Jeremy vs. The Second Amendment
If I didn't have this gun, the King of England could just walk in here anytime he wants and start shoving you around. YOU WANT THAT? DO YOU???
Source: Homer Simpson explaining to Lisa why the Second Amendment of the U.S. Constitution is not just a remnant from revolutionary days.
The following is a letter I read the other day in the New York Times:
To the Editor:
In “Eight Years After Columbine” (editorial, April 17), you call for more gun control. With 40 states permitting law-abiding citizens to carry handguns for protection, the evidence teaches that prohibiting carrying such weapons leads to tragedy.
Virginia Tech is one of the “gun free” zones in Virginia where gun possession is prohibited — a place criminals know that they need not fear an armed response. The prohibition did not stop the gunman, but it did prevent anyone on that campus from stopping his murder spree.
Daniel Schmutter
West Orange, N.J., April 17, 2007
Thank you, Daniel. I know the one thing I was truly upset about in college was the fact that more people didn't carry firearms. My safe haven of learning would have been so much safer. All those drunken fights at parties never would have escalated. Imagine how much safer the football games would have been. And the games we lost, when the entire campus was upset and angry? Much much safer. Who doesn't want more guns around in a place where a bunch of people are fresh out of their parents' homes, feeling lonliness and angst for the first time? According to a recent survey by the American College Health Association, 15 percent of college students were formally diagnosed with depression last year. So what if they all have their own firearms? As long as more than that 15 percent are armed, the world is a safer place, right?
Of course, by law, each and every handgun owner would have to be a responsible and upstanding individual. And if they weren't and they still managed to get a gun? Well, I'm sure there would be another responsible and upstanding individual waiting around to shoot them in case things got out of hand.
I like this plan. I'm happy to be a part of it.
4 comments:
You win! That is the critic's choice for best response to the right to carry guns on campus argument I have read yet.
Well done.
Except, Jeremy, nothing you said explains why Professors and other licensed adults should not have been permitted to carry a firearm on campus.
The fact is that Virginia Tech was a safe zone for the shooter. If any of the Faculty or University staff that this guy encountered during his rampage had been armed, he might have killed far fewer.
Instead, the shooter was guaranteed free reign to shoot as many as he liked for an extended period of time. All that his victims, students and faculty alike, could do was die.
Dan Schmutter
My main point of this post is that, even if this atrocity could have been stopped sooner because somebody was armed (and prepared to take a human life, which I don't think would be so easy for me) more people with guns means more gun violence.
For the tens of deaths that might have been saved in this case, hundreds more would occur in cases where people with impaired judgement had readily accessible firearms. I'm not talking about people with histories that would fail a background check when purchasing a gun. I'm talking about college students drinking too much or facing high stress or depression for the first time.
Jeremy -
You completely ignored what I wrote.
Whether or not you think college students should be permitted to carry guns on campus, there is no reason that responsible adults, such as faculty and staff, should not have been permitted to carry concealed handguns.
Your claim that more people with guns means more violence is completely false. The evidence shows your claim to be quite clearly untrue.
So your solution is to ensure that psychos like the Virginia Tech killer have no one readily available to stop his killing spree, when if even one of the teachers he came across had been armed, many lives could have been saved.
You simply are not making any sense.
Dan Schmutter
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