Just because it’s grading period all over America.

Since the start of 2012, there have been at least fifty shootings in a Walmart store or parking lot…

They’ve just bought them and they can’t wait to use them.

[E]ven though most of us are not conscienceless psychopaths, when we make investing decisions we often act as if we are. This observation casts an interesting light on Joel Bakan’s award-winning 2004 documentary “The Corporation.” In that film, Bakan argued that because corporate managers believe they must maximize shareholder wealth, a corporation is a “psychopathic creature” that “can neither recognize nor act upon moral reasons to refrain from harming others.” To the extent this is true, shareholders themselves may be largely to blame. As University of Toronto law professor Ian Lee puts it, “if corporations are in fact ‘pathological’ profit-maximizers, it is not because of corporate law, but because of pressure from shareholders.”

The makers of Bushmaster guns – the gun of choice for today’s compleat carnage connoisseur – are as we speak suffering a sudden de-psychopathologization among American investors.

No worries, though. They’ll take the business to overseas investors.

… that appeared in Inside Higher Education.

Haredi parties Shas and the United Torah Judaism have responded to a request to bar them from the elections on the basis of excluding women from their party ticket: “The parties function, as demanded by the halacha (Jewish law), with clear segregation between men and women for reasons of modesty. Men have one role and women another role. This segregation does not exclude women, nor discriminate against them nor deem them less worthy than men.”

A US private equity firm is selling off its stakes in the firearms company that made the AR-15 rifle that was used to shoot dead 20 children in a Connecticut primary school last week.

Cerberus Capital Management said on Tuesday it was preparing to sell off its investment in gunmaker Freedom Group following mounting pressure from California’s teachers’ pension funds.

They manage teachers’ pension funds, and teachers have expressed eagerness that their investment firm no longer use the $751 million they give the firm to do business with the Bushmaster boys.

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What’s gotten into the teachers? What is there about feathering their nests from the slaughter of other teachers that bothers them?

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And what about your university?

Profit should be the primary goal of their investment offices, but not at the expense of their broader purposes. If a schoolteachers union or university endowment or nonprofit foundation truly cares about stopping the next mass killing, then they should not provide capital that produces the instruments of such destruction.

Eliot Spitzer:

Every student at a university should ask the university if it is invested in Cerberus.

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People seem to be voting with their feet in other ways on guns, too.

It’s a beautiful day in the neighborhood as Ohio University discovers how far one of its custodians was able to stretch his salary.

Well, even if you don’t make much, there’s always a way to swing for that AK-47, etc., etc., you’ve had your eye on; because what’s the use of making a threat when it’s an empty threat?

He was afraid he was going to get fired because he lost the “keys issued as part of his job.”

No doubt a custodian who loses keys is a fine steward of a home military arsenal. Nothing to worry about there; and no doubt OU is overreacting by having him arrested for threatening to bring one of his many guns (Or wait – don’t they bring all of their guns to the scene these days? At the very least you’ll need your assault weapon to kill twenty people per minute, and then your handgun to kill yourself.) to work if the university tries to fire him.

As I say, what good is a threat if it’s an empty threat?

For all of the upheaval and veiled threats from the power conferences, Emmert’s NCAA will almost certainly hold together. It’s awfully hard to walk away from a legally sanctioned price-fixing scheme — even when it’s in your own best interests to do so.

Guns undermine … community. Their pervasive, open presence would sow apprehension, suspicion, mistrust and fear, all emotions that are corrosive of community and civic cooperation. To that extent, then, guns give license to autocratic government.

Also corrosive of freedom, Firmin DeBrabander points out, since the sight of them frightens us, makes us anxious about what we say and do.

And get used to seeing just as many rifles and shotguns as handguns.

In Stillwater, about 65 miles north of Oklahoma City, the owner of the Stillwater Armory gun shop said the new [open carry] law has brought about a subtle change in buying habits. Customers with small handguns that are easy to conceal have been buying larger weapons, with longer barrels and with magazines that hold additional rounds, as they prepare to wear their guns unconcealed.

Open carry handguns, rifles, and shotguns are powerfully iconic of the cultural divide between Elizabeth Warren and Grover Norquist, between Americans who identify with an American community embodied in representative government, and Americans who are what DeBrabander calls “extreme individualists,” for whom any form of common life founded on some degree of mutual trust seems to be meaningless, threatening.

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UD‘s friend Alan Jacobs says the same thing.

But what troubles me most about … the general More Guns approach to social ills — is the absolute abandonment of civil society it represents. It gives up on the rule of law in favor of a Hobbesian “war of every man against every man” in which we no longer have genuine neighbors, only potential enemies. You may trust your neighbor for now — but you have high-powered recourse if he ever acts wrongly.

Whatever lack of open violence may be procured by this method is not peace or civil order, but rather a standoff, a Cold War maintained by the threat of mutually assured destruction. Moreover, the person who wishes to live this way, to maintain order at universal gunpoint, has an absolute trust in his own ability to use weapons wisely and well: he never for a moment asks whether he can be trusted with a gun. Of course he can! (But in literature we call this hubris.)

