When I first read about the shooting incident on UCLA’s campus this morning I immediately feared that it was over a grade dispute. Especially at this time of the year, when final grades are being doled out, many professors live in fear of students literally fighting back over anything short of the perfect grade. This anxiety is heightened as we become more aware of the brutality common in our news. The violence has become too common, too mundane. And with gun deaths seemingly spiraling more out of control every year, that just adds another potent element into the cocktail of fear. Yet my early suspicion still didn’t mask the dread when those rumors were confirmed. Today’s news is a nightmare come to life.*

This fall I’ll begin a job as assistant professor at a Texas institution that, thanks to a recent legislative bill, will allow concealed carry. I’d be lying if I said I won’t experience a millisecond of dread any time someone walks toward me after a lecture with a serious look in their eye, or when anyone walks briskly into my office with determined pace. I wish those fears were irrational, but they’re not. The UCLA professor today was just the second academic to be shot in his office this year. Just knowing that anyone could be walking around campus carrying a concealed weapon will further add to this stress, not decrease it.

[As a side note: it is ironic that most of the people pushing for these concealed carry bills hold a superficial appeal to an originalist reading of the Second Amendment. However, the very author of that amendment, James Madison, approved the disavowal of guns on the University of Virginia campus, something that the governor of Georgia noted in his repeal of a concealed campus law.]

I feel bad for those who have bought into the myth that the only thing to stop a “bad guy” with a gun is a “good guy” with a gun. What a fraudulent and naive way to think the world operates. Not only is it ignorant of nearly all the data and studies that prove the obvious premise that “more guns” equals “more violence,” but it is steeped in a juvenile and jejune mindset more appropriate for an adolescent who plays with GI-Joes than an adult who makes grownup decisions. It seems some think the only equilibrium of safety is found in a Mexican standoff. If the UCLA professor had a gun, that likely would have led to the student shooting more quickly and erratically, perhaps even leading to more deaths. And as for bystanders: wanna-be heroes often kill as many innocents as duplicitous villains. This isn’t hollywood.

More, the “good guy with a gun” myth originated with and is pedaled by the money-grabbing gun industry who tries to make a buck through our bloodshed. Those who buy into it are either ignorant of the facts or are just flat-out obtuse as to how the world works.

But what I’m really worried about is how these bills that allow concealed carry on campuses–and in most public locations, for that matter–is that they just normalizes the very presence of guns and silently vindicate their depraved purpose. These shootings are not normal. Our illogical and indefensible obsession with gun rights is not normal. As the best analysis of our gun culture—The Onion—puts it, we pretend that this is a necessary sacrifice for our liberty when it reality it is a perversion of our society. We pretend that these acts are inexplainable only because we reject the obvious explanation. With every action taken to broaden concealed carry on our public campuses—and, further, with every time we refuse to pass common sense gun regulation—we move further down the road toward embracing the absurd and rationalizing the irrational.

Students who are upset with their professors will be more prone to take drastic measures, as the gap between violent anger and murderous rage decreases to eventual nonexistence. Pulling the trigger on a gun will not seem as drastic a move as it once did–that is the purpose of those tools, after all, and their function must be commonly accepted given society’s embrace of its mechanism. The great intellectual feat of America’s gun industry is not only its ability to convince us that the only thing that can assure safety is to multiply the engine of non-safety, but also in assuring us that such an absurd logic is in fact sane at all. It normalizes the extraordinary.

And that’s the future that faculty and students now have to face: the terror of the mundane.

_________________________
*Edit to add that it has come out that the shooter was a PhD student. The dynamic is a tad different than if it were an undergrad, but the underlying anxiety is the same.

I share this essay by esteemed scholar David Blight every year on Memorial Day because it is so important. Go read it. Here is a taste:

The war was over, and Memorial Day had been founded by African-Americans in a ritual of remembrance and consecration. The war, they had boldly announced, had been about the triumph of their emancipation over a slaveholders’ republic. They were themselves the true patriots. 

Despite the size and some newspaper coverage of the event, its memory was suppressed by white Charlestonians in favor of their own version of the day. From 1876 on, after white Democrats took back control of South Carolina politics and the Lost Cause defined public memory and race relations, the day’s racecourse origin vanished.

The essay is based on Blight’s award-winning book on the same topic, which is a must-read for anyone interested in the Civil War, race relations, and the horrid undercurrent that has led America to nominate a racist bigot as a presidential candidate. I heartily recommend that book, too, which only continues to seem relevant. 

Today marks the official release date of Greg Prince’s long-awaited Leonard Arrington and the Writing of Mormon History (University of Utah Press). I’ve been privileged to look over an advanced copy since I’m responding to a paper based on the book at Mormon History Association, and I had a hard time putting it down. For those interested in the development of New Mormon History, the LDS Church’s tango with history during the 1970s and 1980s, and the institutional dynamics of the Mormon hierarchy, this is a must-read. I’ll share a more thorough review of the book, and perhaps some poignant excerpts and issues, after MHA, but in the meantime here are a baker’s dozen worth of details that should whet your appetite.

