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Late last Saturday night, at about 3 am, there was a shootout at a Georgia college student’s apartment.
Charles Bailey, who was present but apparently not one of the shooters, says that two masked men burst into a party, intent on robbery and rape, and that one of the partygoers fought them off with a gun he had in his backpack. By the end of the altercation, one of the outsiders, a man named Calvin Lavant, was dead and one of the women at the party had been shot several times.
Although the incident did not take place on campus property, supporters of campus concealed carry legislation are trumpeting it as evidence of the effectiveness of armed self-defense among students.
Others aren’t convinced. A lot of Pandagon commenters, for instance, think the story doesn’t quite make sense.
Was this a massacre averted? Maybe. A drug deal gone wrong? Perhaps. Could be either, could be something else. But I have a hunch we’re all going to be hearing more about this story.
8 am Thursday update: Pandagon has been down since last night, so that link above doesn’t work.
8:30 am update: Police have arrested a man named Jamal Hill who is suspected of being the other perpetrator of the home invasion. An article on that arrest identifies Charles Bailey as living in the apartment.
I love student media, and I don’t think it gets anywhere near the respect it deserves. I don’t like it when people pick on the campus press. But when a student newspaper adopts the bad habits of the mainstream media, and publishes a sloppy, hostile-to-students story, it should get called on it, I think.
Yesterday’s Kent State News includes a piece on the aftermath of the local student riot that happened a couple of weeks back, a riot that some have blamed on police misconduct. The title of this story?
“Some incoming freshmen rethinking their decision to attend KSU after riots.”
But there’s a problem — the article doesn’t give any evidence that the headline’s claim is true.
The piece says the mother of incoming student Kayla Will is having second thoughts about Kent State in the wake of the riots, but that Kayla isn’t. “These riots,” the article says, “don’t impact her desire to go to Kent State.”
Another entering student, Leah Friedlander, says her parents “trust me to stay out of harm’s way.” According to the paper, “she has been planning on attending Kent State for pre-pharamacy since her junior year of high school, and the riots didn’t change her decision.”
That’s the total of the interviewing the paper did. Two students, neither of whom is rethinking anything.
And if the university itself is worried, they’re not saying so — they sent out a letter to incoming students to reassure them, one administrator says, but they’ve received only “minimal calls” about the issue.
This article is grounded in the premise that last month’s student rioters harmed the image of Kent State among likely attendees, but the article provides no support for that premise. None.
Ari Melber of The Nation has put together a sharp overview of the flap over Condoleeza Rice’srecent comments on torture, and his piece does a better job than any other I’ve read of highlighting what a student power moment this is.
Three Stanford students — one with a video camera, the other two just asking questions — buttonholed Rice at a dorm event, and changed the direction of America’s debate on Bush-era torture policy. There was none of the preening or shouting that the talk show pundits wallow in, just good, solid questions and deeply inadequate answers. (At least one of the questioners didn’t even know he was on camera — he was just engaging with Rice in the moment.)
And the three students who made it happen? Sammy Abusrur, is a sports reporter for the Stanford Daily. Jeremy Cohn is a public policy major and an alto saxophonist in the Stanford marching band. Reyna Garcia, who taped the exchange and uploaded it to YouTube, is a sophomore.
An excerpt from my dissertation:
President Nixon revealed the US invasion of Cambodia on April 30, 1970, in a televised speech. At a news conference the next day National Student Association president Charles Palmer, flanked by ten collegiate student body presidents, denounced the invasion and Nixon’s “odious disregard of the constitution” and called for his impeachment.
The nation’s first student strikes in response to the invasion had already been called by the time Palmer spoke, and by Monday walkouts had begun, with NSA’s enthusiastic support, at dozens of campuses. Throughout the weekend NSA staff worked with an impromptu national strike center at Brandeis University to coordinate, encourage, and publicize strike activity as best they could.
Many campuses closed as the protests escalated, but Kent State in Ohio stayed open, and that state’s governor — facing a deteriorating situation on campus in the final stages of a tight re-election race — called out the National Guard. On Monday, a little after noon, Guard troops on the campus fired on a crowd of protesters. The gunfire killed four people, including two students who were walking past the protest on their way to class.
This was not the first time, or even the first time in recent years, that American students had been killed by agents of the government in the course of a campus protest. In early 1968 police had fired on anti-segregation activists at South Carolina State University, killing three. And it would not be the last — nine days after Kent State, two students at Jackson State College in Mississippi were killed in circumstances similar to those of the South Carolina shootings.
But unlike in South Carolina and Mississippi, the students killed at Kent State were white. And crucially, the Kent State killings were documented on film — a Kent State photography major took two rolls of photos of that day’s protest and its aftermath, and his photographs went out over the AP wire that night. One image — of a young woman kneeling over the body of one of the dead, screaming with arms outstretched — appeared on the front pages of newspapers all over the country the next day. The Kent State killings unleashed an unprecedented wave of protest, forcing hundreds of campuses to close for the semester.
“In several educational institutions during the last few years manifestation of student activity in riots has been exciting the country. To the conservative mind, these riots bode no good. As a matter of fact student riots of one sort or another, protests against the order that is, kicks against college and university management indicate a healthy growth and a normal functioning of the academic mind.
“Youth should be radical. Youth should demand change in the world. Youth should not accept the old order if the world is to move on. … There must be clash and if youth hasn’t enough force or fervor to produce the clash the world grows stale and stagnant and sour in decay. If our colleges and universities do not breed men who riot, who rebel, who attack life with all the youthful vim and vigor, then there is something wrong with our colleges. The more riots that come on college campuses, the better world for tomorrow.”
–William Allen White, newspaper editor, 1932.
studentactivism.net 
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