Campus RKBA Roundup #3

With all the furor going on in America's Dairyland over a proposed measure to make their schools less of a target for the disaffected and disturbed, I bring to you this week's Campus RKBA Roundup:

The Cheesehead Edition

Wisconsin State Senate Rep. Frank Lasee (R) attempted to break a trend. Ever since Columbine, it has been obvious that making schools "gun-free zones" hasn't been working. In fact, it tends to better the chances for a would-be gunman to find easy targets within the limits of these zones.

Taking cues from other lands, like Thailand and Israel, and the relative successes they have experienced in allowing teachers to arm themselves for the defense of themselves and their charges, Lasee goes out on a limb and proposes the same for Wisconsin teachers.

However, the mix of guns and schools make for a potent recipe for liberal hand-wringing. In the academic sector, fledgling blueys don their wool and practice putting their hands together for more gun control!

Reactions from Wisconsin's flagship campus at Madison tend to prove my suspicions about the journalism major being nothing more than a liberal puppy-farm. The whole editorial board of the Badger-Herald issued their statement, which, true to form, simply spouts the usual salvos of fearmongering, misinformation, and the party line, while ignoring the successes of other countries that have armed their teachers.

Another budding journalist follows the journalist’s playbook by immediately dismissing these same successes in favor for coddling measures that have proven themselves failures.

The views offered by another campus newspaper, the Cardinal-Herald, offer only slight variations of these same themes. The editorial board’s statement had little better to say as they denounced the proposal. What's worse, they don't explain why Lasee mentioned Thailand and Israel, instead spinning them off as countries “characterized by perpetual violence and police states.”

In this same paper, a student echoes the same sort of solutions offered by the aforementioned journalism major. Interestingly enough, this student majors in “creative writing...”

Warning: rant ahead. Skip the red text to continue the article.

Creative writing? All of the sudden, a slight tremor builds up within me…

“What the hell kind of a major is THAT?” In my days in grade school, back when Jimmy “My lips are as big as Mick Jagger’s but I don’t make half as much sense” Carter was President, we started creative writing in fourth grade! I understand that it’s gotten to the point nowadays that students entering into college need remedial courses to catch up—Holy crap, it used to be just “pass me the ball, beer, and a bimbo, bother me not with books” bonehead jocks, NOW it’s going mainstream—but making a bona fide major out of it?

What the hell is going on in academia? It’s getting to the point that your undergraduate degree in liberal arts isn’t going to amount to more than a gold starred doodle on your mother’s refrigerator unless you earned it before the Clinton Administration.

I can only hope that this major field of study is really a euphemism for “journalism,” which, in effect, is what we’re getting from journalism majors. Don’t know the facts? Make up your own! Be creative!

Okay, rant mode off...(not really, just decocked) While she’s “creatively imagining” these solutions, I wonder how she proposes to keep these students safe while waiting for all this “I’m good enough, I’m smart enough, and dog-gone it, people like me” to take? Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris certainly didn’t wait around. And they certainly didn’t pause for a “vocal, intense and lengthy debate in this country about how to prevent violence” like this tool proposes.

But months before the school shooting in Wisconsin, one student at Brandeis University seems to have seen the connection of arms and security on school grounds. In 2003, the prevailing attitude among campus police towards being armed was rather negative. Three years later, there seems to be a change of heart among their unarmed officers. Now, with concerns over rising crime, weapons seem more practical: “It may be unsavory to some that Brandeis add firearms to campus without an obvious threat to our safety, but it is unwise to wait until someone gets hurt before taking preventative action.”

Can you say, "prophetic?"

The editorial staff for The Heights (Boston College) can’t seem to come up with as good a solution for violent crime. They pull an old favorite out of the Party Handbook--simply blame the government for “the easy availability of the assault weapons usually used,” and let that suffice for “in-depth” journalism.

Okay, what's with all these joint statements? Are editorial boards populated by lemmings or something?

Going further south (in more ways than one), a Sociology major writing in the Daily Tar Heel (University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill) attempts to offer her two cents on the issue: focus on the availability of guns, but also take into account the “highly gendered” aspects of these types of crimes.

As much as I love that state, North Carolina, your tax dollars are paying to raise up geniuses like this one. Okay, Miss Future DSS drone, you earn this week’s MHDD award.

One more "joint statement" (with intended double-entendre)--this one is given by the editorial board of Virginia Tech's Collegiate Times.
I could summarize it in words, but visualize a recently beheaded chicken, and you get about the same effect.

But one ray of light comes right on the heels of that display of herd mentality. A grad student takes the time to answer the hysteria with researched reason:

"Gun control advocates seem to think that the Founding Fathers did not want citizens to have guns other than to prevent government intrusion or invasion form a foreign force. This is a flagrant distortion of the views of the Founding Fathers and Thomas Jefferson specifically. He was very much in favor of citizens arming themselves for self-defense. If the editorial board had done any research on the drafters of the Constitution, this would have been abundantly clear to them. In addition, in U.S. v. Emerson, the Supreme Court opines that the right to keep and bear arms is an individual right, not a collective one. Thus, a citizen does not need to be a member of an organized militia to legally possess arms."

Then he takes some of their own rhetoric and approaches it from a different angle:

"Anti-gun propagandists are always crying, 'It’s for the children.' Well, we now have laws that make schoolyards and classrooms the safest place for criminals to commit wanton violent acts without fear of armed resistance. Is that 'for the children'?

"Why make our children go to schools where it is against the law for someone other than a law enforcement officer to protect them? The police cannot be everywhere all of the time and suggesting that only the police can protect us is defeatist and contrary to the American spirit. We want to provide a safe environment for our children. What environment is safer than one in which potential victims are armed? We all know banning guns does not work; let’s try the opposite."

How about it, Lefties? You open enough to try a different approach?