I have heard several suggestions to the effect that if any of those students or professors at Virginia Tech had had a gun, one of them might have "taken down" the shooter. Following that comes the proposal that students be allowed to carry concealed weapons on campuses.
Um. Going from the ridiculous to the serious here, suppose some student didn't like his grade on a paper or for a course? Or, suppose a student was taking a course from one of the professors highlighted by David Horowitz and his loonies at Discover the Networks, an outfit which bills itself as
a "Guide to the Political Left." It identifies the individuals and organizations that make up the left and also the institutions that fund and sustain it; it maps the paths through which the left exerts its influence on the larger body politic; it defines the left's (often hidden) programmatic agendas and it provides an understanding of its history and ideas.
Could a student decide he'd been given a poor grade solely because his professor was on Horowitz's hit list and didn't like the kid's politics? And would said student be loony enough to confront the professor during office hours, with a weapon in his hands?
More seriously, if a student has a gun and is in the midst of a shooting incident, how are the cops to determine that the student trying to defend himself with a weapon isn't the guy causing the incident? It seems to me that the innocent bystander with a weapon is just as likely to be perceived as a perpetrator as the real perp might be. Is that a risk all these advocates for arming students want to take?
Posted by Linkmeister at April 23, 2007 10:38 AM | TrackBackYeah, this sounds like an insane idea! The more guns, the more chaotic, unpredictable danger.
I found your blog through librarything, by the way.
Posted by: Dewey at April 23, 2007 11:58 AMAgain with stupid thinking, not yours. those others.
Or...the one with the gun would have ended up just as dead as the other 32. I wrote about this at Thudfactor and recounted the story of a shooting at a local mall. Some bozo, pissed off at the world, went to the mall, and unloaded a few rounds at the shoppers. One of them, a stand-up comic of all things, had a gun and pulled it out to stop the guy. He was shot. Now he's a parapalegic comic consigned to a wheel chair for the rest of his life and no....he didn't get off one shot.
A rather personal and painful memory related to this idiotic line of thinking. Back in 1993 when this idiot went on a shooting spree on the LIRR, my psycho ex-husband wrote a letter to the editor of the NYT expressing the same sentiment.
Lucky for me it was published the same day as our company holiday party.
Urgh.
Posted by: FKC at April 24, 2007 09:21 AM