What We Have Here is a Failure to Communicate

“But yes, that’s the beginning of the semester,” it said. “I’m always optimistic. By October, I’ll be wanting to get up to the top of the bell tower with a high powered rifle — with a good scope, and probably a gatling gun as well.” [More]

I understand that the guy being an instructor and all makes such a post questionable, but this looks like hoplophobia writ large.  I find it hard to believe this is not just hyperbole and dark humor, and could have easily been resolved as such just by talking to the guy.

I mean c'mon, do these people have any idea, first, how expensive it would be to acquire a Gatling gun and then what it would take to haul it to the top of a bell tower?

Yeah, OK, in today's era of everybody in academia being an hysterical wuss with the vapors, I see where posting this on Facebook was poor judgement, but my biggest beef with the guy is that a communications professor should have capitalized the "g" in Gatling.

What we have here seems more than a failure to communicate.  What we have here is a chilling warning on what we can and cannot say on social media.  It seems to me the bigger danger is having the state automatically respond by sending in men with guns, prepared to kill us if we cross an arbitrary threshold between joke and threat.

[Via bondmen]