California Hoplophobia

Cal State University campus shut down due to reports of a man carrying an assault rifle.

A report of a man armed with an assault weapon prompted police to shut down the California State University, Dominguez Hills, campus Thursday before they learned the person was an ROTC student carrying a fake rifle.

A ROTC kid with a drill rifle, which is a non-firing reproduction of usually an ’03 Springfield or a Garand is not the same thing as a guy with an “assault rifle”.  Now, he wasn’t in uniform, so it might have been slightly more difficult for whoever called the cops, but come on.

A couple of thoughts – 1: I wish that people could tell the difference between a guy with a drill rifle and someone bent on mass murder.  2: That cadet really should have put the rifle in a bag.  It goes back to what I was saying the other day about airsoft guns, i.e. you should assume that everyone else is an idiot.  If you’re carrying something that looks like a gun, operating rule Numero Uno should be that EVERYONE ELSE is going to think it’s a gun, and you should act accordingly.

Of course, I’m also not surprised that a campus in California freaks out because a ROTC kid forgot to stow his drill rifle.  I’d like to think that if that happened at Purdue, there would not be a campus wide lockdown.  Of course, the thought of actually trying to “lock down” Purdue makes me giggle a bit, because it’s basically a small town.

5 Comments

  1. Univ. of Nebraska sent a 6-man assault team into a classroom this week because a dumb ass honors student brought his Nerf gun to class (the honors dorm has had an “assassin” game going for decades).

    Another student saw the Nerf gun (NERF) and texted the cops, who decided they needed to storm the room because now a days we paint guns to look like toys.

    I say again, 6-man assault team storms classroom after student brings NERF gun to class.

    Granted, dumb on the smart kid’s part, but c’mon.

    The link to the story is over at The Crabby Shack.

  2. Well, I’m fairly sure the VPC will have a “rhetoric shift” one of these days and include bolt-action rifles as “assault weapons”. (Not including their current definition of sniper rifle.)

  3. The antis elastic definition fo “assault rifle” includes any rifle that scares them. Remember, it is how they FEEL about a thing, not the thing itself. Drunk drivers kill TENS OF THOUSANDS of people for every one person killed by a nut with a “military style semi-automatic rifle”, yet you don’t hear calls for registering beer glasses or putting serial #s on whiskey bottles. If they were logical creatures, such would be the case. I’m glad they are not, as there are no Constitutional protections for having a beer. Count yer blessings, lads…….

  4. Jimbob86, good point, but check out http://www.duiblog.com/
    I don’t drink myself, but the Constitutional issues discussed on that blog are hair raising.

    I was a NJROTC cadet in High School in Texas, and sometimes we’d carry our drill pieces home to pratice the manual of arms & drill moves. The cops would sometimes stop to talk to us, and double check to make sure our drill pieces really were non-fuctional, but over time they got used to us and would just wave. We always carried the pieces either at right-shoulder arms or slung over our shoulders with the sling. We started with fiberglass 1903 Springfields, and by the time I graduated we had converted to dummy M1 Garands with wood bodies. I did happen to own an M1 Garand bayonet, but I kept it in my car and never affixed it to the drillpiece unless I was in my back yard.

    Our NJROTC Instructors taught us to handle the drillpieces just as if they were real and to use the same firearms safety rules as we would with a real firearm. For actual shooting, we used air pistols with steel traps indoors and exercised strict range discipline at all times.

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