The Gunner - March 16, 2006

No discussion of Law School Life is complete without first confronting a small, aggressive subspecies of first-year law student affectionately referred to, the world over, as "the gunner." Their numbers are small but most everyone has their own gunner story to tell. Law school administrators, it seems, have become adept and spreading them across the sections of an incoming class like so many air marshals across an airline's fleet. Air marshals are equipped with handcuffs, handguns and a force continuum that permits the unannounced wielding of death. Gunners are armed with opinions, questions and, on the right day, the capacity to test even the most hopeful person's will to live.

At first glance, gunners are no different than any other breed of law student. They're generally personable, they drink coffee, they fret about exams. A closer look, however, reveals a pair of unique physical and environmental traits. First is an over-developed deltoid region, undoubtedly the product of extended periods with an arm raised anxiously skyward. Second is acrophobia. That is to say, gunners are afraid of heights. How else does one explain their insistence upon sitting in the first two rows of seats? I'm fairly certain enthusiasm is not inversely proportional to altitude.

Like most people I know, I'm conflicted about gunners. On one hand, we need them. They keep the professor distracted. The guy sitting to my left isn't going to beat his best time on the expert level of Minesweeper if he has to look up periodically in order to avoid the appearance of a complete lack of engagement. And you can be certain, with the intermittent connectivity of our wireless network, that the girl down and to the right won't be able to order that belted cardigan sweater before Nordstrom runs out if she has to put down her credit card and do the same.

More importantly, though, gunners keep class discussion moving; not moving forward, mind you, but moving nonetheless. The bane of many, they are a godsend for the few who managed to get through but half of the day's assigned reading because Thirsty Thursday somehow turned into Thirsty Early Friday Morning. They expertly retrace their steps with elaborate hypotheticals and reintroduce old concepts for the sake of their own personal clarification, seemingly unaware that each class meeting is a segment of a longer trajectory whose termination point is preparedness for the final exam.

Don't get me wrong, sometimes a gunner has something relevant or useful to contribute...even a broken clock is right twice a day. This fortuitous exception, however, doesn't necessarily invalidate the essential truth of the rule. The reality is a motivated gunner can keep an entire class in a holding pattern for upwards of 15 minutes with just one question. Their facility in this regard leaves no doubt in my mind that there is a position at Newark Air Traffic Control for each and every one of them. To the layperson, this probably sounds like hyperbole. To the now-wizened 1L, I assure you, this sounds like last Tuesday.

To be clear, this isn't an indictment of those students who participate regularly in class discussion and contribute analysis or fact-recitation that is consistently on point. Those students--of whom there are many--are the backbone of a vital, successful student body. Gunners are the pinky toe. Everyone accepts that we have them, but if they didn't exist shoes would fit A LOT better.

The conflict with respect to gunners arises, ultimately, when the utility (to the few) of their ambitious-yet-distracting tendencies is outweighed by mounting frustration (of the many). When that frustration reaches critical mass, groans cascade down from the back rows of the classroom and a flurry of typing builds across the ranks. A quick glance at their computer screens reveals phrases like "ENOUGH ALREADY!!1!" and "PLEASE SHOOT ME" flashing conspicuously in Instant Messenger dialog boxes in various colors of bolded, 26pt font.

Mark, 29, a graduate of Penn Law, still gets heated when he thinks about a gunner from his 1L year they took to calling 'Secretariat.' On the first day of Con Law, the professor asked the class what the Constitution meant to them. It was a fairly innocuous question meant, undoubtedly, to get a feel for the students' familiarity with the subject matter. Secretariat, seated in front of course, raised his hand eagerly and, in an attempt to enlighten his fellow law students, informed them that "the Constitution is...what constitutes us." His revelation was met with deafening silence. I asked Mark if anyone laughed and he said, "oddly, no. We were too stunned to laugh. We could tell by the sincerity in his voice that he was completely serious."

