After yet another school shooting incident — the ninth in a series of violent school incidents stretching back to Columbine — I feel compelled to speak out. Our educational institutions, from kindergartens through graduate schools, are supposed to be places of intellectual freedom and exploration — places where our minds are free to wander. But suddenly, it seems that you’re more likely to be shot at school than get a solid education, thanks to No Child Left Behind and our preposterous gun-control laws.
It is entirely legal to bring a firearm on campus as long as you have a concealed weapons permit. It is argued by the finest minds in the State Legislature and the attorney general’s office that the requirement to actually have a permit is what makes having concealed weapons safe from abuse. This argument is so stupid it practically drools. The people who bring guns to campus with the purpose of taking as many lives as possible, before invariably taking their own, are not the kind of people who can handle the bureaucratic obstacles to obtaining such permits.
Indeed, saner people, such as myself, can barely cope with such bureaucracy without losing their minds. Someone with a tenuous grasp on reality is likely to be pushed forcefully down the precipitous slope to complete insanity after enduring such an ordeal.
Instead, a person will buy or steal guns from wherever he or she can and fail to properly register these weapons or undergo firearms training. There is no way to preempt the possibility of school shootings without resorting to such draconian measures as metal detectors and cavity searches at every point of entry. Although this might be feasible in K-12 schools, our universities and colleges are another matter.
Rather than instituting these measures, the Legislature has decided that to combat gun-related violence, we’ll just allow more people with guns to guard those of us without guns from other people who have guns. Amoronsayswhat?
The last thing I want is some delusional blood monger who watches too much “24” and has Jack Bauer-envy to bring his or her gat to class in the hope of some other delusional freak who thinks the world has wronged him or her decides to end it all in a blaze of glory and panic and lecture notes. The chance that our gun-toting crime fighter will actually come through and save the day is so slim that it barely merits mention. It’s going be more like the shootout at the OK Corral, with additional civilian casualties.
The legal arguments about guns on campus are more complicated and have to do with the fact that the U is a public institution and therefore is subject to Second Amendment-type objections and public property laws, etc. But the facts on the ground, as they say, are this: It does not make me comfortable to know that a fellow student is packing heat along with his or her sack lunch.
Two guns don’t make a right. For one, what if some unbalanced young man or woman were to ascertain that another student conceals a weapon between a dog-eared copy of King Lear and the Cliffs Notes explaining it? Instead of going to the black market for a .38 special and a sawed-off shotgun, he or she might just maneuver him or herself into range of the backpack in question and find him or herself the proud, new possessor of a 9mm, fully-loaded. They’re ready for carnage.
The bottom line is that the fewer guns we have on campus, the better off we all are. This might include accepting the remote possibility that one day, before you’ve accumulated enough credit hours to flee this place for the wider world, you will be gunned down in violent fashion — hopefully just prior to bombing that monster chemistry test for which you didn’t study.
