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The campus concealed-carry debate is heating up in several state legislatures right now, and I’m trying to get up to speed, so I’ve just started reading “Pretend ‘Gun-Free’ School Zones: A Deadly Legal Fiction” — an article by David Kopel that argues that laws prohibiting faculty and adult students from carrying guns on school campuses are “irrational and deadly.” (I found the article through the National Review‘s Phi Beta Cons blog, here.)
Kopel says that for most of America’s history “it was not uncommon for students to bring guns to school.” He cites a column in which John Lane reminisces about his youth in the 1940s and 1950s, and says that he “attempted to find a ‘school shooting’ from that era,” but “came up empty.” On the following page Kopel goes further, passing on the claim that “before the 1990 [Gun-Free School Zone Act], there had been only seven shootings at an American school in the previous 214 years,” and that “in the 17 years following the GFSZA, there were 78 such incidents.”
Each of these claims — that one might search for school shootings in the 1940s and 1950s and find no examples, and that there were only seven shootings at American schools before 1990 — struck me as unlikely, so I decided to check them out.
I fired up the search engine for the archives of the New York Times, looking for articles published between January 1, 1940 and December 31, 1959 that included the words “shot” and “school.”
The search returned 4,940 results.
The United States Supreme Court will hear arguments a week from today in the case of a 13-year-old who was strip-searched by school officials who suspected she had brought ibuprofen to school.
Savana Redding was an eighth grader in Safford, Arizona in the fall of 2003. On October 8 of that year, an administrator discovered that one of Redding’s classmates had high-strength ibuprofen pills in her possession. (Ibuprofen is the active ingredient in the headache medicine Advil.) Under questioning, that student said she had gotten the pills from Redding.
Redding had no history of disciplinary problems, but school officials made no attempt to confirm the classmate’s story. Instead, they pulled Redding from class, and after a search of her bookbag turned up no pills, she was taken to the school nurse’s office. There she was told to strip to her underwear and pull her bra and underpants out from her body, exposing her breasts and pubic area.
No ibuprofen was found.
An appeals court ruled last year that this search violated Redding’s constitutional rights, as well as “any known principle of human dignity.” The Supreme Court will rule on that question, as well as the issue of whether Redding has the right to sue the assistant principal who ordered the search.
Redding is now an undergraduate at Eastern Arizona College, majoring in psychology.
The activists who occupied the New School building at 65 Fifth Avenue early on Friday morning did not use Twitter to organize their action or to communicate with the world outside. No-one who self-identified as a participant in the occupation ever tweeted while it was going on, and the protesters seem not to have given much weight to Twitter as a medium through which they could communicate with the public.
But news of the protest broke online quickly, and by the time the occupation ended much of the conversation surrounding it was taking place on Twitter. Hundreds of tweets about the occupation were posted that morning — by noon, a new one was going up every eighteen seconds. Many of these tweets were written by eyewitnesses, and taken in aggregate the occupation’s Twitter feed offers both a real-time narrative of the morning’s events and a demonstration of the multiple ways that Twitter is deployed when news breaks.
The Occupation On Twitter
The occupation began at about 5:30 in the morning, by most accounts. The first tweet that mentioned it was posted at 6:46 am — twenty-six minutes after the activist group Take Back NYU announced the action via email to its Facebook group.
The first request that observers bring cameras to the occupation site to document events as they unfolded came at 7:26. The first photo from the scene was posted exactly forty minutes later.
“The employers will love this generation. They are not going to press many grievances. There won’t be much trouble. They are going to be easy to handle. There aren’t going to be riots. There aren’t going to be revolutions.”
–Clark Kerr, Chancellor of the University of California, 1959.
A new study of teen eating habits found that young vegetarians tend to eat healthier than meat-eaters, consuming fewer calories from fat. It found that young vegetarians are less likely to be overweight than their peers who eat meat, and that the vast majority of young vegetarians have ho history of binging, purging, or other forms of disordered eating.
But here’s how Time magazine framed their story on the report:
“Is Vegetarianism a Teen Eating Disorder?”
Yup. Despite the evidence that most teen vegetarians make healthy choices in eating from both a nutritional and a behavioral perspective, Time chose to raise alarms that vegetarianism is itself an eating disorder.
What’s the basis for this claim? Well, it turns out that teen vegetarians aged 15-18, particularly those who don’t stick with vegetarianism over the long term, report higher incidences of certain eating disorders than those who have never tried a vegetarian diet. In one study of Minnesota teens, for instance, 25% of vegetarians said they’d taken weight pills or diuretics or vomited to lose weight in the past, as opposed to 10% of meat eaters.
This is an interesting finding, and if it’s backed up by other research it may suggest that a small — but significant — minority of teen vegetarians are at higher risk for eating disorders than their non-vegetarian peers.
But some or all of the effect may be explained by other factors. For instance, Time itself notes that vegetarians may be more sensitive to unhealthy eating habits, and thus more likely to report them to researchers. Perhaps some teens choose vegetarianism as a result of having become more conscious of their food choices after overcoming an eating disorder.
And since girls are more likely to (1) be vegetarians and (2) have eating disorders than boys, one would expect to find higher rates of eating disorders among vegetarians just because of gender, whether there was any correlation between the two issues or not. (One article suggests that in Britain girls are ten times as likely to be vegetarian as boys.)
Time‘s conclusions, in other words, are mostly without basis — even if one accepts the findings of the studies it relies on.
And the article doesn’t just mangle the science on vegetarianism, either. It takes gratuitous shots at non-vegetarian young people as well. It refers to vegetarianism as a “common teen fad,” for instance, and likens it to “experimenting with foolish things like dyeing your hair purple.”
Another “foolish thing” teens do, according to Time? “Going door-to-door for a political party.”
Sheesh.
studentactivism.net 
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