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News-Sentinel.com Your Town. Your Voice.
Opening Arguments

Campus carry

Sorry, campus cowboys; you'll have to keep leaving the shootin' irons home:

A bill that would have allowed guns on Indiana college campuses is dead.

The bill authored by Sen. Jim Banks, of Columbia City, failed to get a hearing in the Legislature. Banks said students have a constitutional right to protect themselves and pointed out that Wisconsin passed a similar measure.

Exceptions to laws are always suspect. Why are colleges different from any other place people might take their guns to? As Banks says, the constitutional right to protect ourselves should not disapprear once we hit campus. All arguments about carrying a weapon would apply on campus just as much as anywhere else, includuing anti-carrying arguments. If concealed weapons make society  less safe, they would make campuses less safe, as well.

By the way, which do you think is truer? 1. If campus carry were the prevailing practice, some of the killings by deranged shooters could have been stopped. 2. If campus carry were the prevailing practice, there would have been even more school shootings.

Comments

Tim Zank
Mon, 02/13/2012 - 9:34pm

Number 1 is accurate.

The more common term for a "GUN FREE ZONE" is "TARGET.

Harl Delos
Wed, 02/15/2012 - 7:40am

Campuses are crime zones anyway.  Kids have expensive electronics that are easy to fence, and they are careless about keeping an eye on it, so there are a lot of thefts.  Women walk around in provocative clothing, having gone to college for "an M R S degree", and what's more,  they are naked under those clothes, and the guys know it, so rape is extremely common.  Excessive drinking is common, and campus-area saloons tend to have a lotof fistfights.  Romantic drama is everywhere you look, and "Carmen" looks straightforward honesty compared to much of the intrigue on campus.

Kids are away from home for the first time, and they're learning by making mistakes.  But they really need to be making small mistakes, the kind that they can swallow, rather than  the kind that swallows them.  Wouldn't it make more sense to have your kid learn to parallel-park in an underpowered land barge rather than in a Ferrari with an 800-hp engine and touchy accelerator and clutch?

In ANY population, even a monastery, if everyone is armed, there will be more armed confrontations than if nobody is armed.  In ANY population, if everyone is armed, there will be well-meaning people stepping in to stop armed mayhem than if nobody is armed.  So the answer to your question, Leo, is that it's not an either-or proposition; both are going to be true.

The questions we should be asking is "Should immature drunks fighting over who stole whose girlfriend be armed with thermonuclear weapons?" and "Should kindergarteners automatically be issued AK-47s on the first day so that nobody steals their lunch money?"

Branch campuses, where older students commute to complete their degrees, might be a different situation, but if you're living in a dorm, a frat house, or campus housing, I think firearms are as appropriate as having a rabid skunk as a pet.

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