North Carolina Newspapers

i L i Thursday, November 29, 2007 fight student apathy, see the AIDS quilt at Western Carolina \2004 episode of Cold Case, one of TV’s numerous police investiga tion shows, brought viewers to the crime scene against an openly gay man in San Francisco during the 1983 outbreak of AIDS. The show, entitled “It’s Raining Men,’’ depicted flashbacks of the mur dered hero’s life as he confronted homophobia and worked to curb the ' spread of AIDS, finishing with the show’s usual cheesy musical montage. Such depictions, while noble in intention, confirm many American’s notion that AIDS is a disease of the past - a disease of a distant continent. But sadly, this is not the case. Last year 19,996 people living in North Carolina had AIDS or HIV, including 404 people in Buncombe County. Others likely contracted the disease but failed to get tested. The AIDS quilt, a collection of more than 40,000 panels dedicated to individual AIDS victims, helps bring home the personal impact of the disease. The quilt travels to our sister school in Cullowhee in honor of World AIDS Day from Dec. 3 to Dec. 6. While our student body supports numerous human rights groups like SDS.ACLU, Amnesty International, SDA and the Student Global AIDS campaign, it often seems the campus body is more interested in the most recent band to rock the Orange Peel than standing for basic human rights. While UNC Asheville talks the talk of the premier liberal arts school in North Carolina with a reputation for leftward thinking, the student body often falls short of backing classroom discussions with actions. Traveling to Cullowhee to see this symbol of international compassion dives students an opportunity for action. Hopefully students will shake off the frazzle of pre-exam stress from Monday to Wednesday to support the NAMES Project Foundation, a nonprofit organization that maintains the quilt. Currently, nurse and outreach coordinator for the student health center Linda Pyeritz is looking to organize transportation for UNC Asheville students to check the quilt out. But as of yet she’s the only faculty mem ber interested in driving students. Hopefully, more health and counseling faculty and members of UNC Asheville’s chapter of the Student Global AIDS campaign will organize easy transportation to see the quilt. North Carolina colleges have an illustrious history of supporting human rights. In 1960, students from Greensboro’s N.C. A&T organized mass sit-ins at Woolworth’s stores to protest segregation. UNC Chapel Hill served as a hotbed for Vietnam protests later in the decade. As products of this legacy, we have to cut back on apathy and stand up for human rights. Earlier this semester, SDS memorialized the U.S. soldiers and Iraqi civilians who have lost their lives since the 2003 invasion in a refresh ingly nonpolarizing display on the quad. This is the trend that UNC Asheville most follow. Hopefully this means that plenty of Bulldogs will make the trek to Cullowhee next week. Ben Smith Managing Editor The BLUE BANNER Editorial Board Karpen Hail 019 828.251.6586 banner@unca.edu lisaV. Gflk^ie, Editor-in-Chief Kri^iai Marrfiall, News Editor Devoi Daw, Sports Editor Poinie Leas, Photo Editor Wally Hosn, Ad Director Riiggjp. Ridgeway, Business Editor Aaron DaWstrom, News Assistent Mary Ball, Sports Assistant Brian Gall^o’, Arts Etc. Assistant Bta Smitii, Managing Editor EanilyMase, A/ts Etc. Editor Melissa Dedaat, L/fesQ'/es Editor Mary McCoy, Online Editor Emily Sigmon, Business Manager AdilqfHome, Chief Copy Editor Hannah Doyte, Lifestyles Assistant Christa Chaqpp^e, Opinion Assistant Micatel Gouge, Faculty Adviser (TheBLUE Banner} Editorials Page 11 Gun control still a U ,S. taboo The Blue Banner is UNC Asheville’s student newspaper. We publish each Thursday except during summer sessions, finals week and holiday breaks. Our office is located in Karpen Hall, 017. i twc tr. The Blue Banner is a designated public forum “d we comes letters bie editor and articles, considering them on a basis of interest, 'imeliness. Letters and articles should be e-mailed to banner@U Asheville.edu and limited to 300 words. They should be sign writer’s name, followed by the year in school, major or other relat ons p to UNC Asheville. Include a telephone number to aid in venficat . articles submitted tme subject to Siting. By Laura Eshelman Contributing Writer Despite popular notions, Americans traveling abroad com monly encounter less hostility from others than they do curiosity or confusion about cultural norms in the United States. It is an effort in vain to explain some of them. The peanut butter and jelly