Is this really the best we can do? It might be if we lived in, say, the world described by Cormac McCarthy in The Road. But we don’t. Our social order is flawed, but by no means bankrupt. Most of us live in peace and safety without the use of guns. It makes more sense to try to make that social order safer and safer, more and more genuinely peaceful, rather than descend voluntarily into a world governed by paranoia, in which one can only feel safe — or, really, “safe” — with cold steel strapped to one’s ribcage.

The writer has overlooked one other reason Lanza chose an elementary school.

Maybe he went to a school full of women and children (no men died) because he wanted the easiest, most vulnerable targets he could find. A skinny little guy withdrawn from and clearly terrified of the world, he began by shooting a sleeping woman, and went on from there.

Most powerful and damaging weaponry imaginable; most powerless people.

A University of North Alabama student reminds us where our priorities truly lie.

The Onion, on the NRA, last May.

Because they (theoretically) serve a charitable educational mission with their respective schools, college athletic departments … are considered nonprofits — a major reason the NCAA clings to the outdated, immoral concept of amateurism, and that big-time football coaches such as Texas’s Mack Brown earn $5 million-plus per season. (When you don’t pay the workforce because you’re technically not a business, all that television money has to go somewhere.) Postseason bowl games enjoy the same hands-off treatment from the IRS, with predictable results: Sugar Bowl CEO Paul Hoolahan earns $645,000 in total yearly compensation; Outback Bowl — Outback Bowl! — CEO Jim McVay eared $808,000 in 2009; former Fiesta Bowl CEO John Junker collected a $592,000 annual salary before the fallout from a scandal involving a $33,188 self-celebrating birthday party, a $95,000 round of golf with Jack Nicklaus and $1,200 strip club visits on the company’s (tax-deductible!) tab led to his firing.

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UD thanks Daniel.

UD’s friend Roy Poses at Health Care Renewal takes a look at Russell Portenoy, a professor at Yeshiva.

In the last few decades, Portenoy has been busy making the world safe for opioids, insisting that millions of Americans can take them with little to no risk of addiction. He has also been enriching himself through consulting and speaking for pain pill manufacturers.

Portenoy isn’t alone. Here’s another advocate:

[In 1998, one doctor] said he understood that a patient would simply ‘go to sleep’ before stopping breathing. While asleep, he said, the patient ‘can’t take a dangerous dose. It sounds scary, but as far as I know, nobody anywhere is getting burned by doing it this way.’

This is the functional equivalent of John Willke on rape.

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Plenty of academic doctors continue to exploit the legitimacy their academic positions give them to shill for pain pill pharma, but what’s intriguing here is that Portenoy now expresses some regrets:

‘I gave innumerable lectures in the late 1980s and ’90s about addiction that weren’t true,’ Dr. Portenoy said in a 2010 videotaped interview with a fellow doctor.

Not just not true. They helped create the stupendous pain pill addiction epidemic in this country.

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It seems obvious that we should, as Roy says, be skeptical of “people paid by narcotics manufacturers advocating increased use of these drugs, no matter how distinguished, scholarly, or influential these people appear to be.” But in the equally destructive matter of anti-psychotics for children, Joseph Biederman, who continues on the Harvard faculty, seems to have met with no skepticism at all – at least none that could stop him as he almost singlehandedly caused a 40-fold increase in the use of these dangerous drugs.

Neither of these activities has anything to do with going to football games.

U Mass drinkers long ago abandoned the middle man, if you will, and went directly at the alcohol poisoning.

It’s logical. Drinking in a stadium is expensive. Your team will probably lose, and alcohol is already a depressant. Stadiums have no cars to tip.

So why did anyone think U Mass students would haul ass across the state and attend their school’s football games?

Many U Mass alumni (who live closer to the stadium) have exactly the same profile as the students they used to be. Why would they go?

Here are two articles rehearsing these well-known facts and wondering why the taxpayers of Massachusetts let the people who run U Mass do such stupid, stupid things.

But what’s wonderful about these articles is that they make the connection between the new U Mass law school and the stadium fiasco.

UMass spending millions on an unprofitable and pricey venture is nothing new. The launch of the UMass law school a couple of years ago harkens [SOS alert: Harkens is awkward. Actually, it’s wrong. Harken is a verb meaning pay attention. Perhaps the writer had the idiom “harks back to” in mind – the law school puts one in mind of the football fiasco. I’d simply say demonstrates.] the same fiscal irresponsibility. With an overabundance of lawyer[s] graduating law school facing a historically anemic job market for attorneys, the idea was a waste of resources.

(The writer doesn’t even mention that the first president of the new law school was fired for credit card misuse.)

It’s important to grasp the synergy here, as these writers do. Taxachusetts indeed.

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UD thanks Andre.