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.

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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.”

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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.

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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…”

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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.

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UD thanks Dirk.

Some stories write themselves.

Actually, what you’ve probably learned from reading UD all these years is that almost all stories write themselves, because human beings are limited creatures and the number of plots (conundrums) they can create for themselves is therefore also strictly limited.

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The profoundly pious get rich quick crook who finally gets picked up by the police and carted away to make room for the next profoundly etc. is such an old story.

Specifically, twas ever thus: Credulous grasping god-fearing dolts find a charismatic spiritual/financial advisor who writes best-sellers with titles like The Gospel of Good Success and Entrepreneurial Faith.

The particular guy in question today even has a degree from (wait for it) the Wharton School! (Feast your eyes on America’s Richest Source of Financial Criminals.) He allegedly sold

$3.4 million worth of pre-revolutionary Chinese bonds, which were in default, to the “vulnerable and elderly.”

Southern Methodist U., one of the most pious and dirtiest universities around, had the dude on their board of trustees until recently. They dodged a bullet on that one. Maybe they knew something before the feds did — though, in fairness, they could have told the world about it and maybe spared the vulnerable and elderly their full measure of exploitation.

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But anyway. Another high-toned man of god will be stepping up to the podium soon. It’s a never-ending story.

– has long assumed, correctly, that its ridiculous trustees will listen to the shit the athletics department tells them year after year about taking care of that pesky deficit. Crazed highly-paid coaches, some still working for the school, others suing the school; games in which no one takes any interest; student athletic fees through the roof; academic quality in the toilet; a deer in the headlights president and an empty-threat legislature – you know the drill. Trustees know the drill…

Cuz everything’s gonna be fine as soon as the athletics department not only kills the deficit, but starts making HUGE money. Hold onto your Stetson!

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But every now and then there’s a kind of … eruption on the part of one of the trustees. One of them suddenly flies over the cuckoo’s nest and lets out his anger at having been lied to and infantilized for years and years and years. It never seems to happen at our most craven sports factories – Auburn, Nebraska, Louisville – but it can certainly happen elsewhere. Because it’s very rare and beautiful and precious and fleeting, like one brief brilliant flash of a peacock’s tail, we take note of it here at University Diaries.

Rob Doughty, president of the UNM Board of Regents – which is responsible for signing off on years of consistently failing budgets from [the] university’s athletics department – says he feels he’s been lied to and won’t rubber stamp any future athletics budgets nor consider forgiving any of the department’s estimated $7.5 million deficit before seeing significant changes.

… “I want to know right now, in front of everybody, why are we [this much] in the hole when I was promised last year that we had a balanced budget?” Doughty intensely questioned.

… “I’m very upset today. I feel like this Board of Regents and the folks that were there, and especially me, were misled and were told things that weren’t true. And [athletics was] making false promises.

“And, I have to say, that in my time at this university in the last four years, as I sit here today, I think I’m as mad as I’ve ever been…. I think the projection line was done just to balance the budget…. [I] want to know what research was done, what analysis was done to really back the projected figures.”

Hey can’t put one over on Doubty Doughty. That projection line was done just to balance the budget!

I’m sorry, kiddies. Either all of these people are idiots, or this is the way they want things to be. It’s a way of life. You don’t get to break in, a century after the cargo cult has established itself, and say Maybe building a landing strip for magical gifts won’t make the magical gifts appear…

Back in the day, Southern Illinois University’s president Glenn Poshard was found to have plagiarized in sections of both his master’s and his PhD. He shed public tears, and the internal group of hacks assigned to exonerate him promptly did so. An SIU emerita professor summed it all up succinctly: I quote her in my headline.

Those wondering about the fate of Hobart and William Smith president Gregory Vincent can take heart. Tears will be shed, and we will be assured by an internal committee that innocent mistakes were made. There’s plenty of precedent for this. This is how it’s done.

… the Second Amendment.

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The opinion piece itself.

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This is a 97-year-old dude saying his final important stuff. Not “strategic,” everyone says. But they might be wrong. Roiling the waters is what this is called, and now that the rallies are over, we need to keep roiling them. This is today’s roil. Good.

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“[A] significant chunk of the Democratic electorate would be willing to support a much more restrictive gun-policy agenda than the party currently supports. The coming of age of the so-called ‘mass shooting generation’ may increase that divide.”

REMINGTON FILES FOR BANKRUPTCY

Well lookee all you big strong men
Sandy Hook sued your ass again
They got your guns in a terrible jam
Made you stop going bam bam bam
So pay off your debt and put down your gun
Gonna have a whole lotta fun

And it’s one, two, three,
What are we fighting for?
First goal your weaponry
Next goal insolvency

And it’s five, six, ‘leven
Now declaring bankruptcy
Well there ain’t no time to wonder why
Remy! your gun’s gonna die

Yeah come on Wall Street don’t be slow
AR-15 gonna lose you dough
Used to be plenty good money made
Selling Steve Paddock tools of his trade
Now instead of making loot
You got a helluva class action suit

And it’s one, two, three,
What are we fighting for?
First goal’s your weaponry
Next goal insolvency

And it’s five, six, ‘leven
Now declaring bankruptcy
Well there ain’t no time to wonder why
Remy! your gun’s gonna die

Shaking My Head, the man says. Shaking my head cuz one day before the big scrimmage a chunk of the team attacked police and property outside a bar last night. This program, the man says.

But it isn’t just the program, right? Texas Tech is a university; a university whose current national rank is #176 , down twenty points from a couple of years ago. A real trailer park of a place, with violent tailgaters, sadistic coaches, 1500 current lawsuits from dismissed sadistic coaches, a freshman who a few weeks ago got annoyed and took his handgun out and blew the head off of a campus security guy, and, well, there’s jest a ton of stuff like that about this great Lubbock institution. Ask me about Alberto Gonzales!

So … shaking your head? You live in the world’s biggest academic shithole. There’s not enough room in all that shit to move your head, let alone shake it.

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UD thanks JND.