Gunners

For those who have not been to law school (and why the hell would you go), you probably haven’t heard of the term Gunner. This might apply to other grad schools (and maybe even undergrads, but I don’t remember the term), but since I’m not in grad school or med school, I can’t tell you for sure. Basically a Gunner is that douchebag in class who doesn’t stop raising his/her hand all the effing time and needs to either ask every question that pops into his/her head or answer every question posed by the professor, which in law school is A LOT. Through the first couple of classes I can understand raising your hand a lot, asking lots of questions. You want to make yourself known to the professor, maybe even impress other students in class. Well, now that we’re in the fifth week, we’re not impressed.

The Gunners in my class have already been identified. You can tell quite easily. There are 3 main ones and about 4-5 subsidiary Gunners. There are a couple who asked a lot at the beginning, but have reeled back because they realized they were douches. Good for them. You see, at Oregon you have your four main classes (torts, crim, civ pro, contract) with the same group of 65. This means that generally, the same douchies (I love the word and all of its derivatives) are talking in every freaking class. Can you tell I’m ranting? At some point you have to understand that we hate hearing your voice every single day in every single class asking the same annoying questions. Worse are the Gunners who preface questions with qualifiers like “I probably should ask about this in office hours, but …” or “Maybe I’m the only one who isn’t getting it, but …” Stop it, please. We all know that those would go before your question anyway, so we don’t need more class time taken up by it.

Yet worst of all are the Asshole Gunners (thanks Pete). These jokers LOVE to add more facts to hypotheticals, change facts in a case to just to see what would happen or maybe even ask how this term in torts class is sort of like the term we learned in civ pro (really, its not). I know you might want to take the professor down a long path about some obscure exception to the rule that has come up once in 87 years and will never be on any test, but hey, its not like I’m paying $30,000 a year, so take 15 minutes away from a class discussion I’m barely getting already. Don’t be that guy. What makes it all worse is that all of our tests are anonymous anyway … the professor isn’t going to grade your exam any different because you had a great question in mid-September about subject matter jurisdiction. So just shut the eff up. Please.

Anyway, despite all of that, I’ve decided I need to talk up in class more. This started foolishly in torts last Friday when I raised my hand to cover the facts and findings of our last case of the day. Doing this while extremely hung over and the little man in my heading pleading “WHY ARE YOU TALKING?!?!?!” isn’t probably the best plan, but oh well. I wanted to talk because I thought I understood the case well, and I pretty much did. I did the same thing again in crim today, though I was not hung over. Plus, the question I answered was in rebuttal to some bad reasoning by one of the Gunners … so making my correct point was all the much more satisfying. I promise not to turn into one of THEM any time soon. I just want to speak maybe once a class. Or more if I get to rebut kids who are really amped about joining the Federalist Society. Douches.

Other rants for today:
• Finally saw Transformers over the weekend. Dear God in heaven that blew giant robot dick. Wow. I really don’t know what to say … it felt like a 2 hour 30 minute trailer for a much better movie. I really have no idea what happened or if there was a plot. I think 10 scenes were cut that might have helped the narrative. I don’t know. But it wasn’t NEARLY as bad as …
• Halloween. I hate Rob Zombie. He’s getting worse but making more money. Maybe he’s what is wrong with America. Some my age say that Transformers and other movies made form TV shows from the 80s are raping our childhoods. For me, this “remake” of
• Knowing that I’m moving into a new, bigger, better place is making me start to resent the place I have now. I do like my apartment, but the grass is always greener I guess.
• Not a rant, but a BIG rave … its starting to feel like Fall here. Fall is by far my favorite time of year and has my favorite holiday, Thanksgiving. The drive down to the law school once you’re on the UO campus is lined with giant trees that are starting to turn. Its beautiful. I will take pictures soon. Yay!