sandwich remains the ultimate, scrumptious staple of energy and protein for Americans. But its sig nificance is lost beyond U.S. bor ders where, oddly, many people find it disgusting. Still, to really baffle a non-American, bust out the righteous spiel about your Second Amendment rights. Our infatuation with guns is a bigger mystery to the rest of the world than anything we could put on a sandwich. Perhaps Americans are simply protective of their constitutional rights and feel the need to inter pret them as strictly as possible, while carrying a big stick, just in case history repeats itself. The purpose of the Second Amendment ensured that the country would be able to defend itself in the event of another revo lution, which considering the cir cumstances in the 18th century, was not unrealistic. But in 2007, it’s improbable the Brits will strike again, especially consider ing that only five percent of the United Kingdom’s households have guns versus 39 percent of households in the United States. Also, considering the United States consistently beats the rest of the developed world in annual I .aura Fishclman (Contributing writer gun-related fatalities (LS per 100,000 people, versus an aver age of roughly six in 35 other countries), Americans kill each other off as efficiently as a foreign army would. In Washington, 31 per 100.000 people are killed by a firearm, yet gun-toting advocates still balk at an upcoming Supreme Court review of whether or not handguns should be banned in the nation’s capitol. It’s not that other countries don’t allow guns for personal use; some countries such as Finland and Switzerland actually rival the United States for gun ownership percentages. The difference is that they seem to realize that guns are not tinker toys, as evidenced by the fact that all of them require licenses. Not even all states have yet put that into effect. For example, Virginia laws allow residents to carry firearms with up to 20 rounds without a license, which made it easier lor Seung-Hui Cho to legally pur chase his weapons two months before his deadly rampage at Virginia Tech. In his native South Korea, the acquisition would have been monumentally more chal lenging. if not impossible. Random killing sprees still occur every once in a while around the world, but only in the United States will several consec utive office and school shootings in a matter of weeks not draw widespread national concern. More distressing than its relative frequency is how' much the prob lem gets ignored in the country which coined “going postal" over two decades ago, and still hasn’t gone to lengths to prevent it frotn being used. The whole point of gun-control is self-explanatory - it's about control, not prohibition, and there’s a reason for it. The tragedy at Virginia Tech is one of many examples of how easily guns can fall into the wrong hands. This is in large part because background checks and restrictions are insuffi cient, and licensing and registra tion is not federally mandated. In short, it is due to a lack of plain common sense. Furthermore, when our forefa thers decided that citizens could “bear arms’’ (an ambiguous gen eralization to begin with), “arms" at that time meant single-shot rifles and muskets, not semi-auto matics. There is no reason why any citizen should be granted the “right” to own a device that could take out a crowd with a couple of squeezes on a trigger. It's asking for disaster, and that’s exactly what happens. In all logic, if the issue was truly about safety, more Americans would clamor for stricter gun laws to make sure only the most responsible and sta ble people could access limited artillery. The real issue is about exaggerated insecurity. Without living in a war-zone. Americans still like to pretend that they do for some reason, ergo it is crucial to be equally or better equipped than everyone else on one s cul- de-sac. Whoever keeps the biggest, baddest guns in theii closet is obviously the biggest, baddest Rambo of the ‘burbs, hence the fascination with killing machines. It’s more compensa tion for lack of assurance than body appendages, though in some cases it is probably both. There are certainly stranger, more disturbing obsessions than those Americans have with their beloved guns. The convenience of someone whose hobbies may include target practice or hunting is not worth another person’s blood, whether that person is a mentally unstable young man or a 66-year-old vice president. Though the Second Amendment may have a grounded historical context, it’s high time to re-evalu ate it in a present context, which is scarcely similar to the era in