Darts and Laurels: March 29, 2019

You sit anxiously in front of your laptop watching the tiny numbers at the edge of your screen. You are waiting for the hour mark to hit 8 a.m. Sheets of papers are strewn out in front of you with highlighted phrases slashed across each page. You do your best to organize your thoughts because it’s almost go time. It’s almost time to pick your classes. A virtual tug of war awaits. You know you are going to have to fight for the classes you want.

You stretch your arms out in front of you and lace your fingers together, creating a satisfying crack in your knuckles. You take a long sip of your coffee and watch as 7:59 turns to 8. You quickly dive into ONE.UF and start searching for your classes. You have become a pro after all these semesters finessing your way into classes, but this time the stakes are high. There is a class you need desperately. You quickly type in the course code and go searching for an empty seat. You finally find it, with one seat available in the class. You release a sigh of relief as you hit the “Add Course” button. You look at your new, pristine Fall 2019 schedule. Situated perfectly in the middle of the week was the one class you truly needed…

Darts & Laurels

This week we have to start with some major U.S. news: the Mueller Report. Special Counsel Robert S. Mueller III submitted a 300-page report on Russian interference in the 2016 election. On Sunday, U.S. Attorney General William Barr released a four-page statement explaining that Mueller’s report found no evidence that President Donald Trump had colluded with Russia in the 2016 election. This means Mueller found no evidence of a conspiracy between the Trump campaign and Russia to undercut the fairness of the election. The report took two years to complete. We appreciate that the findings of the investigation have been released; however, a dart goes to the U.S. government for not allowing a faster release of the 300-page report. The document has to go through a series of examinations before it’s released to Congress, so as to not let out any sensitive government information, whatever that may be.

We are giving a laurel to the U.S. Supreme Court after it officially denied an appeal by gun rights advocates to end a Trump administration policy banning the use of bump stocks. Bump stocks are used as attachments to guns that allow for rapid firing. Machine guns are largely illegal in the U.S., and bump stocks create a mechanism that allows guns to act like machine guns, the Justice Department said. The ban took effect on Tuesday. It was created after a gunman used a bump stock to kill 58 people in Las Vegas in 2017. It’s a welcome change to gun laws in the U.S., but those laws are still in need of drastic changes. As we’ve seen in the weeks since the New Zealand Christchurch shooting, if a country truly wants to implement stricter laws, it can be done in a timely fashion.

A laurel goes to Florida’s state attorney office after it cleared the convictions of two men, Clifford Williams, 76, and Hubert “Nathan” Myers, 61. This comes a year after the state attorney’s office in Jacksonville first began its initiative of reviewing claims of wrongful convictions. The two men were convicted and sentenced to life in prison after they were found to have shot and killed Jeanette Williams and attempted to murder her girlfriend, Nina Marshall, in 1976. The men were exonerated after 42 years in prison after it was found that the testimony of Nina Marshall, which was the entire basis of the case, was found to be wrong. There was no physical evidence linking the men to the scene. We hope Florida continues righting its wrongs and continues to look into wrongful convictions.