in some way?
Not in any clear way, if international gun ownership per capita is anything to go by.
Top ten gun ownership rates:
United States
Serbia
Yemen
Switzerland
Cyprus
Saudi Arabia
Iraq
Finland
Uruguay
Sweden
If you think you can parse some clear moral conclusion out of that list, go for it.
November 26th, 2012 at 8:55PM
What? People in war-torn countries might want guns? No!
Switzerland, eh? Wonder what’s that about…http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gun_politics_in_Switzerland. Unconquered since the Romans.
But at least you’re not reverting to the Bellesilles fantasy. I suppose that’s progress for historians.
November 26th, 2012 at 9:37PM
Unconquered since the Romans.
Napoleon would have begged to differ.
Sounds as though guns = freedom falls into the category of the overwhelming exception fallacy.
November 27th, 2012 at 9:08AM
Ah, the Helvetic Republic. So effective Napoleon gave them back their sovereignty within five years (as soon as the occupying French troops were needed elsewhere).
But you’re the historian, Alan. Tell us how freedom has nothing to do the application of force. Or is freedom not worth talking about since it is just a construct of our collective false consciousness?
November 27th, 2012 at 9:43AM
Dude, if you think I’m a Marxist, you really need to get out more.
November 27th, 2012 at 1:14PM
It’s not clear whether this young woman obtained the guns on her own (through the above-mentioned loophole that lets individuals buy guns at gun shows w/o the otherwise-required paperwork) or whether she just took them from her parents’ house. I will point out that no responsible gun owner leaves firearms lying around the house; they are kept in locked cabinets or are otherwise secure.
November 27th, 2012 at 3:50PM
BB, without more information, we could imagine what they found her with was a .22 squirrel rifle from underneath her kid brother’s bed. But in any event it’s clearly a threat to civilization.
November 27th, 2012 at 11:45PM
Well, at least *somebody* called the police. One could wish for a more direct route (possibly-dangerous armed adult child leaves house; parents call police; not easy, I know, but sometimes you’ve got to do what you’ve got to do), but it beats complete denial that anything bad was happening (and/or that a woman might be seriously dangerous).
January 9th, 2013 at 6:42AM
[…] 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 […]