Guns don’t cause crime, student loans do:

A man who wore a three-dimensional Bucky Badger hat when he allegedly robbed an East Side credit union last week told police that he wants to go to prison and needed the money because he has $250,000 in student debt.

Randall H. Hubatch, 49, of Madison, was charged Friday with armed robbery for the Jan. 11 robbery of the Summit Credit Union, 1799 Thierer Road. What stood out about the robbery was Hubatch’s choice of apparel, which included the Bucky Badger hat.

“If the district attorney agrees to send me to prison for a long time, then I will confess and plead guilty,” Hubatch told Madison police Detective Tom Helgren after his arrest on Monday, according to a criminal complaint. “Otherwise, I have nothing else to say, and if released I will do it again.”

Hubatch told police he is “slightly autistic” and diabetic and can’t afford his prescribed medication.

An online UW-Madison directory lists Hubatch as a lead custodian at Union South on the UW-Madison campus. University spokesman John Lucas said Hubatch is not a current student but earned a bachelor’s in English in 1998 and a law degree in 2004.

When Hubatch was arrested he was wearing the Bucky Badger hat. Police said they found a bus receipt in the motel room where Hubatch was staying and a ticket in his pocket indicating that he was at the Field Museum in Chicago on Sunday.

According to the complaint:

With a plastic Star Wars toy gun in his pocket, Hubatch told police, he wrote a note demanding $500 and told a teller not to stall because he didn’t want to hurt anyone. He said he also wrote that he would shoot anyone who followed him to his car, noting to Helgren that he put in the reference to the car to throw people off because he doesn’t have a car.

He told Helgren he has $250,000 in student loans that he can’t pay. He said he asked for $500 because he thought Summit would not care about $500 and would simply give it to him.