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The gun I carried on the streets of New York City in the late 1960s was a Beretta, similar to the pistol James Bond packed in the early Ian Fleming novels. It was a small, dark beauty that filled me with bravado. I was never afraid when I had it in my pocket, which is why Im so very afraid now.

I was packing it illegally, but I knew that a white man in a suit and tie was unlikely to be stopped by the police and frisked, even in a city with some of the strictest gun laws in the country laws that may soon be swept away if the Supreme Court continues what seems to be its holy war on democracy. In fact, its justices are expected to rule this month in a case that challenges New Yorks constitutional right to deny anyone a permit to carry a firearm. That states current licensing process allows only those who can prove a special need for self-protection distinguishable from that of the general community. That means you cant pack heat just because you want to feel stronger and braver than you are or because you feel threatened by people who look different from you.

It also means that you cant enjoy the privileges of the past. In his history of gun rights in this country, Armed in America, Patrick Charles quotes this from a piece in a 1912 issue of the magazine Sports Afield: Perfect freedom from annoyance by petty lawbreakers is found in a country where every man carries his own sheriff, judge, and executioner swung on his hip.

Sadly enough, carrying such firepower is thrilling, oppressive, and often leads to calamity as hundreds of police officers and the would-be neighborhood defender George Zimmerman, the killer of 17-year-old Trayvon Martin, found out. It was something I, too, came to understand. Let me tell you how.

The Hunter

The Beretta was not my first gun. That was a .22 bolt-action Savage Arms rifle that my favorite uncle insisted I needed to grow into true manhood. My dad was against harboring a gun in the house, but the masculinity argument must have swayed him. He had been too old for the Army and not having served disturbed him. Uncle Irving was his best friend and a World War II vet.

I was around 12 years old, about the age most kids in gun-owning families are first armed. I was an avid fan of the Western movies of that era, which were always resolved by a gunfight. The idea of owning a gun, that symbol of manhood, genuinely excited me. Somehow, because there were so many rules and restrictions, target practice became a duty, as well as a guilty pleasure. (Many years later, I spoke with an Army sergeant who described shooting as unlimited orgasms for less than six cents each.)

In my early teens, I enjoyed plinking away in the woods, knocking off cans and bottles (Indians and outlaws, of course) until the inevitable need to actually kill something became uncontainable. I had to test myself. I was a responsible kid and heeded my dads ban on shooting at birds and squirrels, even rattlesnakes, but I finally begged permission to go after the rabbit pillaging moms vegetable garden.

I got it on the first shot!

And that was the beginning of my conflict.

It just didnt feel as good as I had dreamt it would, even though my hunting partner, my kid sister, cheered, while my parents appeared both dismayed and impressed. In death, the marauder of our food supply turned out to be just a hungry little bunny.

Was there something missing in the experience or maybe in me, I wondered? Where was the joy I expected in actually gunning something down? Nevertheless, I paid lip-service to what I thought I should have felt, turning the backyard ambush into the equivalent of an Ernest Hemingway safari, a tale told heroically until it became satirical. (Hemingway was my generations avatar of toxic masculinity in literature and in life. And, of course, he killed himself with a gun.)

My sister and I skinned our prey and kept those dried-out rabbits feet for years. But ever since, the idea of hunting, if nothing gets eaten, seemed noxious to me and, as the years passed, I began to think of sport hunters as the leatherette men, a gang of poseurs.

Though I kept that rifle, I never fired it again.

The Shootist

Covering police stories early in my newspaper career, I found myself regularly around guns that were almost never drawn on duty, weapons worn by men and women mostly discomforted by their weight and bulge. But I found that I was still fascinated by them. It was only the idea of using them for hunting that bothered me then, not guns themselves.

Still, weapons training in the Army in 1961 turned out to be no fun. The instructors were even more restrictive than Dad and I proved to be a mediocre shot at best.

