Posted on 01/19/2009 11:28:33 AM PST by neverdem
When I went to college I had never tasted beer. I shaved every other day, but really didn't need to do it more than once a week. I had never had my heart broken or depended on my own paycheck.
In my wallet I carried a driver's license, my father's Mobil card and a Cook County, Ill., voter's registration — all symbols, more or less, of adult status — but, like most of the males in the University of Oklahoma freshman class of 1981, I was much closer to being a little boy than I was to being a man. I would have argued that point at the time.
I had a lot of growing up to do in four years, and doing that would require a lot of things. I would need the help of my parents, my professors and my friends. I needed time, money and a lot of hard work.
I didn't need a gun.
Mass killings: On April 16, 2007, Seung-Hui Cho, a Virginia Tech English major who had been treated for severe anxiety disorder and had been declared mentally ill by a judge, used two semiautomatic handguns to murder 32 people on campus before committing suicide.
It was the deadliest campus killing in the nation's history.
Bold headlines provoke the "do something" response in politicians as surely as meat powder provokes saliva in dogs.
Sure enough, state Rep. Jason Murphey, partly in response to the campus killings, proposed removing a restriction on the state's concealed-carry law that prohibits guns on college campuses.
The Guthrie Republican argued that unhinged violent people are already taking guns to school and the law change would simply allow balanced, licensed students over the age of 21 to defend themselves.
The state's college and university presidents organized against the measure, leading to a weaker version of the bill, which would limit concealed weapons to active-duty military personnel, honorably discharged veterans and others with firearms training. The school presidents kept up the fight, and the bill died in the Senate.
With new leadership in the Senate, there's reason to suspect the issue will rise again this year. It shouldn't.
Mark Taylor is a former academic who makes his living studying college students and explaining them to college professors. He's a popular lecturer on campuses and understands the current crop of underclassmen as well as anyone.
I spoke to him on the phone and by e-mail, where he said that proposals to allow more guns on campus is "a manifestly bad idea, actually deeply and fully bad."
The current generation of college students are unprepared for dealing with adult decisions of any kind, and especially with decisions of life and death, Taylor said.
A generation of overprotective "helicopter" parents have produced a generation of students who don't know how to fend for themselves but believe that they are tremendously important.
"High stress, poor skills, plus guns? Sounds like a bad idea to me," Taylor said.
If parents won't trust their kids to write their own college application essays, why would we trust them with .45s?
The real danger, Taylor said, isn't the extremely rare case of a delusional student trying to kill everyone in the lecture hall: It's the student depressed in the dormitory because he just fought with his girlfriend, the pre-med student angry because his professor won't accept a late assignment, or the fraternity boy wanting to make sure his house keeps up on the on-campus arms race with its rivals.
"If it's available, then it's more likely to be used," Taylor said. "It's a miracle the colleges aren't more violent than they are. Mix guns with that and it becomes like Dodge City."
The ghost of Seung-Hui Cho: There are far more dangerous threats to society for the Legislature to deal with, but if they are concerned about the threat of a crazed student going on a killing spree, I have a suggestion that might have a chance of accomplishing something — take on the federal privacy laws that restrict and intimidate the ability of school faculty and staff to compare notes about potentially dangerous students and to intervene.
Currently, school employees live in constant fear of the Buckley Amendment, a 1974 law that limits the ability of schools to share academic records.
Even more powerful than the law itself is its power as extrapolated by school policy and anxiety: For fear of violating a student's privacy rights, school employees refuse to discuss anything.
So, if a professor sees evidence of a potentially violent student on campus, federal law can effectively stop the one thing that might work, talking about the issue with campus police, other faculty members and agencies designed to help people deal with psychological distress.
Convince Congress to start tearing down that wall of academic privacy and assuring the rights of schools to behave in the best interests of students, faculty and staff and you arm the right people with the right weapons.
Send guns to school and you arm the wrong people with the wrong weapons.
FYI Mr. Greene
It's The Bill of Rights, not the bill of NEEDS.
Where’s the barf alert?
No truer words ever spoken...
No state issues CCWs to anyone under 21. Problem solved.
Of course a man whose livelihood is based upon "explaining college students" is going to overgeneralize an entire generation. It wouldn't do well for his business to say most students act like the rational, mature adults they are, now would it?
The indicent cited by the “author”, wasn’t that the school shooter who was shot by a student or teacher who had a gun in his car, which he was able to retreive, thereby putting an end to more carnage, or was it another school shooting I’m thinking of?
In other words, he's an academic who studies academia. Which means he's twice as nuts as your average academic, as this essay shows.
LOL! An alumni of Crook County, IllinoyMexico presumes to "educate" us on gun control.
Don't worry, Wayne Baby - Obama's Brown Shirts will be coming around to collect the guns, or ban the ammunition so as to make us all like Mexico On Lake Michigan.
Youse gotta prollem wit dat?
The projection is strong with this one.
Forget that, it was an incident that happend several years prior to this one. Duh, old age . . .
‘The current generation of college students are unprepared for dealing with adult decisions of any kind, and especially with decisions of life and death, Taylor said.’
Well then I guess we ought to take away their right to vote and drive. Those things kill more people than guns in legal hands. Thank to guys like Taylor they don’t have to make the decision. It’s been made for them. It’s death. Theirs. Thanks a lot, pal.
The illegal violence rate for legal CCW holders is vastly below the baseline in any demographic or region. Don't let facts constipate your opinion process, dude.
L
In spite of all the evidence to the contrary that exists, this clown obviously still believes that the existing laws prevent people from carrying guns on campus, kind of like how the DC handgun ban kept handguns out of DC for all those years.
Guess that in my mid-teen years (living in Illinois countryside), those numerous times when friends and I walked through our small town after school with our rifles in hand to go shooting in the nearby woods were irresponsible, eh? The local constabulary would wave to us as they drove by.
Why, oh why, are libs so dumb?
Really?
Assuming he was going to college directly form High School graduation he was about 18 - 19 and a self declared incompetent.
At that age I had, under my dad's Marine Corps expert tutelage, been shooting Expert for just a hair over a decade.
I just do not have any sympathy or empathy. He needs to shut up.
I didn't even need to read the article to know his position. I grew up next door to Cook County. The vast majority of people there are mindlessly pro-firearm confiscation/bans. It's so knee-jerk one would think it's required to get a voter-registration card.
And we all know Chicago has such a low firearm crime rate...
‘The current generation of college students are unprepared for dealing with adult decisions of any kind, and especially with decisions of life and death, Taylor said.’
Idiocy.
But OK, let’s play his game: All generations of US soldiers are manifestly prepared for dealing with adult decisions of every kind, ESPECIALLY with decisions of life and death. Therefore every active and former member of the US Armed Forces should and must be allowed to carry a concealed weapon on campus, whether they be faculty or students.
Once we have demonstrated success with this pilot program, extend the right to all adults on campus.
It could have used one. It had so many jaw dropping statements. I was stunned.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.