Repeater
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You know what campus needs? More guns
Anti-gun commentary by Sean O'Neal:
Artists' rendering of UT students on their way to class.
In what is being pitched as a preventative measure, Texas lawmakers like State Sen. Jeff Wentworth are currently preparing bills that would allow guns on college campuses like UT Austin.
The new look at campus gun laws is just one of many such proposals over the years that have been crafted in the wake of school shootings like the 2007 massacre at Virginia Tech. Since that specific incident, 17 states have introduced legislation that would allow licensed gun owners to carry them to school, apparently operating under the assumption that students are much less likely to be the target of random violence if wannabe Columbine killers know that every class is potentially full of John McClanes itching to take them out. None of these proposals has passed, of course, despite the protests of folks like Wentworth, who defended his innocuously titled "safety protection bill" by saying, "I don'twant to wake up one morning and hear on the news that some madman went on a Texas campus and picked off Texas students like sitting ducks."
Fortunately for the madmen, Wentworth and his supporters (most notably Governor Rick Perry) are facing the opposition of a few special interest groups--namely their fellow representatives, university officials, gun-control advocates, campus law enforcement, and the student government of UT (who recently passed a resolution urging elected officials to "oppose attempts to eliminate campus weapon bans")--yet they still seem undeterred. In fact, some are pushing to do more than just end the ban: Groups like OpenCarry.orghave collected thousands of dollars and purchased advertising space on billboards and taxicabs as part of its mission to see gun owners "openly brandish" their guns in public, perhaps while wearing some of those cool low-slung holsters like Clint Eastwood in A Fistful Of Dollars.
On its website, OpenCarry quotes Illinois Wesleyan University anthropologist Charles Springwood, who says that such measures will "naturalize the presence of guns, which means that guns become ordinary, omnipresent, and expected. Over time, the gun becomes a symbol of ordinary personhood." (You know, kind of like how it was weird when people started carrying around mobile phones, but then eventually everyone had one?) But then there are worrywarts like State Rep. Lon Burnam, who believe that letting college kids swagger through campus while packing heat would return Texas to a "19th-century Wild West atmosphere." We'll leave it to you to debate the merits of either position, but we will ask that if this law somehow passes, can we also set up some Deadwood-style tents on the West Mall for whiskey shots and handjobs? Might as well go all the way, right?
You know what campus needs? More guns
Anti-gun commentary by Sean O'Neal:
Artists' rendering of UT students on their way to class.
In what is being pitched as a preventative measure, Texas lawmakers like State Sen. Jeff Wentworth are currently preparing bills that would allow guns on college campuses like UT Austin.
The new look at campus gun laws is just one of many such proposals over the years that have been crafted in the wake of school shootings like the 2007 massacre at Virginia Tech. Since that specific incident, 17 states have introduced legislation that would allow licensed gun owners to carry them to school, apparently operating under the assumption that students are much less likely to be the target of random violence if wannabe Columbine killers know that every class is potentially full of John McClanes itching to take them out. None of these proposals has passed, of course, despite the protests of folks like Wentworth, who defended his innocuously titled "safety protection bill" by saying, "I don'twant to wake up one morning and hear on the news that some madman went on a Texas campus and picked off Texas students like sitting ducks."
Fortunately for the madmen, Wentworth and his supporters (most notably Governor Rick Perry) are facing the opposition of a few special interest groups--namely their fellow representatives, university officials, gun-control advocates, campus law enforcement, and the student government of UT (who recently passed a resolution urging elected officials to "oppose attempts to eliminate campus weapon bans")--yet they still seem undeterred. In fact, some are pushing to do more than just end the ban: Groups like OpenCarry.orghave collected thousands of dollars and purchased advertising space on billboards and taxicabs as part of its mission to see gun owners "openly brandish" their guns in public, perhaps while wearing some of those cool low-slung holsters like Clint Eastwood in A Fistful Of Dollars.
On its website, OpenCarry quotes Illinois Wesleyan University anthropologist Charles Springwood, who says that such measures will "naturalize the presence of guns, which means that guns become ordinary, omnipresent, and expected. Over time, the gun becomes a symbol of ordinary personhood." (You know, kind of like how it was weird when people started carrying around mobile phones, but then eventually everyone had one?) But then there are worrywarts like State Rep. Lon Burnam, who believe that letting college kids swagger through campus while packing heat would return Texas to a "19th-century Wild West atmosphere." We'll leave it to you to debate the merits of either position, but we will ask that if this law somehow passes, can we also set up some Deadwood-style tents on the West Mall for whiskey shots and handjobs? Might as well go all the way, right?