Basic training turned out to be boring and disappointing. I had, at least, hoped to get myself in better shape and work on some of those manly arts that were still on my mind, like hand-to-hand combat. But that didnt happen. After basic, I was dumped into clerk/typist school, the Armys numbing attempt to teach soldiers to be all they could be by doing paperwork. The secretarial training drove me so crazy that I went on sick call and started spending nights in the beer garden at Fort Dix, which only made everything worse.

Then, one night, en route to getting wasted again, I wandered into a free shooting range sponsored by the National Rifle Association (NRA). Oh, joy!

Unlimited orgasms, rifles and handguns, jolly instructors. I was still gripped by the fantasy of manly fun. The next thing I knew, I had joined the NRA by mailing in a card from one of its magazines. My mood lifted and, incredibly, I graduated at the top of my clerk/typist class. I then floated through the rest of my six-month active-duty enlistment in the Army information office, trigger happy all the way.

Back in civilian life, writing sports stories for the New York Times in the early 1960s, I discovered that my manhood credentials were unassailable, especially to the guys I now think of as the Bystander Boys. Those were the everyday dudes who genuflect to alpha males, especially the sports heroes they assumed I drank with. Those were specious creds, although it would take me years more to figure that out. Back then, I wasnt yet paying attention to the various kinds of faux manhood that were around me everywhere. Quite the opposite, I was living my own version of it. Especially when I got my beautiful little Beretta.

My frat house roommate Marty, a naval officer, brought back one for each of us from a Mediterranean cruise. It fit our fantasy lives then. After all, wed both studied combat judo with a drunken ex-Marine on a tough street on Manhattans Upper West Side. We were both delusional apprentice bad asses at a time when actor Humphrey Bogart was considered a profile in manhood. We liked the way he smoked and handled a gun in his films. In addition, we had both read the James Bond novels and were proud that 007s early pistol of choice, the Beretta, was now ours, too.

The Gunslinger

To say that I felt bigger and harder with the Beretta in my pocket is true, even if it reduces the experience to a phallic cartoon (which, of course, is just what it was). But there was more. It was proof that I was neither weak, nor soft, and didnt have to feel as vulnerable as I actually did covering stories on the mean streets of the city. It meant I could walk at night in the South Bronx assuming that Id be able to respond to anything, that I would never have to run or surrender my wallet to some teenaged mugger.

So went my weaponized imagination then. I felt primed for action. I was daring the world, strolling through New York with what I took to be the pigeon-toed rolling swagger of that classic star of so many cowboy and war movies, John Wayne. I even began to fancy that I projected a dangerous aura that would intimidate anyone with bad intentions toward me.

Soon enough, I knew, that feeling of invulnerability would have to be tested. The emotional weight of that gun seemed to demand it. I would have to use it and it wouldnt be on a rabbit this time.

I felt feverish with the desire for (and terror of) engagement. I suspect that a kind of temporary insanity set in, that I was gun crazy, drowning in testosterone and the memory of that gives me a feeling for the state of mind of the mad boys now regularly slaughtering people in our country. And here was the strangest thing in retrospect: I dont remember ever thinking that I didnt really know how to use that gun, that Id had no training with it, never even fired it. And in those days, there was no YouTube to show me how.

And then came one lunatic night on Manhattans lower East Side. For a magazine story, I was shadowing a young doctor who worked for a non-profit group visiting sick kids in their squalid rooms. Nervous that the drugs and syringes he was carrying in his medical bag might make him a target, he was hugging the shadows of the dark street as we made our way to his car, half a block away. Suddenly, a group of loud young men appeared, drinking beer. The doctor grabbed my arm. He wanted to duck back into the building we had just walked out of.

Filled with bravado, however, I pulled him along, my other hand in my pocket. I was suddenly on fire in a way that reminded me of my teen self and the rabbit. No punks were going to chase me off that street. I glared at them. They glared right back, but then separated so we could walk quickly through them to our car. I promptly flopped into the passenger seat, suddenly exhausted, wiped out by my own stupidity, my own madness.