Mark had a seemingly endless supply of Secretariat stories. He admits that some of them are uproariously funny, but, for him, only retrospectively. I asked him why that was and he said, simply, "Secretariat was a Yes Butter." I hadn't the slightest clue what he was talking about. Mark took a deep breath and laid it out for me.

"You know how every case has a holding and an essential set of facts?" I nodded. "And you know how most of the time your professor has to kind of walk you through the court's reasoning and the implications of the holding? Well no matter which area of constitutional or property law was being covered during a given class, in the middle of the professor's explanation, Secretariat would interrupt with 'yes, but...'"

What followed, according to Mark, was always a rambling, long-winded misappropriation of the dissenting opinion or the basic principles of logic. Now, I'll admit, I haven't been in law school very long, but I'm pretty sure when the person at the front of the room in the business suit, with the alphabet soup after her name and the CV longer than a Faulkner sentence, tells you what the holding means, you can be sure she knows what she is talking about.

The coup de grace--and the incident from which he derived his nickname--came during a review session for the Property final. They were working through possessory estates, talking about equity, when Secretariat insisted to the professor that the word "equity" was actually derived from the Latin "equine"...as in the horse. The professor called his assertion an affront to common sense. The class snickered its collective disapproval, but Secretariat was undeterred. He persisted with his argument even going so far as to declare as dispositive of his claim the fact that the two words shared the same first four letters.

The entire class booed him. He kept talking, so they booed him louder. "It was the funniest and saddest thing I had ever seen," Mark sputtered out between gasps of breath and fits of laughter. Secretariat--his real name was Harold--managed to graduate and find a decent job, but not before spending 2 ½ years on the business-end of John Elway and Mr. Ed jokes

In the end, gunners are like anything else in life. They are what you make of them. You can let them compel you to commit battery. You can let their inane questions--'what if the Constitution never happened?'--drive you to distraction. You can ignore them. Or you can embrace them for those instances in which they fill the void created by the natural timidity of first year law students. After all, timid or not, when you have a fantasy football roster to tinker with, the only thing more dangerous than 90 minutes of Gunner Perspective is 90 minutes of tortured silence. That's when the cold calling starts, and no one wants that.

Posted by nils at 9:17 AM

Print Friendly · Digg it · del.icio.us · StumbleUpon · Netscape

Comment Policy:

Anonymous comments are allowed. All anonymous comments and comments from those not registered with TypeKey are moderated. They WILL NOT appear until they are read and approved by a moderator.

It is strongly encouraged that you sign up and login with a TypeKey account. Once you do that, your comments will be immediately posted.

Comments

Hey guess what? That wasnt funny. At all. In fact, it was downright worthless. Wake me up when you have something amusing to talk about. Loser.

Posted by: Anonymous at March 16, 2006 12:52 PM

I feel like I've read this before, or at least something very similar.

Well written, but not up to par, not your style and really only mildly entertaining to lawyers and law students. The pinky toe metaphor needs to be reworked or deleted. It's a bit awkward.

Hopefully this is aiming towards constructive criticism and not unhelpful insults like the above anonymous comment.

Posted by: Jen at March 16, 2006 01:28 PM

Maybe it isn't funny if you only think about it in terms of lawschool, but there are people like that in every walk of life. Doesn't everyone remember someone like that from highschool? Maybe all of those are future lawschool students, I don't know. While it wasn't laugh out loud funny, I at least still found it entertaining.

Posted by: Bethany at March 16, 2006 01:38 PM

engineering school has these retards also

Posted by: M at March 16, 2006 02:35 PM

Good times.

When I started Law School, a 3L told me "if by the end of the first month, you don't know who the asshole in your section is, it's you."

Happily, in my 130 person full section, we had three, and I'm calling them out in order, worst, to most tolerable (1) Jim Tobin, (2) Guy Guyberson - nice name, (3) Susan Antonio.

Ugh.

Posted by: caneesq at March 16, 2006 02:40 PM

This was really funny Drunk. It flowed well and the humor had crisp, intelligent quality.

Posted by: Pete at March 16, 2006 04:19 PM

I loved it. Thought it was very well written, great use of the English language, and a good balance between laughing at / harboring homicidal feelings towards gunners.

