Collins says the bill will help protect Arkansans. “This is all about protecting our children protecting our spouses and protecting the people that are on college campuses,” he said.
John Diamond, university spokesman, said allowing others to have guns on campus isn’t a good idea, “They may overreact to a situation. They may misinterpret something that’s going on, and if they are armed with a deadly weapon it’s much more likely than not that they’re going to act in a way that compounds a problem rather than resolve it.”
Allowing guns on campus could make for some entertaining faculty meetings.
ReplyDeleteThe biology prof who shot and killed half of her department at the University of Alabama thought so too.
DeleteJesus H. Tapdancing Christ.
ReplyDeleteNo, don't bother making weapons of mass murder harder to get. Just give teachers guns (and maybe training--will they get training too? Probably not. Or they'll have to pay for it out of pocket because the Good Lord knows that states are so strapped for cash right now they have to slash teacher pay and get rid of their collective bargaining rights). On second thought, arming teachers might not be such a good idea, what with them bein' union thugs an' all.
This makes me want to scream.
FUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUCK!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Fully support this. No that isn't sarcasm.
ReplyDeleteBurntChrome, I don't think the suggestion is to start passing out guns like we're being invaded by aliens and professors are the world's last defense. If you're planning on murdering someone, you don't care about a misdemeanor weapon's charge anyways. All these "gun free" zones are is "helpless victim" zones.
I don't know who you are. I have never seen you on this site before, so I am going to go ahead and tell you that you sound like a total fucking moron, and you should probably go sell your crazy somewhere else.
DeleteTo quote the photo of the teacher after the NRA wankfest last week, "When one kid hits another kid with a rock, the solution is not to give all the other kids rocks."
I am so sick of American cowboy gun culture I could puke blood.
You think you're going to do any good with your little concealed carry pistol and 4 hours of "training"? Fuck you, John Wayne. The military and police spend MONTHS training soldiers and cops how to react in crisis situations. People with no training will do one of two things (or maybe both): shit their pants, and/or shoot blindly and add to the chaos.
PS. I own two rifles and I am smart enough to know that I'm not going to be able to save anyone should a killer come into my classroom. Unless I had a round chambered and the safety off, I'd be dead before I could even lift it into position.
So I repeat, fuck off.
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DeleteThat seems like a disproportionate response to IS. In all areas of life, we attempt actions that experts do better than us thanks to their extensive training. I might help an injured person out of a burning car after an auto accident, even though I'm not a trained EMT. I might not do it as well as an expert and I might even hurt the guy more than if I waited for the ambulence to arrive. However, the circumstances require that I make the attempt. Are you going to say, "Fuck you, Florence Nightingale"?
DeleteFour hours of training in a chaotic situation wouldn't help much. How about 4 hours of training when you know the gunman is coming to your room in advance, such as after you hear the gunshots from the adjoining classroom? What about 10 hours of training. Given your well-thoughtout response, I'm surprised that you didn't consider these alternate scenarios.
BB, with all due respect, I have thought those scenarios.
DeleteIf we go ahead with this idea, who pays for the gun I keep? Who pays for the bullets? Who pays for my permit, for my 10 hours of training?
I live in a state where the folks in charge have fucked over state employees in the name of "fiscal responsibility." I think it's the height of idiocy to think that they would pay for very expensive equipment and training for an event which, as you pointed out above, is statistically unlikely to happen.
My dad is an ex-Navy SEAL. When I talked to him about this, he just shook his head. Arming every civilian would end up creating even more chaos in these sitiuations. The military spends a lot of time and money training soldiers how to look at a human being as a target and not a person. This ups the likelihood that the soldier will be able to react accurately in a live fire event.
I don't know about you, but I have all I can do to keep up with my teaching and committee and PD and home obligations.
And what's more to the point, I am not interested in being armed at my job. That's why I'm not a security guard or a cop.
I agree that arming every civilian would be a mess. Forcing faculty to carry guns would be a very bad policy too. Thankfully, that's not what anybody is talking about.
DeleteNow that you've moved from "fuck you" to "how will we pay for this", I think you raise some good questions. These details, along with liability insurance issues, will probably undo such proposals.
The "fuck you" is pure frustration over the sheer idiocy of this idea.
