One skater's carelessness no reason to ban them all

Editor,

While I consider skateboarders on the whole to be a nuisance, filling the world with more annoying sounds than are needed, they do not warrant being banned on campus. Knowing that James Burbank is an English professor here at UNM, dare I assert he has committed the association fallacy?

He says that he used to find skateboarders "an amusing, albeit destructive, part of campus." But now that one skateboarder ran into him, he is defining them as dangerous, their riders rude and the boards deserving of a ban.

If we are to ban one form of destructive behavior, why not suggest we ban chewing gum on campus, too, as one cannot find a pathway that is not littered with gum's departed brethren?

I wonder, would Burbank raise this point had one not collided with him? Or would skateboards still be the amusing sideshow on campus?

Alexander Roessner

UNM student