RKBA Campus Watch: Going for the Bite Size approach

Well, school's out for most of the campuses, but it will afford me time to get caught up on all the op-ed's I can scrounge.

Given my schedule, I don't think I'll have quite the time to do as extensive a round-up as I have been, so I will post them as I find them.

My favorite starting-off point, Wisconsin-Madison, ends off an interesting school year on a positive note: One guest columnist and a student rebutting all the hand-wringing published directly in the wake of VT.

The guest columnist, a sophomore in Economics, Math, and History, takes an interesting angle on the issue. He says gun control stats support both sides of the argument: pro and con. So, the question is, who really benefits?

If more gun control doesn’t mitigate crime, then what does it do? Look no further than any authoritarian state or society in history.

Lines straight up with that Jared Diamond quote I gave a while back. Furthermore, this boy has done his own research, and reached the same conclusions I did about the number of guns used in crime versus the number of guns in the country, only he looks at gun owners. This yields slightly different numbers, but the end result is the same--the overwhelming majority of gun owners in this country do not commit crimes:

If you don’t believe me when I say many gun owners follow the law, just look at the numbers. According to a survey administered by the Harvard School of Public Health, there were 57 million adult gun owners in 2004. According to the U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics, there were 338,587 instances of firearms related crime in 2004. Do the math and we’ll find that, in 2004, at most 0.59 percent of gun owners committed a crime with their firearms. Additionally, we’ll find that at least 99.41 percent of gun owners in 2004 were law-abiding citizens. Run the same analysis on every year for the past 20 and you’ll get roughly the same results. In any given year, a super-super-majority of gun owners used their firearms in a responsible and lawful manner. (emphasis mine)

That, my friends, is one to keep in the back of your head.

Column number two, appearing April 25, surprises me. This comes from another underclassman, a freshman, and a journalism major to boot. He rebuts the notion that 2A is out of date, and takes a lot of time to quote several historical examples. To sum up:

Why? Because these infamous leaders knew that they could never consolidate power, disregard the opinions of the minority (or even the majority), or commit the atrocities they committed with an armed populace. As Aristotle said, “Both the oligarch and Tyrant mistrust the people, and therefore deprive them of arms.”

So, it seems there are sensible journalism majors out there.