ChemGuy take a shot

Thanks to TYWKIWDBI for linking to the above video.

As I so often do, I turn to John Stewart to be both serious and light-hearted.

I don't have a clue as to how to tackle anything so serious as my thoughts about gun control, but I feel like I should at least say something - maybe because I try to keep things relatively light and airy around here. When we get too close to something serious like this, I tend to whistle as if we were passing a graveyard. In light of the current rise in gun discussion, however, I want to say a few things.

First off I understand the need for the second amendment or at least I understand why there was a need. We had just come through a war against the British, and we wanted to make sure we didn't find ourselves with another king against which we would need to rise up. Americans - however we wanted to define that at the time, however we want to define that now - lived on a continent with needs for guns. We had to hunt. We had to defend. We had to shoot lest we starve or die.

We do not exist in that nation any longer. That vast majority of us live in a nation where food comes from a grocery store, where the most hunting we need to do is for bargains and deals, coupons and nutritional information labels.

And we do not exist in a nation where we are at risk of a king taking control. Yes, we can debate the possibility of some sort of oligarchy in politics today, whether we need to rise up against the government and kill all the socialist politicians, but I'm going to come pretty firmly down on the side that says we don't need to overthrow the government and are pretty far from needing to do so.

We do exist in a nation, however, where for every 100 people, we have 88.8 firearms (source)...where between 8000 and 9000 people are intentionally killed by guns every year (not including accidental shootings and suicides - 25,000 a year if you include those - source)...where nearly 7000 African-Americans were killed by firearms in 2007 (source) - 18.1 out of every 100,000 in the United States.

The only times I've ever had a gun in my hands would be the following...

• water guns - lots of times
• paintball gun - one afternoon, hated it
• pump-action air rifle - one as a kid, fired into a couple of cardboard boxes
• suction cup dart guns - lots of times

I'm clearly not the NRA's target demographic; I know it. I'm not a hunter. I'm not a gun owner. I've had people break into my house - while I was gone, admittedly - and I still don't want a gun. I live in a world where I don't have to draw a gun to correct every slight. I know this all puts me in an group that some people would say shouldn't talk about guns because I'm speaking from a position of lack of knowledge.

But I do know that the concepts of hundred-round magazines, of civilian-purchased body armor, of a gun and knife show at the Sharonville Convention Center once a month all year long, of legal assault rifles, and of gun stockpiling worry me. I know that I would have absolutely no problems at all if the United States instituted a six-month waiting period to buy a gun, if the our background checks were stepped up to include a lot more than just whether you were ever involuntarily committed for mental illness, if we stopped just sort of making private gun ownership fully illegal in the United States. 

It's too easy to buy a gun - when forty percent of guns sold today have no background check performed at all.

It's too easy to buy guns meant to kill multiple people - semiautomatic weapons that can fire a hundred bullets without reloading even once.

Until we can find a way to make sure no one hates, no one sees so little future that they choose to solve their problem with a gun, everyone receives the mental care that they need, we have to find a way to make their mistakes less deadly.

The last meal project

The last meal project takes a look at the last meals of various people put to death in the United States over the past twenty-plus years and intersperses their photos and meal choices with commentary about the death penalty.

More info about last meals can be found at these websites...

• Last meal requests by notable prisoners
• Last meals of death row inmates beautifully recreated
• Can a prisoner request anything for his last meal?
• Famous death row last meals
• Dead Man Eating Weblog

Another fallen

This past week Princeton lost Lamar Williams, the third player lost from the football team in the past three years.

The first was Ryan Sawyer who died in a car crash on a wet, dark road in Mason.

The second was Jovante Woods who died from as asthma attack in his home.

Lamar Williams "was shot after he participated in a robbery, according to Springdale police," as a Cincinnati Enquirer article writes.

I haven't been around school yet, having just gotten back from a week-long material science camp in Dayton, and I'm not close to most of the students on the football team, so I have no real idea how Princeton's students and staff are taking things, but I wonder how we will remember to mourn the person and the loss but remind our students that this young man clearly put himself in a bad situation, one that can lead very easily where it seems to have lead.

Photo source

Locklanders locked up

I've made my opinion about pranks known.

And I have especially and absolutely no patience for or enjoyment of senior pranks.  Either the students go too far and cause significant damage/problems/inconveniences or they don't go far enough, and the prank is lame.

The little space in between - where senior pranks are witty, not damaging, not harmful, not derivative, and actually creative - is a space smaller than the blade of a pen knife.  It's impossible for any group of students to find that space, to stick the landing on that space.

Senior pranks should not be done.

One of the school districts bordering Princeton found this out this past weekend when twenty seniors - just under a quarter of their graduating class of eighty-seven - were arrested for breaking into Lockland High School (one of the twenty hid in the school until the janitorial staff left for the night Thursday and let the others into the building) and trespassing.  Their plan - according to the Enquirer article - was to 'move all the books from the library into the cafeteria, but the library doors were locked.'

Wow...that's just hilarious.

Books...

in the cafeteria...

Holy crap, I think I just pooped myself from the laughter.

Instead, officers from Lockland, Evendale, Woodlawn, Wyoming, Reading, and Arlington Heights responded to a neighbor's call about a break-in at the high school.  From the first Enquirer article, '[a]t one point, Evendale police even had one student at Taser-point, and a paramedic squad was sent to the school after one student suffered a panic attack, according to Hamilton County emergency communication reports.'

The dumbest part of the whole thing is the parent - whose younger son is at Princeton High School - who 'said he knew ahead of time his son was going to participate in a prank at the school and that the teen’s mother even dropped him off at the school.'

And the parent are complaining that '[t]he police have blown it out of proportion. [The students] did not break in. They were let in. Yes, that’s trespassing, but it goes on every year.'


C'mon, folks.  These kids will be - assuming that they're prosecuted and convicted - guilty of breaking and entering and trespassing.  They'll get their diplomas - they've earned the credits, taken the classes, made the grades - but they'll graduate as felons-to-be.

And I'm just fine with Lockland's plans to deny the students the privilege of walking in their graduation ceremony and intent to let the police/prosecutors/whoever prosecute the kids to the fullest.

They don't deserve the chair or anything, but they certainly deserve far more than a slap on the wrist for this one.

The side bar on the first Enquirer article, by the way, has a nice little list of other senior pranks that have gone wrong at Cincinnati area schools in the past decade or so.

Update: Reasonable middle ground was found.

My school should be getting mo' money

Clearly we are not tapping into every available revenue stream available in the Sharonville area.

Police recently busted a big prostitution ring just up the street from good ol' PHS.

If we're going to miss opportunities for revenue like this, then of course we're going to have money issues. We clearly need to be more creative and diligent in searching out funding sources.