Just thinking about it now, almost 60 years later, my spine tingles, my muscles lock, and I feel a deep sense of shame, especially for endangering that young do-good doctor. And the possible outcome, had I done something truly stupid? I imagine the gun snagging on my pocket lining as I tried to pull it out for the first time and shooting myself in the foot or, far worse, shooting someone else. I never carried a gun again.

The Unarmed

When I gave the Beretta back to Marty, I told him only a piece of the truth. I said I was afraid of getting busted with it in a city with such rigorous gun laws. I promised to visit the pistol in California, where he would soon be living. And I did. I shot it there for the first time at a commercial range, along with Martys new .45. He was rapturous, but I was just going through the motions. There was no excitement or pleasure. I had changed.

I was done with guns and felt like a fool for ever thinking differently. But because of my experience I do understand why, in this thoroughly over-armed land of ours, so many others consider such weaponry (and far more powerful and deadly versions) so important to who they are. Having experienced a sense of that identity myself, I dont look down on them for it. And I understand that behind the mostly male pleasure in being armed can lie complex feelings. As historian Adam Hochschild noted in the New York Review of Books several years ago:

The passion for guns felt by tens of millions of Americans also has deep social and economic roots. The fervor with which they believe liberals are trying to take all their guns away is so intense because so much else has been taken away.

Even more troubling is that many of them believe they will need those guns for defense against the rampaging gangs (calling themselves militias?) that would rise after the possible collapse of American democracy as weve known it, which any number of armed men dont trust to protect them anyway. (Thank you, Donald Trump, most Republicans, and, alas, my old benefactor the NRA!)

Is stocking up on AR-15s and thousands of rounds of ammunition paranoia or preparation? While a Beretta would never be enough, it turns out that such lesser guns have done most of the damage to Americans. Mass murders with military-style automatic rifles, especially school shootings, have reaped so much of the attention, but its been handguns that have killed far more Americans every year, most often via suicide (which is why its so sad to see so many of us increasingly arming ourselves to the teeth).

More than half of the 45,222 gun-related deaths in 2020, the last year for which we have solid statistics, were suicides, while only (yes, put that in scare quotes) 513 of them were thanks to mass shootings, defined as an incident in which four or more people are shot, even if no one is killed.

Handguns, not long guns, were involved in 59% of the 13,620 deaths classified as murders that year as well, while assault rifles were involved only 3% of the time. So banning those military-grade weapons, manufactured to kill as many people as possible as quickly as possible, while distinctly a sane idea amid this mounting firearms insanity of ours, would probably have little real effect on our proliferating gun culture. Given the politics right now, its hard to imagine any administration attempting to begin the disarming of America.

Unfortunately, its easier to imagine a future government eager to build that arsenal to ever more destructive extremes, both at home among individuals and throughout the world as arms merchants, the ultimate in gun culture.

Its not hard to imagine this country strutting all too manfully toward the apocalypse with more than a Beretta in its pocket.

This column is distributed by TomDispatch.

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A Country Armed to the Teeth - CounterPunch.org - CounterPunch

Attorney Ben Crump meets with a client in the Netflix documentary Civil: Ben Crump, which premieres on Netflix on Sunday, June 19. Photo: Netflix

He seems to be everywhere whenever a Black person is killed during a police shooting, hes there to help. Attorney Ben Crumps nickname is Americas Black attorney general, and in a new Netflix documentary, we get to know a little about him.

For Civil: Ben Crump, filmmaker Nadia Hallgren (director of the Michelle Obama documentary Becoming) followed Crump for a year of busy traveling the man is constantly on the road as he pursued a record settlement in the wrongful death of George Floyd. Crump was the Floyd familys first call after Floyds death while in the custody of four Minneapolis police officers.

