University Diaries » ‘[T]he simple commercial problem facing firearms manufacturers has not changed: They make highly durable goods. Firearms can be passed down through generations. To meet growth targets, then, firearms manufacturers must figure out ways to scare or otherwise motivate people who already own firearms to buy more firearms.’

We all need to adjust to the idea that unfathomable levels of gun violence, including school shootings, are going to get worse, not better, in the decades to come. In the past month alone, my two sons had a baseball game canceled because of a shooting at the park where they were meant to play and, two weeks later, soccer practice cut short because a nearby gunman had opened fire on a school down the road. In that latter incident, no innocent lives were lost thanks only to the gunman’s inability to effectively use any of the three assault rifles—I’m sorry, “modern sporting rifles”—he had stockpiled in his apartment overlooking the school...

My wife, who grew up in the suburbs of New York without any firearms in her home, tells me that I am fighting a losing battle. She tells me it’s impossible to recapture a more responsible approach to firearms.

But we have to try. Because the firearms are just not going away. The shootings are not going to stop. Our children are going to be exposed to a level of everyday gun violence that children in literally no other developed nation experience.

Andrew Exum, The Atlantic

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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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Notes of a Neophyte

Matt McKeon Says:
June 2nd, 2022 at 8:09AM

It feels hopeless, but I am going to antigun demonstrations now, and maybe other people will be motivated to stop the insanity.

Margaret Soltan Says:
June 2nd, 2022 at 9:53AM

Matt: I too plan to go to the big DC anti-gun rally when we get back. Exum might be right, but gotta keep trying. Astonishing things happen all the time.

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