This is SO unfair.
He still has two kids left over whose suicides he can assist.
It’s America’s newest pastime — when you run out of room at home for your 500th stockpiled weapon, start storing in your kid’s backpack.
Yet another state enacts a death with dignity law. That makes eight.
Getting there.
[Sun has] always been interested in building a law enforcement career and [has] already enrolled in a US university to study criminal justice, starting from August this year.
Let’s hope it’s a school that shares his passion for mass killing.
An astute evocation of university life as the utter death of independent thought.
Here at University Diaries, we’re following one of many stories involving teeny weeny middle school and high school students accumulating massive arsenals and tipping off school buddies that they plan to massacre everyone in the place. The buddies then tip off the principal, who tips off the police, who visit the babe’s home and find … you know … standard boy stuff…
In a sea of teenagers stockpiling weaponry with which to kill everyone at their school, this guy stands out for the sheer depth and range of his armory, apparently maintained with the happy collusion (encouragement?) of his parents in Taiwan and his host mother here. (His host mother, knowing the police were on their way, took the kid’s weaponry out of the house and gave it to a friend so she could lie and say the kid didn’t have weaponry. The police eventually found it anyway.)
All the major networks are featuring the kid and his famous parents (they’re actors in Taiwan), and Homeland Security is on the scene, reading all of his electronic devices. But hey. His parents have issued a request that we all respect their privacy as they go through the process of watching the American justice system put their kid away for years, onaccounta making terroristic threats and holding – hiding – mucho illegal weaponry is for some reason lately around here a very big deal.
Here’s why we should all stop talking about this: The folks have explained that it was all a linguistic misunderstanding – their kid said something, I guess, to his friend, but due to the language barrier an unfortunate misunderstanding ensued. Even if, haha, he did say something about killing everyone in his school, he was just kidding. Not only that, but all the personal armor in the kid’s stash was bought exclusively for Halloween. So keep your trap shut.
UD‘s beloved DeLillo stars in the New Yorker’s account of the YouTube killings.
There will be a temptation to read the attack as a dark parable of the attention economy — the story of someone so hungry for views that she took a handgun to those who, in her belief, had limited them. But the truer story is that going berserk with guns has become a way of American life.
Correct. Guns are now the way America’s berserk turn down the bed and turn out the lights.
[E]very country contains mentally ill and potentially violent people. Only America arms them.
… playbook, the host mother of a fully-weaponized 18-year-old exchange student decided – on hearing that the police wanted to visit the arsenal he’d build up in her house – to gather up his guns and ammo and give them to a friend – for safekeeping, I guess. Keep it all safe until the visit from the authorities – triggered by a wee threat the exchange student made to slaughter everyone in his school – was over. Begone, 9 MM Glock and the 1600 rounds of ammunition! (The ammo was not merely for the Glock, but for an AK-47, an AR-15, and a shotgun).
UD is starting to enjoy recurrent features of the infinitely recurrent crazed-baby-with-an-arsenal story. Her favorite thing of all is the standard response of legal counsel to the wittle one’s situation.
Every one of them finds herself in the position of issuing public assurances that unstable children who make threats and accumulate
a military-style ballistic vest, crossbow with scope and light, 20 rounds of 9mm ammunition, military ski mask, ammunition clip loader, a strangulation apparatus known as a garrote, and other equipment
— plus a Glock and ammo not merely for the Glock but for the AK-47 he was in the process of assembling for himself, plus a shotgun — are sweet tow-headed exemplary lads trying to get a head start on their life-saving careers as policemen.
[This is] an affable, precocious student with no discipline or antisocial tendencies. The young man’s parents have flown in from Taiwan and fully support their child. Our investigation reveals that there was no intention to terrorize or otherwise commit any criminal act. The family is concerned by the rising level of rhetoric that is being transmitted to the news media and hopes that the public will keep an open mind as all the facts and circumstances are brought forward.” [The threat-issuer is simply] interested in a law-enforcement career and [is] planning to major in criminal justice at a university, [says his former attorney].
Back off, baby! Terroristic threats and extensive personal arsenals, collected at age 17, demonstrate affability and prosocial tendencies.
And how about this: His parents love him! And look out cuz they don’t like your rhetoric and there’s no telling what people in this family will do when they’re pissed off.
Plus good going undermining his intellectual development as he scopes out a new home for his arsenal: a dormitory.
*****************
A boy and his toys. Awwwwwww.
… when this hero of a school that features the word Christian in its name beat the shit out of a bunch of people at a bar. No one cared, because he runs real fast, and he went on to be drafted by an NFL team.
And of course his Texas Christian University hero page remains proudly up online cuz you know he’s so great y’all and we’re so proud to be associated with him, especially now with his beat-up girlfriend giving interviews about how much she bled in his latest attack on her.
Yeah okay so it’s all too much for the NFL team and he’s been dropped. But you won’t find TCU taking down his hero page! A player who can really draw blood doesn’t come along every day.
Taking off from Patek Philippe’s iconic slogan, University Diaries continues its special series on fathers, and sons, and guns.
