College students are supposed to be getting world class educations on everything from the STEM courses to liberal arts and rhetoric and logic.  No, I’m just kidding, they really don’t study any of that today, except STEM in some of the more technical universities (thank God for that), but the fees they charge would hint that they must learn something.  Right?

Well, let’s put that to the test.

Imagine yourself sitting in class. It’s been a long day, and you’re not paying attention to your professor. Instead, you’re planning your evening. Maybe you have an exam the next day and you want to go study in the library. Maybe you have to go down to the KAC at 4 for practice. Maybe all you want to do is sit with your friends and eat.

Then you hear gun shots. Not from the shooting range nearby, but on campus. The school goes on lockdown. Your professors instruct you to stay in the classroom, turn off the lights, cover the windows on the doors, lock the doors from the inside and hide. The room is absolutely silent. Eventually, Campus Safety comes to tell you you may all go back to your dorms.

“Were there any casualties?” you ask. “We are not at liberty to discuss that information right now,” the officer replies. You call your parents to tell them you’re OK and then you call all your friends to make sure they are as well. One of them doesn’t pick up. You try again. Still no answer. The next day the president’s office sends out an email explaining the incident and those affected. Your friend is in critical condition.

This hypothetical situtation is similar to what the families and friends of the first graders at Newtown, the high schoolers at Columbine and the college students at Virginia Tech have experienced. I am not willing to allow my school to be added to that list. House Bill 48, Concealed Carry-Affirmative Defenses-Carrying Firearm in Certain Vulnerable Areas, or the “Guns Everywhere Bill,” which is currently in committee in the Ohio State Senate, would allow people to carry weapons on college campuses across the state.

This is a recipe for a disaster. College students are under a tremendous amount of stress, are often impulsive and inevitably have access to alcohol. The combination of these factors would produce a dangerous and potentially disastrous situation if guns were added to the mix. But it is more likely that impulsive students will hurt themselves, rather than their peers.

So her thesis is this.  Students will “inevitably” get access to alcohol.  Inevitably, says she.  And perhaps she’s right.  Prohibition never works.  But she advocates gun control that looks just like prohibition, thinking that rules against them will keep them off of campus if someone really intends to bring one on anyway.  Moreover, she advocates control over peaceable, law abiding students rather than the criminals she purports to control (by the way, more rapes, burglaries and assaults occur on our local campus – UNCC – than anywhere else in the metro area of my home city, that campus being a “gun free zone”).

But she switches midstream in order to move the target.  By the end she advocates all of this under the rubric of safety for students should they get access to guns in a panicked, diminutive or pathological state.  And yet getting access to alcohol and getting behind the wheel of a car doesn’t so much as grab her attention, even though others besides the student stand to be injured or lose their lives in an accident cause by inebriated driving.

She moved the goalposts in order to redirect your demurral, and when she did, she left unaddressed the perfect analogy to guns (in terms of laws of prohibition), simply assuming that such laws won’t and can’t work.  So there you have it.  The current state of scholarship in American universities.