DeleteIt's frustration because it does nothing to address what I see as one of the main issues: the ability for civilians to access the kind of weaponry used by military forces. I am not advocating taking away anyone's deer rifle or .38. Can't get more than 6 rounds through a .38 and only as fast as you can get the hammer back. It's not an AR-15 with a 100-round drum magazine. Who needs that? No one. But no, we're just going to give teachers Glocks and hope for the best when someone in Kevlar body armor decides to go out in a blaze of glory.
It's the stupidity I find frustrating. And I lashed out because I am sick of the response to gun violence being more guns, instead of fewer.
While my alias is of indeterminate gender, I am small and very female and even if I were trained to use a gun and licensed to carry one, what are the chances I could get to it in time to stop an angry student, and what are the chances that student could overpower me and shoot me with my own gun? I've dealt with so many angry, threatening, and pretty unstable-seeming students and I really don't want the added possibility that they might also very easily shoot me. I'm not against all guns everywhere and I know that they make many people feel safer, but along with suggestions that students be allowed to carry guns, this just seems impractical, especially with so many unstable students (and professors! not a few desperate adjuncts out there). I'm a professor, not an old-west lawman looking for a shoot out in the quad at high noon.
ReplyDeleteNow, if we were being invaded by aliens and professors were the world's last defense, I'd be all for it. I'd totally be an alien-shooting badass.
A gun is impractical in many instances. In those scenarios, you'll probably die anyway so it doesn't matter if you fail to draw your gun from it's holster or you don't have one at all. A gun could be effective if a violent student sees you reach for it - not every attacker is a methodical killer, some are impulsive. You could also defend yourself if you heard gunshots from the next classroom or office, followed by footsteps to your door. Running and hiding are also good options in these cases but having a gun could provide an additional option that could be helpful, depending on the circumstances.
DeleteI LIKE guns and I think America has too many....the NRA probably uses Collins like a meat puppet and for that privilege they probably stuff his slush fund.
ReplyDeleteThat's our problem as Americans; we don't know when ENOUGH is ENOUGH and this mentality bleeds over into all aspects of the culture.
You don't know it but guns are all around you. People have guns. It's not a big deal to many of us. The same people will carry them on campus, the same way they carry them downtown, in their cars and most anywhere else. Given the rare occurrence of mass shootings, I don't think there's anything to worry about.
ReplyDeleteIn the past 3 decades, there have been 62 mass shootings. 24 in the last 7 years. The numbers are on the rise. So yeah, I am aware that guns ate all around me. I am wondering when the right to concealed carry infringes on my right to feel safe in a public space. When does the right to buy an assault rifle with a 100-round magazine start to sound fucking insane? I'd have said right around the time the ban was allowed to expire.
Delete*are
DeleteI'm not sure about your statistics. I've seen reports that mass shootings are not on the rise. It probably depends on how you categorize the type of shooting, its severity, etc. News coverage of shootings has increased over the past ten years. Whether or not 100 deaths by gun rampages is more or less than 20 years ago, the coverage is more than 30,000 dead from traffic accidents.
DeleteA car's main purpose is to transport people and goods. What is a gun's purpose? Your analogy fails.
DeleteMy stats came from Mother Jones, but this is a good place to go, too: http://journalistsresource.org/studies/government/criminal-justice/mass-murder-shooting-sprees-and-rampage-violence-research-roundup
As BC said. When a car is used properly no one is hurt. When a gun is used properly, people die. You can't compare the cost of something used properly with the cost of something used improperly.
DeleteAnd yes, guns can do other things. But they were invented, and then improved, for the primary purpose of thrusting a small piece of metal very fast into another person's body.
I neither hate nor fear guns. I've done some target shooting with antique rifles. But I do wonder just why we accept something no other developed industrial democracy would consider tolerable, this country's level of gun-related violence. Of course we also accept levels of access to medical care and poverty levels, not to mention educational outcomes, that most of the other developed nations would consider unacceptable.
BB, wow, that gun-vs-car deaths comparison comes straight from any NRA mouthpiece. As others said, a car's purpose isn't to kill, when used properly and for its express purpose. A gun, when used properly and for its express purpose, (and especially an assault rifle, with a 30 bullet clip) is used to kill people.
