At Capital University in Ohio, an individual described as a “convicted serial groper” allegedly sexually assaulted a student. Someone has been arrested for the assault, but now members of the student government want to pass a resolution supporting each student’s right to self-defense.

However, that doesn’t matter since the student body president apparently didn’t like the resolution.

A student body president vetoed a resolution supporting students’ right to nonlethal self-defense in the wake of highly publicized sexual assault allegations at Capital University in Ohio.

President Jason Fugate is inventing procedural and technical reasons to prevent the bill’s passage, according to members of a student group who wrote Senate Bill 1.

Despite majority support for the bill in a Tuesday night student senate vote, Fugate said he wouldn’t approve any similar bill until he was convinced the entire student body supported it.

The veto is “little more than an effort by the university administration to bury this conversation before it even starts,” the bill’s three authors, also members of the university’s Young Americans for Liberty chapter, said in a joint statement. “This is a clear example of university bureaucrats putting a political agenda over student safety.”

…

In response to that incident and other violence targeting Capital students, student senator Garrett Kehr, the campus coordinator of Students for Liberty, joined with the pro-liberty student government caucus to advocate for a “No More Victims” measure, a Students for Liberty spokesperson told The College Fix in an email.

Senate Bill 1, which had six sponsors, asks the university’s board of trustees to adopt concealed-carry policies similar to those at the University of Texas-Austin and “in line with the Ohio Revised Code.”

President Fugate came up with a litany of reasons, but none of those really wash. The vast majority of those reasons were procedural, which should have blocked a vote from taking place, not allowed a vote and warranted a veto.

Self-defense is a basic human right. Denying anyone the means to effectively defend themselves, particularly women who tend to be lighter and physically weaker than their attackers, is to deny a basic human right. President Fugate’s reasoning rings hollow in light of that fact.

Among the arguments Fugate presented was that the student government did not have a “direct audience” with the trustees. However, wouldn’t the purpose of a resolution to be to notify both the trustees and the student body that the student government was making this request in light of campus safety concerns?

Another was concern that the seven footnotes, including three news articles, were too much for voters to consider during the course of the evening. Again, this would have been grounds for tabling the vote, perhaps, but it also sounds like the majority of those voting disagreed. They felt they had sufficient time to consider the evidence presented.

No, I can’t help but wonder if the problem is that Fugate is like so many other campus activists these days, terrified of anything that might empower individuals over collective overlords. Let’s face it, guns are the ultimate empowerment tool, and keeping them away from campus is something campus crybullies would prefer as it allows them to bully others into either compliance or, at least, silence.

Without knowing Fugate, I can only speculate, but I do know that none of the reasons presented sound like a compelling reason to ignore the wishes of the student government.