Today In Gun Fun Times: Should We Arm Our Precious Snowflake College Students?

 
 Greetings Wonkeristas, and welcome back to our occasional tour through the dissipated, sand-blasted desert hellscape that is the hive mind of the all-guns-all-the-time Second Amendment fetishists. We would visit more often but this is a terrible place and everyone who lives in it is terrible. Let us talk about one of the terrible ideas for which these terrible people advocate and then sneer at it, as is our wont.

When you read our story last week about sexual assaults -- er, incidents of nonconsensual sex -- on the campus of Yale, was your first thought that if only those assault victims had been armed, they could have stood their vaginas and fought off their attackers? S.E. “2 Girls 1” Cupp thought it, and not for the first time. Because there is no problem so grave it cannot be solved with arming people, apparently.

This is part of the justification behind the push to allow college students to carry guns on campuses across America. Or, as Students for Concealed Carry put it on the group’s website, “The answer to bullets flying is almost always more bullets flying. That’s why the police bring so many guns with them when they respond to a report of ‘shots fired.’” That they do! Of course cops also have lots of training and something called “rules of engagement,” much like soldiers in war zones, so they don’t start firing bullets all willy-nilly and accidentally hitting the civilians whose lives they are supposed to be saving. And even with all that training and all those rules, the cops still fuck up sometimes. Now imagine instead of cops we’re talking about some nineteen-year-old college student with no training? Or don’t imagine it, just watch this video instead. 

Students for Concealed Carry has a long list of objections raised by its opponents which it labors to answer, and somehow most of these answers can be summed up as, “Heyyyy, relax, guy!” Colleges too crowded to safely allow concealed carry weapons? Heyyyy, relax guy, colleges are no more crowded than your average mall or movie theater! Guns sometimes go off by accident? Heyyyy, relax guy, that usually only happens when a gun is handled in an unsafe manner, which a responsible gun owner would never do! Colleges are emotionally volatile environments so maybe we don’t want to introduce guns into them, lest some emotionally volatile young people decide shooting someone is the best way to resolve a roommate dispute? Heyyyy, relax guy, concealed-carry opponents said disputes over parking spaces and traffic accidents would result in people shooting each other and that didn’t happen. (Except for all the times that it did.) Concealed-carry permit holders don’t let their emotions get the best of them in other environments (except when   they   do ) and it will be no different on college campuses. Trust us!

Second Amendment fetishists always say, “Trust us!” Yr Wonkette does not trust them. Too many of them come off as ranting,   unhinged,   uneducated jackholes. And Students for Concealed Carry’s apparent reliance on the work of fecal-brained fuckwit John Lott to back up their argument is not exactly convincing. We would trust the work of the Centers for Disease Control a little more, but the CDC might tell the gun fetishists something they don’t want to hear, which is why the NRA has gotten Congress to prevent that from happening for 17 years and counting.

Luckily this movement to make college campuses safe by bringing more guns onto them has so far met with very limited success. Currently only two dozen schools across the country (out of 4300) allow concealed-carry permit holders to bring guns on campus. In Texas, where one would think it an easy sell, a bill to allow students with concealed-carry permits to carry their guns on campus stalled in the Senate. The issue may get revisited during the newest special session of the Texas Legislature, which started last week, but right now any bill seems to be low on the list of priorities. Kansas recently passed a law saying that its public universities cannot prohibit permit holders from carrying guns unless a building “has adequate security measures,” and the schools’ governing boards can opt out of this law for up to four years, which gives them until 2017 to improve security. Even colleges in Arkansas have opted out of allowing concealed-carry holders to bring guns on campus.

Which brings us back to S.E. Cupp and her knee-jerk “arm the wimmenz!” response to the news from Yale last week. We think Yale is terrible. As is the University of North Carolina,   Princeton,   Swarthmore,   our own grad-school alma mater USC, and numerous other schools (yeah yeah, AOTK!) that worry more about protecting the institution than the health and welfare of their female (and even occasional male) students who are sexually assaulted on campus. But the flip side of this argument is that, unless you can somehow weed them out ahead of time, potential rapists will also be allowed to bring guns on campus. How many more rapes will happen if a guy feels particularly empowered by the gun he's carrying while he's getting some Kappa Delta drunk on cheap beer at a frat party? And Cupp's solution does nothing to address the larger cultural issues that lead to rape in the first place, nor does it address the problem of slut-shaming that is so often the first response to a woman who reports being raped. Imagine if these women start shooting their attackers? Nothing good can come from the screaming fits people will throw while untrustworthy authorities try to sort those cases out.

There are (we hope) solutions to at least reduce the incidence of sexual assaults on campus (chief among them, fellas: DON'T FUCKING RAPE). But arming the nation's college-age children, as the NRA would like to do, is not one of them.

Don’t you love it when Yr Wonkette takes 900 words to arrive at the conclusion that we have no fucking idea what to do about this problem, other than to keep drinking?