← Previous Post: | Next Post:

 

A sixteen year old girl, depressed and anxious almost to the point of catatonia…

… finds with ease the .40-caliber semiautomatic pistol her parents told her to use in case of an intruder. (The household has ten more weapons locked in a safe, but this one is in a bedroom, loaded.) She kills herself while her mother checks her email in an adjacent room.

Her mother says “she won’t live with guns in her home again.”

Remember 21 year old Tyler Hilinski. His college roommates had an AR-15 all ready for him.

Margaret Soltan, August 25, 2019 7:40PM
Posted in: guns

Trackback URL for this post:
https://www.margaretsoltan.com/wp-trackback.php?p=62010

4 Responses to “A sixteen year old girl, depressed and anxious almost to the point of catatonia…”

  1. theprofessor Says:

    It doesn’t really matter whether the gun is a .40 semi or an old, single-shot .22 derringer. A point-blank shot to the head is fatal most of the time, regardless of whether it comes from the media’s scary-gun-of-the-week or not.

    Inquiring minds would like to know whether Aurra was taking prescribed anti-anxiety or anti-depressant medicine.

  2. UD Says:

    tp: Yeah, I kept the gun type in just to lend the telling some detail. As to whether she was on meds – it sounds from the article as though she was not.

  3. theprofessor Says:

    I wonder whether in fact the reporter did not elide that rather important detail. Practically any student who exhibits anxiety or depression is sent to a pill-rolling Dr. Feelgood pronto.

  4. Margaret Soltan Says:

    tp: I suspect her benighted New Mexico school district hasn’t even gotten to the pills stage yet.

Comment on this Entry

UD REVIEWED

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

Archives

Categories