I used to keep tally marks of this one woman in class. Towards the end of the semester, there were even multiple columns - examples being "WTF?!?!", "speechless", and "She knows this is obvious, right?". Think the all time high was something like 26 of her comments ... in maybe an hour.

Anyway, just a thought in case fantasy football has been solved for the day ...

Posted by: Jessica at March 16, 2006 07:18 PM

Maybe you just have to know this type of person for it to be funny, but I thought it was a well-written piece that was humorous enough. Plus, when you're waiting two weeks for a DrunkRex update, you take what you can get.

Posted by: Chris at March 17, 2006 10:24 AM

I thought this was funny... I'm a freshman taking BIO 102 and we have that person in our class. It's to the point where everytime the person raises their hand people start to howl with laughter :)

Posted by: Dawn at March 17, 2006 01:27 PM

Gunners at Rutgers School of Law and Hair Design at Newark? HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!!!!! I guess not everyone can get into a good law school.

Posted by: Anonymous at March 17, 2006 10:57 PM

i agree with the first comment, this actually was downright worthles. it feels forced. if its wait an extra week ir read a piece of shit like this, ill wait the extra week.

Posted by: Anonymous at March 18, 2006 01:01 AM

Good shit Rex. I emailed this story to my Engineering friends.

"Gunners", as they were, are extremely prevelent in engeering classes as well...

Posted by: Derek at March 18, 2006 02:21 AM

From the first sentence, I thought of the Gunners in my class. Unluckily for us at UNLV Law, our gunner is a fify something y/o lady, so she has an anecdote from her life for about every class to go along w/ her incessant hypotheticals.

Posted by: Frank at March 18, 2006 08:54 PM

I do believe though that the 'gunner' type gravitates toward proffessions such as lawyer because of the abundant use of rethorics, or at least they feel it will be that way, and being able to refuge in rethorics makes up for they both their necessity to overanalize and their insecurities.

Posted by: Joel Rojo at March 19, 2006 11:42 AM

this brought back many homicidal feelings from high school and college... I always hoped the gunners would walk in front of my car.

Posted by: mike at March 19, 2006 04:26 PM

Perhaps Drunk, you should do like you did with BART passengers. Like number of hot students in your class, etc. This way, you look like your taking copious amounts of notes, and youre getting new things to write about. And gunners are in all forms of life, just later in life, its not so unethical to kick the living fuck out of them in front of their girlfriends.

Posted by: Ray at March 20, 2006 01:29 AM

our practice here in econ is to attach articles to names of our heroic students. Recent exerpts (is that a word?) from pint night:

"ya, The Ken was really annoying today."

"is The Brit coming tonight?"

Posted by: thirsty dinosaur at March 22, 2006 02:54 AM

it was a pile of horseshit

Posted by: running man at March 22, 2006 10:04 PM

I personally thought it was really well written and dead on but I am like 5 beers deep (what do you expect someone reading Drunkasaurusrex articles at 2:30 am on a Thursday to be...sober?). Perhaps the idiotic comments above come from Gunners themselves who took offense to this. I dunno...its just a thought.

Posted by: TheGlove at March 23, 2006 04:27 AM

Vanderbilt Law 1L here,
great bit. Captured the annoying nature of the gunner in perfection. Also like caneesq's comment.
Have you started playing gunner bingo yet? Once your card is complete, you have to get up and ask a question w/ the word bingo in it. Makes the day go by that much faster (if you haven't mastered spider solitaire yet)

Posted by: Hank at March 23, 2006 05:37 PM

I can dig this. Three years into an English degree, and it seems as though these assholes are multiplying. Frankly, I don't give a fiddler's damn whether you can quote Alghieri or Milto canto for canto from memory - if it has nothing to do with the discussion at hand, leave that shit at home. Well penned, and though it isn't your regular style, I think it's a well-crafted experiment. Good stuff.

