PA Bill Number: SB99
Title: In county boards of elections, further providing for expenses of county boards and of primaries and elections to be paid by county, expenses of ...
Description: In county boards of elections, further providing for expenses of county boards and of primaries and elections to be paid by county, expenses of ... ...
Last Action: Re-referred to APPROPRIATIONS
Last Action Date: May 8, 2024
Two Arguments Against Campus Carry :: 11/27/2014
There are lots of good reasons why young Americans shouldn’t be able to exercise their natural, civil and Constitutional right to keep and bear arms on campus. Wait. No. There are a few reasons and they all suck. But they do exist. They have to exist, otherwise people who want to ban guns from campus (except for local, state and national police; campus security and the National Guard) would appear as what they are: hopeless hoplohobes with a tenuous grasp of reality or, dare I say it, common sense. deseretnews.com has pubished an article that reveals the anti-gunners’ anti-campus carry logic, such as it isn’t. Starting with the first sentence . . .
Advocates for keeping firearms out of college assemblies say there’s something wrong with a system that bans people from bringing their own food or drinks into a university assembly, but not their guns.
What does a ban on food and drink at college assemblies – which prevents unhygienic conditions and extra work for unionized custodians – have to do with banning concealed carry – a neat, discreet and effective means of providing personal self-protection and deterring unimaginable slaughter? Nothing – if you think about it. If you don’t, prohibiting food and drink while “allowing” firearms sounds crazy! Bullets, not bananas? GLOCKs not Gatorade? The horror! The horror!
“It’s our concern as mothers that children are being prevented from being able to participate in assembles and events where they can have intellectual freedom,” said Chelsi Archibald [above right], with the group MomsRising.org.
There’s a joke in there about Dads Rising but I’m not going to make it. And neither are you. Meanwhile, Chelsi’s [non] reasoning posits that the presence of guns – hidden guns – intimidates students, preventing them from speaking freely. Much in the way that the presence of sharp scissors in a kindergarten classrooms scare children out of their ability to finger paint.
Even if Utah banned guns on campus someone could carry a hidden firearm into an assembly. (Someone like FSU shooter Myron May.) Ms. Archibald is arguing that Utah should void gun rights so that children (children!) can feel safe – even though they’re wouldn’t be, really. In fact, the children (children!) would be less safe without armed citizens to protect them.
Archibald said students should not be deprived of learning because of the fear of being shot.
“Our Second Amendment rights do not trump our First Amendment rights for free speech,” she said.
To quote the ad, that’s not how it works. That’s not how any of this works. The rights protected by the United States Constitution are not prioritized. They are co-equal. You can carry a gun AND speak freely. You can speak freely AND sue the police for indiscriminate search and seizure. If a student feels “deprived” of learning because of his or her fear of firearms or snakes or crowds of people or clowns (a.k.a., sociology professors) I recommend hypnotherapy. Depriving Americans of their gun rights won’t solve anything.
“I don’t have an opinion on that issue altogether, with people being able to carry guns. I come from a gun-friendly family. My specific issue is with gatherings and assemblies and the ability to exchange intellectual ideas between students,” she said. “When that is hampered, then we are on dangerous ground. Because then we are allowing people who are concealed carrying, which is completely their right, to infringe on people’s free speech. That’s a very dangerous place to be.”
Yup, it’s Groundhog Day. Chelsi makes the same argument again, with an extra helping of disingenuousness. “I don’t have an opinion on [gun control] altogether.” Right. “I come from a gun-friendly family.” So what went wrong? “That’s a very dangerous place to be.” Like . . . the classrooms at Virginia Tech?
Joining Archibald on Friday to deliver the petition was Bishop Scott Hayashi of the Episcopal Diocese of Utah.
He believes that while the majority of concealed permit holders are well-intentioned and would not cause a problem during an assembly, if an incident were to arise, they would not be able to respond the same way a police officer or a person with military training would. They might be more reckless in using their firearm, he said.
Because of that, Bishop Hayashi believes the same people who believe they are giving others a sense of security by carrying a weapon are actually doing just the opposite.
I doubt Bishop Hyashi ever spent a moment contemplating the difference in life-saving effectiveness between armed citizens’ defensive gun uses and police officer involved shootings. Not only do armed Americans take out more bad guys than cops, they almost never shoot the wrong person. “Law-abiding American citizens using guns in self-defense during 2003 shot and killed two and one-half times as many criminals as police did,” forbes.com reports, “with fewer than one-fifth as many incidents as police where an innocent person mistakenly identified as a criminal (2% versus 11%).”
Groups petition for gun bans from school assemblies failed to forward my favorite anti-campus carry argument: young adults with gun permits in college get drunk and shoot people. In this case, as in so many others, it’s all about a “sense of security,” rather than facts. Truth be told, the antis are not interested in facts, logic or reason. They operate from a position of irrational fear, willful ignorance and intellectual arrogance. And our children pay the price.
http://www.thetruthaboutguns.com/2014/11/robert-farago/argument-campus-carry/
