Last week you might remember that I reported on a college professor who shot himself in the arm, allegedly to protest President Donald Trump. Now, however, he’s changing his story, saying that it was to protest malnutrition, pollution, and AR-15s.
Mark Bird is a 69-year-old sociology professor who taped a $100 bill to a College of Southern Nevada bathroom with a note reading “for the janitor” before proceeding to shoot himself in the arm. While Bird told students, staff, doctors, and police that he shot himself to protest Trump immediately after it happened, he now says he did it to protest AR-15s, according to Blue Lives Matter. But here’s the thing: he didn’t even use an AR-15 to shoot himself.
In an apology letter to the school’s president and VP, Bird gave two reasons for shooting himself, saying “the Earth has roughly 100 million malnutrition and pollution deaths in the past decade — and the Earth is on…course for at least another 100 million such deaths in the next decade” and complaining that since the Las Vegas massacre last year, “there has been no national legislation banning bump stocks, banning civilian ownership of AR-15 type assault weapons, and the passage of universal gun background checks.”
So I’m guessing that the reasoning here was to attract media attention by doing something really drastic and then giving himself a megaphone that way? Bird says he shot himself on campus because he knew the College of Southern Nevada police would not let him die.
The professor is banned from campus and charged with carrying a dangerous weapon at school and without a permit, as well as shooting it inside a restricted environment.
College of Southern Nevada professor Mark Bird shot himself in the arm, apparently to protest President Donald Trump, reported Las Vegas Journal-Review. He is charged with carrying a dangerous weapon at school and without a permit, as well as shooting it inside a restricted environment.
Bird, who had taught at the College of Southern Nevada for 25 years, apparently taped a $100 bill to a mirror in a campus bathroom with a note reading “for the janitor” and then shot himself in the arm with a .22-caliber pistol. Campus employees and one or more students saw him limping out of the bathroom. Someone called 911 and the report says that before the police arrived, the professor said he shot himself to protest Trump.
Bird will have a preliminary hearing on September 17. Now, I don’t get too many stories out of Nevada, to be honest, but another one that did come to mind was University of Nevada, Las Vegas history professor Tessa Winkelmann, who, after the Las Vegas massacre, warned her students that “people will die” because of Trump.
