Students are too drunk and irresponsible to own guns! Up in Muncie, Indiana – not too far from where I live, the Students for Concealed Carry on Campus are working on an awareness campaign. Indiana’s state laws allow colleges and institutions the right to forbid weapons on their campuses, which is precisely what SCCC are trying to overturn, so that students who pass the background check and are legally allowed to own firearms can carry concealed on campus. As usual, this brings the usual objections from the administrators.
The Ball State Administration is adamantly against weapons on campus. Its police force said it would be at an extreme disadvantage if a shooting spree occurred and people were armed.
“When trained police officers come on to a scene, if you don’t allow guns on campus, you know who the assailant is when you come into the room,” said Associate Vice President Tony Proudfoot.
This is true – the assailant is one the standing on the piles of dead bodies of unarmed students. I’m not trying to be hyperbolic here or anything, but they are right when they say that it’s easy to tell who the badguy is when everyone else is unarmed and dead. This is one of the flimsiest arguments that the anti-gun factions put out when they talk about campus carry, how if there was a shooting the cops wouldn’t have any idea who the good guys or the badguys are. It’s patently ludicrous, and it’s just being used as a scare tactic argument.
“This is college. People get drunk, even smart people. They do crazy things,” said a student.
Hey look, guys! It’s a projection argument! This is the other standby of the anti-concealed carry faction, which boils down to “I’m not responsible enough to carry, so by default no one is.” This is the same argument functionally as “I get road rage, so you can’t have a gun”, and the other horde of projection arguments that you see from time to time. What makes this argument so lame is that all you have to do to refute it is find someone who is responsible and doesn’t “get drunk and do stupid things”.
In fact, you can do that right here – when I was in college, I had a concealed weapons permit, and sometimes I would forget to remove my gun and lock it in a secured container before crossing onto campus/college property. In the 1 and a half years that I had my CCW on campus, had guns in my apartment, I never once mixed guns and alcohol – nor did my concealed gun leap out of the holster and start murdering people. It’s almost like I was adult enough to make a grown-up decision and understand that alcohol and firearms don’t mix.
Ultimately though, campus carry is a serious hot button issue. When you bring children (and there is no denying that college students are functionally children for the most part, instead of young adults) into the equation of concealed carry, people tend to stop thinking logically and start thinking even more emotionally than they usually do. That’s what I’m such a big fan of Students for Concealed Carry on Campus, as they do a lot of work to dispel the emotional arguments and focus on the facts and issues at hand.
I think it would be more accurate to say that the “typical college student is functionally a child” or “on average, college students are functionally children”.
I will agree that maybe 75-90% of the students at your typical college have no place owning a firearm. However, those same students would never: a)go through the hassle of taking a CHP class, b)spend valuable beer money on said class and the subsequent permit fee, or c)spend even more valuable beer money to buy the handgun in the first place.
Granted, being an engineering major, I suspect a much larger number of my peers back then could have handled that responsibility. Though that may just be projection on my part, since I was in my twenties when I started college, having spent 4 years in the Navy before going.
damn. I was hoping the block quotes would work. I’ll never figure out how people do such creative stuff in their comments.
They do, you just have to use HTML.
Although I agree; I obviously didn’t fall into the “irresponsible” (for the most part) category during college, as referenced by my own personal anecdote. There are some college students who are in fact responsible young adults, but they are a definite minority.
And then the administration wrings their hands over how immature their student population is. Treat them like kids and you’ll get – kids.
Personally, I don’t drink, period. There are others like me, and there are others who have the good sense to drink and own guns and not mix the two. And then there are the rest, who, as laughingdog said, probably wouldn’t spend valuable beer money on a gun and a permit.
I really, really hate being judged by the lowest common denominator in my peer group. Imagine if free speech rights were determined by the actions of the dumbest (and mouthiest) college students.
interesting that the ‘stupid decisions’ argument is not applied to their voting rights.
If society has determined someone eligible to vote, how can they logically be barred from anything due to ‘poor judgment’ ?
they shouldn’t continue to be referred to as ‘kids’ as long as the legal system considers anyone 18+ to be adult with no judgment qualification.
oh yeah, and isn’t the drinking age 21? …a good portion of college students are under the drinking age… are they then making poor decisions even without alcohol?