But the Floyd case is not the sole focus of Hallgrens film. Crumps law firm, Ben Crump Law, based in Tallahassee, Fla., fields around 500 phone calls a day. The quest for social justice comes in many forms, from Black farmers who may have been poisoned by Monsanto fertilizers to banking while Black cases his firm has collected some $200 million for banking victims.

Theres no ambiguity about it, Crump says in the film. I know who I am, and whose I am. I have been given influence for a reason. And shame on me if I dont use that influence. We are stronger than they ever perceived us to be.

Crump, now 52, was also a dashing young man. He went to Florida State University, earning his law degree in the mid-1990s. Theres great footage from his wedding to Genae, whom he met in law school (she also has a law degree), and she and their daughter, Brooklyn, are the light in Crumps life.

Most of the general public first became aware of Crump when he represented the family of Trayvon Martin, who was killed in 2012 by George Zimmerman, a member of a community watch in his neighborhood in Sanford, Fla. Since then, he has taken high-profile case after high-profile case, gaining millions of dollars in compensation for families in civil cases.

Crump contends that since the United States is the ultimate capitalist society, one road to equality is through the pocketbook, and that has brought some heat. During a 2021 interview with CBS Sunday Morning, Ted Koppel said Crump thrives on media attention and asked him, its made you a lot of money, hasnt it?

One wonders if Koppel might ask the same question to other non-Black high-profile lawyers fighting for social justice, such as womens rights advocate Gloria Allred.

Also shown in the film is, of course, Fox News, whose indignant anchors accuse him of playing the race card.

But thats the whole point in a discrimination case, isnt it?

Civil compensation often has to stand in for legal justice. Yet its clear that to Crump, nothing can substitute for a criminal conviction. He got Floyds family a record $27 million, but when Hallgrens camera catches Crump in real time listening to the verdict read in the murder trial of Derek Chauvin the man convicted of killing Floyd his unburdened emotion shows whats truly important.

MCivil: Ben Crump: Documentary. Directed by Nadia Halgren. (PG-13. 101 minutes.) Available to stream Sunday, June 19, on Netflix

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Review: Netflixs Civil follows a momentous year in the life of Americas Black attorney general - SF Chronicle Datebook

Students for Socialism protest on campus demanding that Kyle Rittenhouse not be allowed to enroll at Arizona State University, Wednesday, Dec. 1, 2021, at ASU in Tempe, Ariz. Protesters were demanding the university disavow the 18-year-old, who was acquitted of murder in the deadly shootings during 2020's unrest in Kenosha, Wis.Photo: Matt York (AP)

Donald Trump built an empire on lies, the labor of unpaid contractors and possibly cooked financials. He was rewarded with a stint in the White House. Some of us are old enough to remember the name Oliver North, who flipped a scandal over illegal weapons sales, Nicaraguan rebels and American hostages into a Congressional run, a Fox News gig and the presidency of the NRA. A decade after killing Trayvon Martin, George Zimmerman is still outchea, alive, free and searching for a come-up whether by slinging plagiarized art or suing everyone from politicians to Martins parents.

In short, grifting is the second act of many conservative miscreants career. Because Zimmerman gave us a lesson on libel, and because Rittenhouse is litigious, Im definitely not calling the latter a miscreant or grifter. I am wondering out loud where this whole bit about where or whether hes actually going to college is heading.

Rittenhouse said last week on the podcast the Charlie Kirk Show that he was headed to Texas A&M Universitymajor undecidedto study.

But the school says that statement didnt give what it was supposed to gave.

From USA TodayThe College Station-based school soon debunked his claim.

He is not a student this summer and has not been admitted as a student this fall, Texas A&M spokesperson Kelly Brown told USA TODAY.

The deadline to apply for the fall semester was in March.

Citing privacy issues, Brown did not verify whether Rittenhouse applied to the school.

Rittenhouse last year was acquitted of criminal charges related to carrying an AR-15-style rifle across state lines as a 17-year-old in 2020 to protect a business that didnt belong to him, and then killing two people and wounding a third during protests over a police shooting. Several GOP Congressmen offered him jobs that he turned down following the acquittal.

