Half a century ago, when I was in high school, one of my English teachers was also editor of Gun Report and wrote a column for every issue. I never heard anyone in town who thought he was acting incorrectly, but his wife was a vegetarian and people thought she was weird. In the late 60's, after the Navy, I attended SUNY College of Forestry in Syracuse. That's a small & specialized school, with limited space, but plenty of interest in our end of the subject. Syracuse University (across the alley) had a smallbore rifle range & maybe a skeet range. In 1985-88, I had an opportunity to go back to academia, pursuing an advanced degree at Univ of CA at Davis. The UCD main library had an interesting collection of books on firearms. I often read them when my graduate work in paleomagnetics got to be a bit much. In 1998, I had a chance to go back to UCD for a week of refresher training. I went back to the UCD library, thinking I would spend evenings reading George Chinn's volumes on machine guns. All the gun books had been removed from the library and were no longer listed in the library's extensive on-line catalog.
Last year, my son took a basic machine shop course at our local junior college. The first day of classes, the instructor ran over procedures, safety rules, etc. One of the rules was that you could not even ask questions about gunmaking techniques. There would be no discussion of guns at all. College policy. The same JC has a police academy with all sorts of banging away at their pistol range. Maybe things are different in Iowa or Alaska, but here on the left coast, I don't think serious studies of things associated with firearms by the proletariat will be tolerated by the academic higher-ups.
All this flap started over some discussion about Michael P leaving his papers to some institution. The thread got a bit off track. No matter where MP's papers go, unless there is an endowment to support curatorship, there is a big chance they will head for the dust bin.
waterman