1. To give you a perspective of the different era in which Arrington was born, his family traveled via a horse and buggy when he was a kid. (105)
2. Arrington’s life was, in a way, bookended with blessings from Mormon women: shortly after being born gravely ill he was blessed by his mother, Edna, and her friend, Hanna Bowen (10, 222); and when he was to have bypass surgery much later in life he once again received a blessing that was given by his second wife, Harriet, co-worker and friend Maureen Beecher, as well as Michael and Jan Quinn. (446) These experiences might have made him especially open to scholarship on the ritual practices of Mormon women.
3. While an undergraduate student Arrington was part of the largest college cooperative experiment during the Great Depression, which likely influenced his later scholarly focuses. (15-16)
4. When he tried to enlist during World War II he was deemed too short for the Navy and medically unfit (due to his asthma) for the Air Force. He was eventually drafted by the Army. (39)
5. While overseas during the war Arrington had the pleasure to meet the Pope. (45)
6. Though he came to be known as a historian, he received his PhD in economics, was hired as an economics professor at Utah State, and never even taught a history class before his appointment as Church Historian in 1972. This experience made him sympathetic to the many non-specialists who engage in the field of Mormon history.
7. Arrington had an article in the first issue of BYU Studies on the economic origins of Word of Wisdom governance, and its content proved so controversial that the journal avoided historical topics for a number of issues afterward. This lack of an outlet for Mormon historians led to the creation of Dialogue and, later, Journal of Mormon History. BYU Studies, of course, later returned to the historical sphere. (137)
8. Arrington was tapped to be assigned mission president to the Church’s Italy Mission in 1967 before being vetoed by Elder Ezra Taft Benson. (148)
9. Arrington had been in talks with the LDS Church and BYU for a joint appointment for a few years before being called as Church Historian. He originally expected to become an assistant historian, but a new organizational program that swept over the church in 1971 encouraged Church leadership to divest divisional responsibility off of general authorities and onto specialists. So Arrington’s appointment as Church Historian was just one of many bureaucratic changes that took place in the early 1970s.
10. During the 1960s Arrington and his colleague, George Ellsworth, applied to the National Historic Publications Commission for funding to do the Brigham Young Papers Project. The NHPC readily agreed and pledged $40,000. The Church, though, declined. A decade later, Arrington tried to resurrect the Young project, only this time as a 7-volume biography. The Church declined again. However, they agreed to support him in a one-volume biography, which became Brigham Young: American Moses (Knopf), a team-oriented project that only took seven months to draft. (185, 398-400)
11. Prior to the 1970s it was Church policy to terminate a woman’s employment once she had a child. However, Maureen Beecher, an employee in the history division, with Arrington’s support, fought for her continued employment after she became pregnant. They succeeded in not only obtaining an exemption for Beecher, but also a reversal of the entire policy. (240-244)
12. Once when teaching a course on Mormon history at BYU, Arrington discovered there were at least two students who were assigned by LDS leadership to “observe” his teachings and report back. (386)
13. Prince’s biography is just the newest item in a string of Arrington coverage. Arrington originally planned for an autobiography in 1975 when he hired Rebecca Cornwall to ghost-write it, and then in 1982 when he hired Lavina Fielding Anderston to ghost-write another that covered his Church Historian years. Both resulted in biographies that were privately published. (437-439) Arrington eventually authored his own biography, Adventures of a Church Historian, that was published by the University of Illinois in 1998. Arrington sincerely feared his memoirs would lead to his excommunication, yet the final product was quite kind and pulled many punches.

These are just a few of the fascinating details in the book. I strongly recommend it.

A collection of some of the things I found interesting this week.

American History & Academy

The Missouri Regional Seminar on Early American History has a call for papers for 2016/2017. I absolutely loved these meetings–they are always well attended, have good food, smart commentary, and excellent camaraderie–and I’ll honestly miss it while I’m in Texas.

The Celia Project went live. Martha Jones spoke at Mizzou a few months ago, so I’ve been looking forward to this. It should be a great resource not only for those interested in race, sex, and law in America’s past, but also for potential pedagogical tools in the classroom.

Flora Fraser Wins the 2016 George Washington Prize for her book, The Washingtons: George and Martha, “Join’d by Friendship, Crown’d by Love” (Knopf).

The Journal of American History is looking for a Visiting Assistant Professor/Assistant Editor. Looks like a great gig.

Seth Perry did an incisive review of Origins of American Religious Nationalism, a book I also reviewed in W&MQ, and he makes broader points about “rushing” to make a point.

American Culture/Politics

Gawker has Pulitzer-worthy reporting on Trump’s hair weave.

Mormon History

Matt Bowman did a fabulous interview with Stephen Taysom about his biography-in-progress of Joseph F. Smith. Steve is one of the great thinkers in Mormon history, not to mention a superb writer. The book should be great.

I also did an interview with Thomas Simpson about his forthcoming book on American universities and the making of modern Mormonism.

Mormon Interests

Paul Huntsman comes close to finalizing his purchase of the Salt Lake Tribune. This is a great move that will solidify the Trib’s existence and maintain its independence. (For an example, see their continuing coverage of the BYU rape scandal.)

I already highlighted it here, but make sure to read Kristine Haglund on the BYU rape issue.

The best podcast in the Mormon world, Blair Hodges’s Maxwell Institute Podcast, interviewed genius Marilynne Robinson.

Michael Austin is my favorite Mormon commentator, whether he writes in a serious or humorous vein.

Still trying to figure out what I’d like to post here, but a fun and infrequent series might be “New Book Arrivals” to brag about my recent purchases. 

I’m really excited about all these books, for different reasons. Saltwater Frontier won the Bancroft, and I have a goal of reading all books that reach that designation. Nick Guyatt, who wrote Bind Us Apart, was hired at Cambridge just as I was leaving; his book on Providentialism is one of my favorites, and his new book covers a very important topic. Like many interested in American intellectual history, I’ve long-awaited Kloppenberg’s time on democracy, and the 200 pages or so I’ve read thus far have been great. And Wilentz is always smart and provocative, even if I don’t always agree with him. (I concur with the main gist of this review, save the unfair swipes in the first two paragraphs.)