Since then, hes accepted a speaking engagement before Trump-supporting political organization Turning Point USA and was one of last years highest-rated guests on Tucker Carlsons Fox News show in addition to multiple other interviews. He says he wasnt paid for any of the appearances, but college or no, its clear theres a payday in his future if he wants it.

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Kyle Rittenhouse is Lying About Going to College - The Root

A Buffalo Public Schools administrator has been chosen a national leader.

Fatima Morrell, associate superintendent of culturally and linguistically responsive initiatives, has been selected out of hundreds of applications across the U.S. as one of TIME magazine's 10 "Innovative Teachers of the Year."

This inaugural list profiles teachers who, despite all the challenges of the 2021-2022 school year, went above and beyond to change the educational landscape and make a positive impact on their community.

Time said Morrell was chosen for the significant impact she had on Buffalo relating to anti-racism curriculum. She helped redirect the curriculum to include lessons with principles including empathy, diversity and restorative justice. Morrell said it was part of a six-year effort that created a new office of Culturally and Linguistically Responsive Initiatives in the city school district to address racial inequalities in the classroom, the curriculum and the community. And it has become especially significant in light of the racially-motivated mass shooting at the Jefferson Avenue Tops supermarket May 14.

Read and listen to her conversation with WBFO's Marian Hetherly below:

WBFO's Marian Hetherly talks with Fatima Morrell

"We have we literally built an office from the ground up, called the Office of Culturally and Linguistically Responsive Initiatives, to address racial inequalities in our school district community, in our schools, classrooms and our curriculum providing equity spaces for our students and professional development for our teachers, as well as updating our curriculum to include those voices that are historically marginalized in our curriculum, our textbooks and, in many other ways, in our schools and classrooms.

"So we really went on a very ambitious endeavor to train 3,000-plus teachers three times over the last last three or four years in any bias, any racist teaching, and teaching culturally responsive practices and inclusion. And also our administrators and parents having received the same training. And also bringing in our nation's top experts on culturally responsive teaching and pedagogy, such as Ava Max Kennedy on anti-racism. Nikole Hannah-Jones has been here. We actually implemented the 1619 Project at the high school as a mandated requirement for all teachers of social studies and our district. We created the Emancipation curriculum to, again, in the histories and narrations and voices of communities of color that are so often left out of the American story that is told in our schools and in our textbooks. We really wanted to ensure that our our district community had a great office that was a resource for elevating these practices, understandings and ways of knowing in our school district.

"You know, 86% of our scholars are of color. Almost a flip of that, approximately 80% of our teachers are white. And we know that many of them is their first experiences with anyone of color when they come to work in the Buffalo Public Schools. So we always felt that it was really important that we integrate and infuse into our standing curriculum because we knew that it was very Eurocentric-based in nature that we included these other narrations and perspectives and voices and advocacy for social justice into our standing curriculum. And we have been doing that quite effectively for about three years along with the required teacher and administrator and parent training that goes along with it.

Black Lives Matter

"I will have to say to you that, after the incident with George Floyd, you know, we looked at that degradation of human life and dehumanization, another event of dehumanization, but this time it played out in such a horrific way on national media and social media platforms. To actually watch it was just horrific. And it really struck a chord with our teachers in the Buffalo Public Schools. In fact, we had a demonstration that summer of our teachers. Approximately 700 had Black Lives Matter protests right here on the steps of City Hall. And so many of those teachers are curriculum writers in the Buffalo Public Schools.

"They came back to the table and said, 'Hey, we really have to do more, we have to ensure that our young people know their value, we have to ensure that their culture is in this curriculum, we have to ensure we edify their voices even more so now. Because we knew there were many, many young people who are watching this play live out live and, of course, it became a national racial reckoning for our country, as we dealt with the dual pandemics: one being COVID-19 that had us all locked away in our homes glued to the television in a computer for 18 months, and then the other one being systemic racism that just really took a lead in terms of the dialogues and conversations.

