University Diaries » ‘At the second Mental Health Summit in Casper, [Senate President Ogden] Driskill bemoaned that [Wyoming] legislators created a Suicide Prevention Trust Fund but didn’t put any money in it. Wyoming has the nation’s highest suicide rate per capita… But Driskill balked at any solution that includes gun control. He admitted the number of suicides might drop if there were fewer guns, but insisted people who want to kill themselves will use other methods, like car wrecks. “Because the root of suicide isn’t the gun, that’s the tool they use,” he maintained. It’s not the gun? Come on. That argument ignores the fact that 86% of all gun deaths are suicides in Wyoming, while 10% are homicides… [And keep in mind that] nine out of 10 people who survive a suicide attempt don’t try to kill themselves later. Because firearms are so lethal, though, [nine in 10 don’t survive the firearm attempt].’

Give Wyomingites guns and they’ll kill themselves. Give them cars and …

Hell, why don’t your basic rodeo boy just kill himself by smashing his Chevy Suicido into a lightpole?

I’ll tell you why. First and most important when you use a Glock that ol gun will survive pulping your head fully intact, to be handed down to your suicidal son and his suicidal son ad infinifuckinitum. OTOH you’re definitely gonna total the truck. The truck’s goin down with you.

Secundum: It takes a whole lotta planning and a whole lotta luck to stage a successful trucko-da-fe. Maybe you’ll just go the paraplegic route. Maybe you’ll kill other people. The whole thing’s a big ol mess. At-home pulping, especially if you do it in the bathtub or shower, is neat and sweet and one hundred percent effective. State park pulping, a popular option among Wyoming’s rugged outdoorsmen, is even neater, and leaves you, as you expire, not with views of yourself careening agonizingly into a hard surface, but of calm majestic Tetons.

Thirdly: The whole public/private thing. The wreck’s gonna traumatize onlookers; and because it’s a news story it’ll make the local tv shows. Some guy popping his top at home is no news at all in Wyoming. Furthermore, beyond the extra expense your family will bear making you coffin-ready with your whole body pulverized vs. with just a little hole in your head, there’s the whole embarrassment on top of grief thing as the kinfolk deal with the community curiosity whipped up by the newspaper pix of your twisted truck/body.

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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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It’s [UD's] intellectual honesty that makes her blog required reading.
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There's always something delightful and thought intriguing to be found at Margaret Soltan's no-holds-barred, firebrand tinged blog about university life.
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Margaret Soltan at University Diaries blogs superbly and tirelessly about [university sports] corruption.
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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.
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