DeleteI once took an entire day's training, about 8 hours worth, on firearms safety and handling. There is absolutely zero percent chance that I will safely lunge for, aim, and fire a gun without shooting myself or an innocent bystander in the frenetic opening moments following someone bursting into my classroom doing a Marc Lepine re-enactment.
How would any campus even begin to ensure classrooms are properly protected by at least one person with a firearm? Would each class need a designated armed security person? Would they need extensive and sustained firearms training and target practice? Is the gun and the training going to be paid by the uni, by the govt, or is this entirely voluntary? The faculty safety committee has a hard enough time getting one person per floor in a building to be voluntary fire marshal during a fire alarm...
Oh, goodness. I can't imagine how many new clauses this could add to my already novel-length syllabus.
ReplyDeleteGuns aren't all around me. I live in Canada. Guns are in the hands of the police. Handguns are locked up at the ranges where those who own them practice, and anyone carrying one anywhere else is in deep and instant trouble. Hunting rifles are locked up at home and can't be concealed if anyone is asshole enough to carry one.
ReplyDeleteYes, there are some criminals out there who carry guns with them. That's why there were 52 deaths due to guns in Canada this year. This is, per capita, about 5% the rate of American gun deaths.
Gun control works. Letting more guns get out there, especially handguns & semiautomatics & so on, legally or illegally, does not work. This is the experience of every country on the planet - including the US, which the rest of us use as the grim counter-example.
What does a normal person need a gun for anyway? Does "civil society" mean anything in this conversation? You know, not one where everyone is armed and carrying, but one where no one needs to?
Lots of different laws work well in other countries due to differences in their people's culture. Canada's gun restrictions would not work well in the US, even if they were legal. Other countries have more restrictions on free speech and everybody seems pretty content there. What normal person would need to deny the Holocaust, anyway? Yet, we let that slide here. What normal 18 year old would need to drink beer, anyway? Well, ours sure felt the need and caused enough traffic accidents in the 1980's that we moved the drinking age back to 21.
DeleteActually, MA, there are guns all around you in Canada. As Michael Moore pointed out in Bowling for Columbine, gun ownership rates aren't that different in Canada vs USA. However, as you stated, they are all hunting rifles and shotguns, used for target practice and hunting, and locked up in people's gun lockers, with trigger locks and the ammunition safely stored in another separate, secure location.
DeleteBB, the drinking age analogy doesn't work - while the % of traffic deaths involving alcohol is about the same (approx 30%) in both countries, even though the drinking age in Canadian provinces is lower (18 and 19), alcohol-related traffic deaths in Canada is less than in the USA [3.1 per 100,000 pop'n (2009) vs 3.3 per 100,000 pop'n (2010); even less in Quebec (age 18), with 2.8 per 100,000]. The equivalent scenario involving firearms would be the USA having lower rates of homicides and accidental deaths involving firearms despite the higher rates of gun ownership - which is clearly not the case...
Teaparty yeah, BurntChrome. We're academics, right? We care about data, questions, answers, truth, dealing with reality. How teapartying likely is it that any given gun is used to defuse some nasty situation with a "bad guy with a gun" versus used to exacerbate a situation: "Well, she finally shot the bastard." I'm teapartying tired of the kneejerk response that the answer is to make sure everyone is armed all the time. What kind of anarchy is that? What kind of society? It's teapartying b.s.
ReplyDeleteJust last week, the cop killed in Houston after a traffic stop turned into a chase:
"The saddest thing is that the officer, who is deceased, didn't have the opportunity to pull his weapon and defend himself," Cannon said. "It happened that fast."
Other news: "Organization devoted to gun ownership and manufacturing recommends solution involving purchasing more guns."
"Gun-free zones = helpless victim zones" -- teaparty you. False dichotomy much? You get that slogan off a soda can?
I rather liked the comment a friend reposted on Facebook; "America needs more guns like the Sorcerer's Apprentice needed more brooms."
ReplyDeleteGuns as a hobby are lame, but so are 80K beemers in a 65mph freeway. Everyone has their weird hobbies.
ReplyDeleteBut isn't it the austerity measures and income inequality that is causing the increase in massacres and the mental illnesses, not gun control laws? It's not like you could know what the causes are anyway, but income inequality makes sense.
At any rate, fuck the NRA for its racist history, but I do feel for the rubes who lost their jobs, benefits, dignity, so I can't blame them for wanting to hold onto their assault rifles.