Students for Concealed Carry
You may not be Wyatt Erp, but if you have a gun, then you have something to shoot back with if somebody else with a gun shoots at you.
Virginia Tech, site of a mass murder a few months ago, is a “gun-free zone.” Or you might call it a triumph-of-hope-over-experience zone. If there are no weapons on campus, who can shoot anybody?
Of course, a person intent on mayhem doesn’t always obey such rules.
Andrew Dysart is a senior at George Mason University senior, where he organized a chapter of Students for Concealed Carry on Campus. He wants state legislators to change a Virginia law that allows universities to outlaw the Second Amendment of students and others on campus.
About the Virginia Tech victims, Dysart says, “[T]he students . . . really should have had a chance. They should have had the chance to defend themselves if it came down to that.”
In a perverse twist, campuses like Virginia Tech can’t ban outsiders to the campus from carrying weapons for which they have permits. As Dysart puts it, students therefore “don’t have the same rights to self-defense on campus as the general public.” Now, this is not a contradiction we want to solve by extending the ban on self-defense to our whole society. There is no virtue in making everybody as helpless as possible when attacked.
At least one Virginia state school, Blue Ridge Community College, does let students and teachers arm themselves. Other campuses should too.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