"So teachers came back to the table after George Floyd and really began to say, it has to go deeper, it has to be more widespread. It can't be superficial on any level. And, of course, these were our white teachers, as well as our black and Latino teachers that were really saying, we need this in our schools. And we started writing more lessons that really focused in on our commonalities, but also included the narrations and stories and histories of our black, Asian, Latinx and, of course, indigenous student populations. We want to make sure that we honor those contributions and the intellectual brilliance and capacity of all people and especially, Black and brown people whose stories aren't told.

Buffalo Supermarket Shooting

"We also said, we don't want to ever create another Derek Chauvin or George Zimmerman, we don't want to create these folks, right? These people who have learned that they don't have to value Black lives or brown lives. We want all of our children to see the common humanity in all people. And so we said, we never want to raise another person like this person who committed this massacre on the Black community in Buffalo, and who actually touched the lives of 10 innocent people, many of them community giants who worked for excellence in education and equity. Were taken out, were killed that day. And so, in light of that massacre happening at our own doorstep, in our own backyard, we're now also doubling down on our efforts even more to say, this cannot just be about Black children knowing their own history and culture. This has to be about white children also knowing the history and culture of Black children.

"Because we know that they are fed over time with stereotypes about Black and brown people, and specifically black people. I'm talking about racial stereotypes. There's hate that is occurring. Each and every day, they fought on the national stage, like we've never seen it before, on January 6, right there at the Capitol building, which many of our children had a field trip there just the year prior to that. And so our young people have been exposed to this hatred and our white children are being exposed at even exponentially greater levels, because there's no one inserting, 'Hey, here's another perspective, here's another voice on what democracy means to this group of people.' Because we all believe in the democratic ideal of America, but we have many different perspectives about what those democratic principles mean for us as a community.

"So there are white children who don't even know where they come from many times, their history or their background, if they're Irish students or if they're German. They don't even know their own history and background to be able to love themselves. As this young man who came into Tops and stole and traumatized our community, and stole 10 lives of our community, they know how to love themselves. When you can't love yourself, because you don't know about yourself and you haven't been nurtured or you haven't been taught to value life, then you can't value someone else's life. And, therefore, it's easier to dehumanize someone based on their race and based on their social economic status or their gender identity or whatever it is.

"And so that's what we're doing in Buffalo. We're saying this is not only for Black and brown children who definitely need to know their greatness, because we're sending them so many messages of failure, so many negative ideas that help to develop negative self-concept. And we need to develop positive self-concept.

Healing Conversations

"But turning to this recent event, what are we doing with white children to ensure that they are globally competent citizens of America that respect all people? That also becomes a conversation around culturally responsive practices and knowing the greatness of other people in the common humanity. And where there are differences, why those differences are so great. Because that's what makes us America, our differences. And so in light of all of this, absolutely, we're doubling down on, of course, our healing practices in the district, our social emotional learning practices and being able to restore ourselves. It's traumatizing, right? And so, how do we restore ourselves as a community to remember our greatness, right? Our greatness as Buffalonians? But our greatness as Black and brown people? Our greatness as people, period, in this district community, in this city.

"So, yeah, a lot of conversations are occurring and the work continues. And we're now, you know, really, at this time, focused in on those healing conversations and those healing dialogues and how do we move forward as a district community. Who has been harmed and how to repair that harm? We ask for help from everyone, even those who don't look like us, to understand our plight and to understand that racism is real. And so with white supremacy, it's not something someone's talking about in a back room and it's just superficial. It's actually real, okay?

"This young man was a teen. He had guidance on this, he'd had thoughts that were put in his head, in one way or another, because he can't just make it up on his own, because he's still a child. So he was on these websites, he was interfacing with people saying things in the media regarding replacement theory and he ran on those ideas, because there was nothing else inserted to say, 'Wait a minute. Here's another idea. You might be looking at that the wrong way. You might be perceiving something that's actually not.' There's no one to interrupt the white supremacist notions that he had maintained once they were started.

