Campus RKBA Roundup #4

This week's edition of the Campus RKBA roundup showed a pretty good balance, with some surprising favor towards the Right to Keep and Bear Arms.

Had some technical difficulties whack out the farm's internet connection this week, so I wasn't able to scour the Web for as many student op-ed pieces as I could have found. But what I have, I'll share.

Most of the articles are pretty out-of-date by several months. Seems that everyone has calmed down about school shootings or concealed-carry issues...

...or they're just waiting for the mid-term elections to get underway so they can really spring their rhetorical ammunition on everyone and try to rake in the votes for their favorite ideologue.

At any rate, my first find comes from Georgetown. Now, having had a left-leaning prof from G-town (check this out--female, just got her Ph.D, first professorship, divorcee--translating as big ego, "I am woman, hear me roar," man-hating (well, condescending)--it made life rather interesting for this conservative male grad student), you kind of figure that the apple doesn't fall far from the tree.

Well, whether you consider this fella a good apple or a bad one, I'll leave to you. But it seems that his experiences with the D.C. area (want a taste of the madness? Read this) really give him some good insight into the practicality of arms for self-defense. So much so, he says that "Happiness is a Legal Gun," and backs up his opinion with a lot of research.

Contrast this, however, to this leftie from Norwalk who decided to take his opinions to the gun range, and still came back an unbeliever. You can't fault the guy for trying. At least he admitted he had fun shooting.

You see, this is the sort of thing I would like to try with just about every fearful gun virgin I come across: "Ever shot a gun? No? Let's go to the range! Don't like guns? How do you know if you've never shot one? I tell you what, let's go, fire one a couple of times, and if you still don't like it, at least you're coming from a position of experience."

Unfortunately, uprooting someone from their anti-2A dispositions tends to be harder, especially if they live in a cushy ivory tower.

The problem with living in academia's ivory tower is that immersing yourself too much in the theoretical can keep you out of touch with reality, as seems to be the case with this sophomore from Arizona State. Reacting to Frank Lasee's proposal in Wisconsin, this attempt at persuasive writing features the liberals’ favorite weapons: fearmongering and fantasizing. She starts off with a bit of creative writing featuring Dirty Harry as a teacher. She fantasizes about students ripping guns off of teachers. She speculates about the economic impact of bullets and licensing.

What she doesn’t do: look into the hard facts surrounding the successes in Thailand and Israel. Investigate the particulars about Lasee’s proposal. Check out the facts involved in concealed carry. Instead, she fills in the blanks with her imagination, and we know how well imagination imitates the real world.

Oh, did I mention she was a journalism major?

Now, check out what this graphics design major from Auburn University Montgomery has to say about gun control. But before you click on the link, ask yourself, what can you usually expect from an art major, and a woman to boot?

Her stance might surprise you:

“I believe the answer is yes, but not in the way you are probably thinking. I have a family where every man and most of the women hunt. Even my grandmother owns a handgun. So I am not against people owning guns. I am against people using guns to solve problems that could be handled differently. When teenagers use guns at school, it’s time to make a change.”

She sees education and family involvement as effective means to both reduce gun-related violence and encourage gun safety. She also recognizes that gun bans are ineffective—the violent will find some other means.

Heading over to my native state (but not my alma mater), this Vanderbilt student's article is an interesting study in statistics: to use them, or not to use them? He seems rather confused. On the one hand, he says you can't really rely on them, but then says you need them, and tries to use them to disprove guns' role in reducing crime.

Mr. Vandy student, you earn this week's MHDD award for two reasons: One, your choice of an institution (double-entendre, as always, is intended), and two, for shooting yourself in the foot with your own logic concerning stats.

I have virtually berated many a liberal for spouting their opinions without substantiating them. Heading on over to my brother's hometown, Wilmington, one student over at UNC-W makes up for the lack of hard demographics concerning this coastal NC city's relationship with guns and crime by instead applying stats gleaned from the Harvard School of Public Health.

I can understand the similarities, being that Boston and Wilmington are both coastal towns, and have a university with at least 2 r's in the name.

And what does this regional-specific research yield? What secrets does it unlock?