which the founders drafted the Constitution. Regardless ol what one’s spectrum of interests include, tools meant to cause death need to be regulated, and they need to be more heavily reg ulated. Unfortunately, it seems that numbers will keep rising before people realize that happi ness is not a warm gun after all. From SGA School ups tuition for next year by $98.50 By Tristyn Card Student Body President I hope you all had a wonderful Thanksgiving break leaving you refreshed and ready for the two- and-a-half week blitz to wrap this semester up. The final recommendation of the fees committee this year was to raise annual student fees $98.50 out of the maximum $98.60 for the 2008-2009 aca demic year. This puts students’ general fees at $1,615.35. To catch you up on the student fees outcome, the final figures recommend a $46.50 increase for the student activity fee and $18 increase for athletics. The educa tion and technology fee was upgraded by $19 and a $15 increase was prescribed for the health services fee. I’d like to clarify how that does and does not effect the mandatory health insur ance proposal. The mandatory health insurance proposal that is currently in circu lation is just that - an insurance proposal. Some of us have it, oth ers don’t. For those who don t and are taking more than 12 hours, come next fall, we will most likely need to scrape up another $600-plus to get insured through the university, as a part of the cost of attendance. However, this has nothing directly to do with the health services fee, which goes toward the managing budget of the department. The initial fee increase estimate CLRSSIFIED RDS Fristyn Card Student Body Fresident was off by less than $6 over all from the final recommendation. These adjustments come after research and number crunching, department presentations and input from diverse constituents and students. Then members of the committee that represent the students, faculty and staff of the university, as well as the depart ments concerned with the fees, discuss and agree upon the final recommendation. The initial proposal was pre sented to the Student Government Association for feedback. The SGA held a special session and called for the committee’s recom mendations to adju.st the student activity and health services by an increase of about .$2 dollars each. The student .senate also voted to keep the athletic fee increa.se at $14 from the previous year. This was a recommendation made to the committee whose recommen dation will go to the chancellor, senior staff and other governing boards for final approval. Also up for approval, is the Campus-initiated Tuition Increase committee’s recommen dation on the tuition increase for the next academic year. The cap for this increase as a part of a four-year plan by University President Erskine Bowles is at 1.4 percent annually, which comes out to roughly $8(),()()(). Sure, there’s a lot to be done with $80,0()() and the committee acknowledged this, asking that should there be a tuition increase, which goes toward student-based and academic needs. Again, this is only a recommendation to the chancellor and senior staff, and it asks for UNC Asheville to forego an in-state tuition increase for 2008-2009 and to raise out-of- .state tuition by $212 per student, a 2.8 percent increase. Finally, a look at transportation fees. The SGA passed resolution SSB007-0049, calling lor a reor ganization of the transportation fee. Currently all students, stafi and faculty pay a $70 parking fee, including those students who don’t park on campus and fresh men who aren’t allowed to have cars. The resolution that stems from the transportation committee’s discussions, proposes that all stu dents pay a flat $30 transportation fee and that those upper classmen who choose to drive, purchase a $70 parking permit. Yes, this increases the total cost for drivers from $70 to $I(X), but it also makes the transportation fee fair to all students and will finance more bike racks, preferably cov ered, a shuttle and other trans portation alternatives and hope fully better bus routes. The facul ty senate passed a motion to sup port the spirit of the bill. More when I have it, good luck with those exams. We are a successful health A fitness business poised for growth with your creative, guerilla and Internet market ing skills, and your ability to assist in web development systems that keep the company running smoothly. This is a part-time entry level web devel opment position. Web programming skills are required but most impor tantly is the ability to pick up new skills. 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