"We are actually interrupting white supremacist notions of superiority. We're interrupting the marginalization of communities of color in our schools and our classrooms and our textbooks. But most certainly, after the incident at Tops on May 14, we are doubling down on how we ensure our kids are safe. But not just physically safe, intellectually safe, all children of all colors. How are we making sure that they are intellectually safe, so they don't get caught up in this web of lies and half truths and misconceptions about people of color and all people."

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Buffalo associate superintendent named to Time's 'Innovative Teachers of the Year' list - WBFO

The University of Notre Dame issued a statement saying it is appalled that the suspect in the Buffalo grocery store shooting cited an article written by one of its professors in his diatribe before he killed 10 people.

Payton Gendron, 18, has been charged with murder and is being held without bail.

In 2013, John Gaski, associate professor at Notre Dame, wrote a commentary titled A Discussion on Race, Crime and the Inconvenient Facts, where he makes claims of race-based rape and crime statistics but fails to cite where he got his information.

A group prays at the site of a memorial for the victims of the Buffalo supermarket shooting outside the Tops Friendly Market on May 21, 2022, in Buffalo, N.Y. (Joshua Bessex/AP)

A 180-page diatribe allegedly written by Gendron refers to one of the claims in Gaskis article and links to it. The diatribe, which officials are working on to verify its authenticity, repeatedly cites the great replacement theory, a conspiracy theory that falsely claims white people are being replaced.

On May 14, Gendron allegedly went to a supermarket in a majority Black neighborhood in Buffalo, New York, and opened fire, killing 10 and injuring three, most of them Black. The mass shooting is being investigated as a hate crime.

The Notre Dame connection came to light after comedian Liz Hynes, a writer on the Last Week Tonight show, posted on Instagram and Twitter about the article.

In the article, Gaski wrote, Because the number of white-on-black rape is so low nationally in any given year, the ratio ranges from 100-to-1 to infinity. This is the part cited in the diatribe.

Gaski does not mention that rape and sexual violence are difficult to measure because the crime is underreported. He also provides only one citation throughout the article.

The article was written after George Zimmerman shot and killed 17-year-old Trayvon Martin in 2012, and it accuses prominent leaders, including Al Sharpton and Barack Obama, of race-baiting.

This petty, intellectually dishonest piece, dripping in racial animus, has forever linked the University of Notre Dame to a white supremacist murderer, Hynes wrote on her social media platforms three days after the mass shooting. No marketing on earth can undo that. But an acknowledgment would be a start.

On Thursday, Joel Curran, the universitys top spokesperson, issued the following statement from the university: We are appalled that a 2013 article by John Gaski, an associate professor at Notre Dame, was cited by the perpetrator of the heinous murders of innocent people in Buffalo. Whatever professor Gaskis intentions, we deeply regret that his words were used to support a doctrine of racial hatred. We urge all, at Notre Dame or elsewhere, to speak and act in ways that never give harbor to hatred and violence.

On Friday, Gaski issued his own statement, published on the universitys news webpage.

It is sobering that a portion of an article I wrote in August 2013 was cited in the document composed by the Buffalo shooting suspect, Gaski wrote. It was, of course, never my intent to in any way incite violence in fact, just the opposite. I also am appalled and deeply distressed that the information I provided is associated in any way with this young mans horrific actions.

An attempt to reach Gaski by phone was unsuccessful. He is listed as an associate professor of marketing in Notre Dames Mendoza College of Business directory. In response to a request for comment, a Mendoza college spokesperson referred the Tribune to the schools published statement.

scasanova@chicagotribune.com

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Notre Dame says it is 'appalled' the Buffalo shooting suspect cited an article by one of its professors - Chicago Tribune