...students who own handguns are more likely to engage in high-risk behavior such as binge drinking, vandalism, drunk driving and unprotected sex.

I read the above with great sorrow. Because...I'm a gun owner...and I haven't gotten deliberately hammered since I was a junior in college. I have never gotten a DUI, never vandalized someone else's property (unless you count rolling a friend's yard when I was a freshman in college), and haven't engaged in unprotected sex since I was an undergrad.

And I feel I'm missing out on all the fun.

But I did all four long before I ever owned my first handgun.

Heading towards the Left Coast, a philosopher from Southern Cal blames neither the NRA nor Hollywood for the recent rash of school shootings, but rather, individualism borne out of materialism. It almost sounds like he's starting off on a Chavez-esque tirade against capitalism (not knowing that Marxism is a very materialistic philosophy in itself), but laments the fact that families are more interested in giving their kids stuff rather than personal investments of time.

Not bad. Certainly addresses the problem better than throwing more money into school counseling programs.

Now, just in case you've started getting bored with these findings, let me tell you that I have saved the best for the very last.

Remember the Political Science Student from Butler University who inspired me to start the Campus RKBA roundups?

It pleases me to say that Ms. Danielle Rather got quite the royal reaming following her op-ed in late September. It elicited eleven whopping huge responses, warranting its own “Letters to the Editor” page the following week. Here are highlights of some of the responses:

“I agree with Maire Gurevitz and urge Indiana to ban all citizen owned firearms, especially those evil concealed handguns.

”Some .004 percent (4/1000 of a percent) of Hoosier concealed handgun owners are involved in crime each year. This is way too high.

”Guns are unnecessary. In 98 percent of the times a citizen uses a gun to defend himself, no shot is fired by the crime victim. If the badguy is that easily scared off just by seeing the gun then you clearly didn’t need the gun in the first place. Banning CCW will prevent these unnecessary defenses.”

And:

“'Why do we love our guns so much in this country? Why do we want to be able to carry them around with us everywhere we go?' Answer: I don't know that we do love guns. What we love is freedom from unwarranted searches and seizures, which muggers frequently violate -- especially where ordinary private citizens are not allowed to bear arms.”

And someone gave my favorite quote from Alan Dershowitz:

"Foolish liberals who want to read the 2nd Amendment out of the Constitution by claiming it's not an individual right or that it's too much of a public safety hazard don't see the danger in the big picture. They're courting disaster by encouraging others to use the same means to eliminate portions of the Constitution they don't like."

And the hits just keep on rolling:

“I read with interest and dismay your editorial 'A picnic and a gun' yesterday, and I'm somewhat alarmed at the views you put in print. You expressed that that you're alarmed by the fact that our DNR director recognizes what our Founding Fathers intended with the Second Amendment. As a Political Science and History major, I'm sure you know the origin of 'gun control' laws as well as what Madison, Henry, Jefferson, and Franklin, indeed all of our Founders, considered the 'militia' to mean. It was not the National Guard, but private citizens, protecting themselves and their families first, then their state and country. 'Gun control' legislation came about much later, and is something of a misnomer, since it was not to control the gun, which is merely a tool akin to a shovel, a hammer, or a car, but rather to control Blacks and prevent them from being able to arm themselves. Enslaving and controlling them was so much easier when only the 'masters' had effective weapons.”

This guy has also noticed the liberal tendency to emphasize one part of a certain amendment, while ignoring the rest:

“The saddest part of your opinion is your woeful misunderstanding of the second amendment, and American history. Other than the fact that you totally misintepret the first part of the amendment, (militias meaning 'all' or 'individual' not collective, which is what state militias were), you conveniently leave out the second part about 'the RIGHT of the people to KEEP and BEAR arms shall not be infringed'.”

And commenting on the state of academia, as exemplified by our clueless coed:

“I am amazed that a student of your college would be comfortable displaying such an obvious lack of experience and wisdom in a public forum. It raises grave concerns about the state of higher learning in this country in general and definitely at Butler University if one of your students can be so ignorant in her third year of college.”

My reaction?


And not just because my two cents were featured! Read the rest of them, and enjoy the barbecue!