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Opening Arguments

Hot shot students

And the latest gatherings of lunatic, dangerous gun nuts can be found in . . . the Ivy League?

In between completing problem sets, writing code, organizing hackathons, worrying about internships and building solar cars, a group of MIT students make their way to the athletic center, where they stand side-by-side, load their guns and fire away.

They are majoring in biological engineering, brain and cognitive sciences, aeronautics, mechanical engineering, computer science and nuclear science. Before arriving at MIT, nearly all of them had never touched a gun or even seen one that wasn’t on TV…

[Nick] McCoy is one of the brainiacs on MIT’s pistol and rifle teams, which, like other college shooting teams, have benefited from the largesse of gun industry money and become so popular that they often turn students away. Teams are thriving at a diverse range of schools: Yale, Harvard, the University of Maryland, George ­Mason University, and even smaller schools such as Slippery Rock University in Pennsylvania and Connors State College in Oklahoma.

“We literally have way more students interested than we can handle,” said Steve Goldstein, one of MIT’s pistol coaches.

The push for guns on campus is chiefly from the NRA, which is horrifying to the usual suspects horrified by anything at all to do with guns. As this observer notes, it was a pretty smart move: "By investing in competitive shooting sports on campus, they hoped to give young people a chance to experience the shooting life for themselves rather than relying on the daily narrative they are fed by the media." It won't change campuses to model settings of common-sense values overnight, but it's a start.

Your're afraid of what you don't know. How often has that been said? It applies here. I grew up in a rural area where a lot of people had guns -- mostly shotguns and rifles, but they all went boom and threw lead. And we even had a rifle club in high school where you could go to the basement range and learn how to shoot. Guns in the hands of students in school! That would be pretty much unthinkable today.

College kids today mostly have no experience with guns and only hear about them when they're used in some awful crime or killing spree. And theu hear, day after day, the liberal, mainstream narrative that only knows how to say, "Guns bad, bad, bad." They get some actual experience and guess what?

“I had a poor view, a more negative view of people who like guns than I do now,” said Hope Lutwak, a freshman on MIT’s pistol team. “I didn’t understand why people enjoyed it. I just thought it was very violent.”

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