Field of Science

Showing posts with label college students. Show all posts
Showing posts with label college students. Show all posts

Not feeling any safer here in Lincolnland

The fire-arms prohibited signs like this one were put on our academic building sometime during the past few days, but TPP is not feeling any safer.
Nonetheless, with quite a few restrictions, like no firearms at football tailgate parties (duh!), concealed firearms are now allowed on public university campuses because Lincolnland finally caved in to the SCOTUS rulings that certified citizens' right to bear arms without the necessity of well-regulated militias because apparently conservative judges cannot conjugate sentences.  Consider what typically occurs on campuses even before such signs became necessary.  First you take 20,000 to 40,000 eighteen to twenty-somethings and put them altogether with little or no adult supervision. OK that's actually all it takes. Most of them don't know how to drink alcohol in a mature manner even when they're old enough to be legal. Let's add up the other variables: a lot of raging hormones, some immaturity, peer pressure, various tribal affinities, and bad or impaired judgment.  During any particular period of say 2 days, stupid, crazy, regrettable stuff will happen just because, but mostly they live and maybe learn.  Now add concealed firearms to this equation and solve. What possibly could go wrong?  The campus environment doesn't need another variable that makes it so bloody easy for even a behavioral moron to kill someone, but they will. You can already hear the NRA chuckling over their antics. "Oh, those crazy college kids; always shooting each other." "Remember when we were in college and it was never anything worse than a fist-fight?" "Boy, do kids today have it easy."

First in freedom - tops in voter suppression

The first in freedom state has been making news for now being tops in voter suppression, and it's not just racial minorities who are the target!  Now funny things happen when you plop a university down in a little town somewhere in the boondocks, a town like Boone NC (Eee,Ha! Remember the HeeHaw bit?).  You know students come there from fer away places, like Charlotte, and bring in them funny foreign ideas, like the right to vote.  And the faculty, well, some of them might even come from up North!  Why that doggone college done messed things up so bad, why this here district almost voted for Obama in the last election.  Now you just caint have that so the local voting board, controlled by the "right" people removed the voting precincts from campus after checking if they could just take the vote away from students period.  Oh, we caint?  Well, then let's just make it good and hard for them to vote; let's make them walk clear across Boone to vote (probably take 20 min), and then wait in line because too many people have now been assigned to the remaining precinct.  Now there's a perfectly nice young woman going to school there, TPP's niece, and now she knows what it's like to be a disenfranchised voter, although she can get from campus to the voting precinct in probably 4 min. on foot; most students would be considerably slower.  But now she knows how a lot of minorities feel too.  Wonder what she and her fellow students at Appalachian State are going to do about it?  People, make them keep those poles open all night if you have too!