Posted by: Al at March 24, 2006 01:44 AM

I am a 1L and anyone who is or was in law school can certainly relate to this. It is amazing how pervasive this is over all law schools!

Posted by: Anonymous at March 24, 2006 01:18 PM

That first commment definitely came from a gunner.

Posted by: Anonymous at March 25, 2006 08:13 PM

the most recent comment is from a fucking loser who starves for the cock and hungers for assex night and day. Maybe when he has something interesting to disclose he'll take the dick out of his mouth and say it...

Posted by: Anonymous at March 26, 2006 10:35 AM

i sort of stumbled across this, and the title "Yes Butter" will forever forth be a part of my vocabulary...high five

Posted by: K Mak at March 27, 2006 06:38 PM

great stuff. forwarded it on to my some of my law classmates and we all thought it was on point. by the way, i agree with the guy that suggested that you should do a "bart passenger" piece for one of your big classes.

Posted by: J at March 27, 2006 11:47 PM

ha! i fully agree with the engineering students who posted previously. This is great writing and very true in engineering faculties as im sure it is in law school. my favorite is one student who will listen to a prof then raise his hand and say "so what you're saying is..." followed by a repitition of what the professor just said...its sad

Posted by: David at March 28, 2006 11:55 PM

Hilarious. Perfectly describes Cornell 1L gunner Eric Eisenburg.

Posted by: CLS at March 29, 2006 07:34 PM

Definately relate to this, in undergrad most classes have at least two of these guys. It was especially bad in Criminal Law. Entertaining just because of how much I can relate

Posted by: Mary at March 31, 2006 09:45 AM

This was HILARIOUS. I'm currently a 1L and you are SOO right. We have 3 of these people in my section, yes, just my SECTION. 3 out of 75. The other day my Property professor actually called out one of them, "You do realize that every time your raise your hand you start your sentence with 'So...'. We don't call him "Hypo" for nothing.

Posted by: Cagney at March 31, 2006 11:15 PM

Unfortunately, the gunners in my school are also the cool kids, so they don't get the disdain they observe.

Posted by: Mike at April 1, 2006 06:30 PM

Wow, you are not funny at all.

Posted by: Tony at April 2, 2006 09:11 PM

did you forget how to write?

Posted by: M at April 5, 2006 12:09 PM

First, I don't think this is supposed to be deep fall out of your seat laughing funny. Those who write these kind of comments are either (A) A gunner, and is shocked that people actually hate them; or (B) A gunner, and has to throw their damn opinion into something when they have absolutely no business discussing the subject.
Proud member of LSAG. Law Students Against Gunners

Posted by: Josh at April 5, 2006 03:13 PM

I thought this piece was great - the ending was clutch. For those who didn't, you're either a gunner or you're not smart enough to understand why this is funny. Either way you're a dumbass.

Posted by: K at April 5, 2006 10:29 PM

I think the piece is pretty good - I'm a first year Law student in India. In our batch of 80, we have about four of these people. They never seem to tire of the sound of their own voice, and generally make class time hell. However, as you quite rightly pointed out - they make things a lot easier for those who need to sleep. Considering I'm up late at night finishing off last minute papers, I appreciate every minute toe buggers waste in class.

Posted by: Vipul at April 7, 2006 06:34 AM

equity - from Latin "aequits", from "aequus", even, fair

equine - Latin "equnus", from "equus", horse

Owned by an a.

Posted by: Anonymous at April 13, 2006 08:42 AM

you going to keep writing drex?

Posted by: M at April 16, 2006 03:29 PM

Although the gunner is perhaps most prevalent at law schools across america, she is certainly present in other settings as well. In my experience in pre-med courses, the gunner tirelessly recounts anecdotes about her summer research which are, at best, tangentially related to the class discussion. Optional readings are never optional for the gunner, as they are necessary for her to cite incorrectly subsequent meetings. My understanding of the gunner is feminine; I have experienced predmominantly female gunners, who laugh louder, harder, and longer at every males professor's inane jokes.

Posted by: watson at July 18, 2006 02:51 PM