Very interesting article in the UW Daily

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Well, a little more good news! Just this morning, The Daily published this comment on their op-ed page. Way to go, Stan!


Euromutt: maybe you should also bring up how the policy opens the school up to liability if someone is killed or injured who otherwise would have had some way to defend themselves.

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Stealth Potato wrote:

The Daily published this comment on their op-ed page. Way to go, Stan!

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Stan's argument there is very closely related to the main reason I stopped supporting gun control, only my reasoning went along the same road in the opposite direction, so to speak. Stan says, very correctly:

Responsiblity must be transferred to another, before that other can excercise authority.

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For the government to legitimately restrict, let alone prohibit, private ownership of firearms for self-defense purposes, it has to first accept the responsibility to protect each and every citizen (and foreign nationals) in its care, and be held liable when it fails in this task. In repeated instances (notably the SCOTUS rulings in Warren v District of Columbia and Castle Rock, CO v Gonzales), the government has refused to accept this responsibility. Therefore, it cannot legitimately claim authority to deny its citizens the means to defend themselves.

Yeah, maybe I should push for the school accepting liability if anyone gets hurt as a result of complying with its policies. Problem is, it's rather difficult to prove that a particular victim of a school shooting wouldn't be dead or wounded if he or she hadn't been restricted from carrying.

Trip Volpe makes an interesting note in that comments thread, about how the UWregs state that "Nothing herein shall be construed to deny students their legally and/or constitutionally protected rights." Perhaps the stealthy approach is to just get something like that inserted into the Evergreen regs, and then let the college administration explain how imposing disciplinary sanctions for lawful possession of a firearm is not an attempt to deny students (and staff and faculty) a constitutional right.

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Euromutt wrote:

Trip Volpe makes an interesting note in that comments thread, about how the UWregs state that "Nothing herein shall be construed to deny students their legally and/or constitutionally protected rights."

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That would be me. I think the existence of that exception would their policy very difficult to actually enforce, should it ever come up.

Anyway, more good news from The Daily! In today's issue, they published a letter I wrote in their weekly "Free Speech Friday" feature. This was in response to a letter by one Emily Stix that they published last week; she made some of the usual tired old points, e.g., guns don't belong in schools! and someone who's carrying might snap and decide to kill everybody! She also claimed that if people carry guns for self-defense, criminals will resort to carrying even more deadly weapons. :shock:

They don't seem to have any published letters for the last couple of weeks on their website, so here is the text of my letter for any who are interested:

Emily Stix claims that Jackson Rohrbaugh's article Vigilante Justice is "absurd," but her letter is itself nonsensical.

One claim presented: If students carry firearms, criminals will escalate by carrying even more deadly weapons. Such as what? Rocket launchers? Nuclear missiles? And this doesn't even consider the fact that students and other citizens already carry guns for self-defense on a daily basis around the city of Seattle. When somebody gets mugged with an RPG, let me know.

Regarding concealed carry on campus, Emily asks how she can know that a student who is carrying won't decide to go on a rampage like Seung-Hui Cho did at Virginia Tech. The question is flawed because it assumes that a "no gun" policy will prevent people from bringing guns onto campus in the first place. What's stopping anybody from going on a rampage right now?

One might claim that deadly weapons are not conducive to a learning environment, but this is an emotional argument, not a rational one. The State of Utah has allowed concealed carry on its public university campuses since 2006, and has so far had no reason to regret it. It's time for Washington to get with the program.

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Ah, and here's the article by Mr. Lynch: http://spectator.seattleu.edu/news/story.aspx?ID=24200

Not terribly biased or anything, though I did make a point of the Washington State Constitution in the interview, and I'm kinda wondering why he didn't bother to mention that.

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Stealth Potato wrote:

Yeah, The Daily has always been pretty left-leaning, which is no surprise, but they've also seemed reluctant to even touch the issue of guns or guns on campus. It's definitely pretty remarkable that they would publish something like this now.

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Oh, I don't know. When I attended the UW, I wrote for the DAILY. That was back in the early 1970s and the day after George Wallace was shot, I did an editorial condemning the notion that "we need more gun laws."
We already had gun laws, just nobody with the balls to enforce them, I wrote. The AMERICAN RIFLEMAN magazine, then under editor Ashley Halsey, Jr. picked that up and ran it. "Enforce existing laws" from then on became kind of a generic response to demands for new laws.

Them were the good old days.

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Dave Workman wrote:

Oh, I don't know....That was back in the early 1970s

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If you have any doubt, pick up a copy of the Daily on nearly any day of the week now. The "good old days" are long since gone. It is nothing more than a liberal mouth piece now.

I just graduated about 18 months ago, and a lot of my buds still attend. They pick me up copies of the "best of the best" liberal pieces from time to time, as if I need more proof.