Gun industry’s helping hand triggers a surge in college shooting teams

A surprisingly even-handed look at the increasing popularity of collegiate shooting teams:

Gun industry’s helping hand triggers a surge in college shooting teams

In between completing problem sets, writing code, organizing hackathons, worrying about internships and building solar cars, a group of MIT students make their way to the athletic center, where they stand side-by-side, load their guns and fire away.

They are majoring in biological engineering, brain and cognitive sciences, aeronautics, mechanical engineering, computer science and nuclear science. Before arriving at MIT, nearly all of them had never touched a gun or even seen one that wasn’t on TV.

“Which is strange because I’m from Texas,” said Nick McCoy, wearing a ­T-shirt advertising his dorm and getting ready to shoot.

McCoy is one of the brainiacs on MIT’s pistol and rifle teams, which, like other college shooting teams, have benefited from the largesse of gun industry money and become so popular that they often turn students away. Teams are thriving at a diverse range of schools: Yale, Harvard, the University of Maryland, George ­Mason University, and even smaller schools such as Slippery Rock University in Pennsylvania and Connors State College in Oklahoma.

“We literally have way more students interested than we can handle,” said Steve Goldstein, one of MIT’s pistol coaches.

The real minimum wage is zero

That’s what you end up with when the job you were working is no longer worth whatever the government decides the “minimum” wage should be:

Ruinous “Compassion”

It is fascinating to see brilliant people belatedly discover the obvious — and to see an even larger number of brilliant people never discover the obvious.

A recent story in a San Francisco newspaper says that some restaurants and grocery stores in Oakland’s Chinatown have closed after the city’s minimum wage was raised. Other small businesses there are not sure they are going to survive, since many depend on a thin profit margin and a high volume of sales.

At an angry meeting between local small business owners and city officials, the local organization that had campaigned for the higher minimum wage was absent. They were probably some place congratulating themselves on having passed a humane “living wage” law. The group most affected was also absent — inexperienced and unskilled young people, who need a job to get some experience, even more than they need the money.

Multiple standards aren’t better

Singing a stupid song is an unpardonable offense, but knocking a girl out so hard she was left with broken facial bones is OK?  This sort of moral inversion is what happens when you put Democrats in charge:

OU: Tough On Racism, Weak On Assault, Burglary

University of Oklahoma president David Boren’s immediate expulsion of students involved with a recently-leaked racist video stands in sharp contrast to the lighter treatment the school has given to football players found responsible for violent crimes.

Just two days after a video leaked of Oklahoma students, mostly freshmen, singing a racist song on a bus, Boren took decisive action by summarily expelling two students he claims played a leading roll in the chant. The students, he said, had created a “hostile learning environment” for other students and had to be kicked out immediately, with no opportunity to reform. Boren has suggested that more expulsions could be on the way.

“There is zero tolerance for this kind of threatening racist behavior at the University of Oklahoma,” Boren said.

However, while Boren might have zero tolerance for racist songs sung in private, Boren and OU have taken a very different approach to the privileged members of the school’s elite college football team, emphasizing the importance of second chances and allowing the team to welcome back players with a history of violence and even sexual assault.

One such player was Joe Mixon, a freshman and one of the top football prospects for the Sooners. Last July, Mixon was caught on video in an altercation with another OU student, 20-year-old junior Amelia Rae Molitor. During the altercation, Mixon punched Molitor so hard he broke four bones in her face and knocked her unconscious.

On Friday the 13th

8d65004afb88f3dcc0e40d1bcf14bf68This is the second month in a row we’ve had a Friday the 13th.  That occurrence doesn’t roll around all that often, as it can only occur in March on a year that isn’t a leap year.  Some quick calculations indicate that the next one won’t roll around until 2026.  Looking further ahead through the rest of the century, the remaining occurrences are in 2037, 2043, 2054, 2065, 2071, 2082, 2093, and 2099.

How stupid does she think we are?

Yesterday, the excuse that Hillary Clinton gave for conducting official business through a private email server was that she had two phones to access multiple email servers. There are multiple problems with that “explanation, but since when do you need multiple phones to manage multiple email accounts? I have access to my personal email server (like the Clintons’, but more secure because mine runs Linux instead of Windows) and a Gmail account through my phone. It’s lame email software (Outlook comes to mind) that can’t handle multiple accounts.

A certain substitution is easily envisioned here

Faded glory. Faded freedom.

Quoting Edward Gibbon:

In the end, more than freedom. they wanted security. They wanted a comfortable life, and they lost it all……security, comfort, and freedom. When the Athenians wanted not to give to society but for society to give to them, when the freedom they wished foremost was freedom from responsibility, then Athens ceased to be free and was never free again.

Something to think about. Keep our current predicament in mind as you do so.