Posts Tagged ‘Gunners’

So as I said before, I have some thoughts about gunners that might run counter to what most people think. That is, gunners aren’t all bad. I am not, nor do I ever intend to become, a gunner and the gunners in my place have made themselves easily recognizable — always raising their hand in class to add their thoughts about some principle or another, countering the Professor’s hypo with a slightly modified hypo of their own, rushing to pack up their things at the end of class to be the first in line to ask questions to the Prof. Yes, it can get very annoying. Especially if the gunner has like an annoying voice or something, it can be like nails on a chalkboard whenever you see their hand shoot up mid-lecture (or better yet, when they don’t even raise their hand and just interject mid-lecture . . . which is quite disrespectful I’d like to add. Even more so considering how brilliant these professors are; I am sometimes awestruck how some people interrupt the flow and dynamic of the classroom with sometimes ridiculously trivial side comments).

Ok, so there’s a lot to be said about the negative qualities of gunners, but gunners live everywhere, not just in law school: business school, med school, even undergrad. Moreover, gunners exist everywhere OUTSIDE of school, like in your office when they might be competing to get the boss’s (or senior partners’) favor. So while it’s fully established that most people dislike gunners (unless one is a gunner oneself), what about the positive characteristics of gunners? This topic is something that has largely been neglected and I must say that I don’t think I have ever seen or heard anyone talking about the great things gunners do for the rest of us — not in person, not on ANY law-related Internet forums I have read, and not in any other venue. But from what I can tell, there are at least two very distinct and very positive qualities about gunners that deserve attention.

First, gunners give the rest of us a break in class. That is, when a gunner raises their hand and makes some comment that everyone else is certain is irrelevant or maybe extremely tangential, it gives us a break from the mad rush of typing notes for an hour-long class session. Unless a gunner’s comment or question is particularly brilliant or engages the professor in some compelling way (which it NEVER does) you can almost guarantee that it won’t be at all important in the scope of the class and that it will most certainly NOT be addressed on the exam. Thus, you can bet that any notes on the issue raised are useless, giving all of our cramped fingers and cloudy minds a short break from a bombardment of Socratic case analysis.

Second, everyone hates gunners. If the mutual suffering of 1L year doesn’t get people in a class to bond, you can bet that mutual hatred of another person will. Everybody else can rally around their distaste for this one person (or small collection or people). In effect, what you get is a great benefit to the many at the detriment of the few.

So at this point, that’s all I’ve thought about on my pro-gunner argument. But I would appreciate any further ideas — I’m writing a research paper. Ya know, in all the free time I have between writing memos and reading casebooks.