Let a thousand concealed handguns bloom?
Strange things happen to your mind when it’s transplanted to a foreign culture. Events and ideas that would have once appeared outrageous become very normal, and before long you accept them without batting an eyelid. It takes a serious jolt for you to realize how normal the hitherto abnormal has become.
Recently I had one of those jolts, when I read that the Texas State Legislature was about to pass a law forcing college campuses to permit students to carry concealed weapons on their persons. There is already a law that says Texas colleges can decide for themselves if they want students to wander around with secret firearms. None permit it; that’s why state lawmakers want to force them to grant students their 2nd Amendment rights.
O brave new world, that has such people in’t!
The idea is not new. I first encountered it following the Virginia Tech massacre of 2007, when a student named Seung-Hui Cho shot and killed 32 people before turning the gun on himself. A few days later a lawmaker in Texas proposed loosening the gun laws in the state, to make colleges safer.
‘Arm these kids…’ he said. ‘Teach them to KILL.’
Well, he didn’t quite put it that way. His argument, however, was nearly as simple- that by depriving kids of weapons on campus you render them defenseless against murderous psychotics such as Cho. By the time campus police respond there’s usually blood on the walls and brains on the ceiling. Only by letting a thousand firearms bloom will the flower of Texas youth be safe. I must admit, the more I thought about it, the more I realized there was a seductive logic to this argument. I think it was its very simplicity that gave it power.
And that was the second shock, perhaps even greater than the first. I found myself half in agreement with a proposal that two years earlier would have struck me as berserk, although more from sheer pragmatism than the semi-sacred awe of the gun that many Texans feel. After all, if just about anybody can amass an arsenal of deadly weapons in his basement then it is inevitable that a small number of psychotics will occasionally snap and kill innocent people. If loons and scoundrels can arm themselves, it’s inexcusable to deny sane, decent people the same privilege.
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