Violent, mentally disturbed daddy had his gun taken away from him – twice – but this is America, and after awhile they gave it back! So I guess to celebrate he “returned home from work [last year] and went to bed, leaving his duty Glock 19 [He’s a parole officer! I ain’t making this up.] loaded and unsecured on a living room desk.”
*************
Now we all know how easy and popular it is, when you kinda feel blue, to grab the domestic firearm that’s just sitting there on the living room desk, the Glock that’s murmuring to you how quickly and painlessly it’ll make your blues go away… We all know that tons of our fellow citizens, every single day, pick up America’s most abundant and convenient home appliance and have at their cortex with it. Little 18 year old William Han Manstrom-Greening is – was – one of those fellow Americans, and he has his father to thank for his early exit.
But now dad’s un p’tit peu up shit’s creek, as is the parole office which figured rearming a guy who repeatedly “harassed and threatened violence against co-workers and his wife,” and who also had a “history of mental health diagnoses, including severe depression and bipolar disorder,” made sense. Cuz they’re both being sued by the kid’s estate for wrongful death.
One final detail: “After the 18-year-old’s death, the county took no disciplinary action against” the father, which UD assumes means, among other things, that he’s still packing and still leaving his loaded Glock lying around the house. Wonder if he has any other kids.
**********************
Why did Greening – does Greening – keep getting guns? Because this is a man’s world. And that is what Isabelle Robinson has had to learn.
A year after I was assaulted by Mr. Cruz, I was assigned to tutor him through my school’s peer counseling program. Being a peer counselor was the first real responsibility I had ever had, my first glimpse of adulthood, and I took it very seriously.
Despite my discomfort, I sat down with him, alone. I was forced to endure his cursing me out and ogling my chest until the hourlong session ended. When I was done, I felt a surge of pride for having organized his binder and helped him with his homework.
Looking back, I am horrified. I now understand that I was left, unassisted, with a student who had a known history of rage and brutality.
Why was that? Why was Cruz still in Robinson’s high school at that late date, and why was that high school leaving her alone with him?
My little sister is now the age that I was when I was left alone with Mr. Cruz, anxious and defenseless. The thought of her being put in the same situation that I was fills me with rage.
Her WHAT… ME? face grins out from her mug shot.
Teacher’s aide Gillian Jeffords is clearly attempting to understand why her clever idea of bringing a loaded 9 mm Ruger to a classroom full of developmentally disabled children, and placing it, accessible to everyone, in her open purse, has upset people. Has gotten her fired. Has moved the “Board of Cooperative Educational Services [to take out] a restraining order against [her], barring her from contact with students, their families and staff and being on board property. She is also prohibited from [all] Clarkstown school district facilities…”
*****************
I mean, hellooo people are we not overreacting? I brought the gun because
1.) guns have been shown to be very therapeutic for many people; and
2.) if any of my charges misbehave, I can kill them.
… coverage and keep your job.
UD predicts Howard University’s president will soon resign.
“We want to show solidarity and support for their demands and everything they are standing for,” said Eva Raczkowski, a George Washington University student, who came out with a group of others to donate food, water, and blankets.
La lutte continue…
Now this is impressive. This UD must share with you; and in addition UD must bow to the Greek people.
To be so supremely gangrenous, so suppuratingly pus-ridden, as to face expulsion from arguably the world’s most infected body (FIFA!!); to be so persistently, so top-to-bottom violent — from gun-wielding team owners who rush the pitch and threaten referees, to alcoholic fascists in the stands who beat the shit out of everyone — is truly to have accomplished something grand.
But of course the expulsion will never happen. Did Hitler expel Goering from the party because he was too anti-semitic? In world football, you can’t be too corrupt or too violent.
… and today’s student sit-in at cash-machine-for-administrators Howard University shouts it out: At some point, a university becomes so squalid that its students have no choice but to take over running it from the knaves on the board of trustees. Just as seventeen year olds have to change America’s gun laws, nineteen year olds have to run Howard University.
Maya McCollum, a 19-year-old freshman who helped organize the sit-in, said on Friday that the news of [massively] misappropriated financial aid money was “the straw that broke the camel’s back.”
It’s all about the culture of the school, and making sure student culture matches administrative culture. Here, there’s a terrible mismatch. The Howard student culture has long been thoughtful, subversive, principled; the administrative culture has long been what’s in it for me. And so you generate the sort of conflict we see right now.
A shining example of a complete match between students and administration is self-righteous, rapeaholic, Baylor University. Baylor just gave a gift of fifteen million dollars to the football coach who oversaw, for years, large-scale rape on the school’s football team, and who recently filed a massive libel lawsuit against the school (he eventually dropped it – I guess when he got wind of the fact that Baylor was going to give him fifteen million dollars…). Do you hear a peep out of anyone – students, faculty – about their money having gone to someone who initiated a multimillion dollar lawsuit against their school? Who looked the other way (or worse) while his players raped and raped and raped?
Baylor still faces multiple expensive lawsuits from victims of its football players… I mean, think of all the university funds it’s losing in this long disgraceful spectacle. But do you see any student protest? Even a mild letter to the editor of the school newspaper? NO. Baylor’s full of good Christian rape-apologists. One for all and all for one.
*************
UD thanks Dirk.
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