When I was set to graduate high school, a lot of us used various criteria to figure out where we wanted to go to college. They ranged from the smart, such as who had the best program in what we wanted to study, to the kind of silly. Yes, many of us picked our schools based on how good their football team was.

GO DAWGS!

Anywho...

The one thing no one really considered was politics. After all, we were going to go to college to start our lives. We weren't looking to permanently relocate. The politics were largely irrelevant to us.

Yet a recent survey seems to suggest that today, a state's gun policy may influence students' decision to attend college in the state. Particularly in Arizona, supposedly.

Eighty-one percent of current and potential students say gun policies influence their enrollment in college, which could cause trouble for Arizona’s public universities as a new bill allowing concealed carry makes its way through the state House.

The bill, which is known as SB 1198, states that “the governing board of any university, college or community college shall not enact of enforce any policy or rule that prohibits the possession of a concealed weapon” by someone who carries a valid permit.

That bill won’t be too popular among university students, however.

Most students prefer schools that restrict guns on campus, and one in three students worry “at least a fair amount” about gun violence, according to a new poll by Gallup and the Lumina Foundation. 

...

Courtney Brown, the vice president of impact and planning at the Lumina Foundation, said that was one of the reasons that the findings were so important.

“We’re seeing an enrollment decrease over the last 10 years, so it’s important to understand what barriers (students) are facing,” she told the Arizona Daily Star.

The feeling of “security and safety on campus” is causing students “not to enroll or to enroll in certain places,” Brown said.

And the issue isn’t partisan, according to the findings. More than three-quarters of current and prospective Republican students say campus gun policies are important to their enrollment decisions.

Now, this is presented as a bad thing for Arizona colleges, but the truth of the matter is that if they're that driven to pick a school based on state politics, I'd almost rather those students end up in some anti-gun hellhole.

See, I keep seeing all sorts of reports of high crime around campuses regardless of whether a state is pro-gun or anti-gun. It's probably because there's a perception that colleges are for rich kids. Either way, though, universities are often target locations for criminals.

So if these kids want to be disarmed in the face of these threats, that's on them. Let them go where they can get exactly what they're asking for. If they get robbed, well, those are the breaks.

However, let's also understand that while we've been seeing a lot of talk about gender and racial politics being injected into our classrooms, there have also been a lot of teachers pushing gun control in those same classrooms. These students often feel so passionately about gun control because they've only ever gotten one side of the equation. They believe in gun control because they don't know anything else.

So, they've been indoctrinated into an anti-gun position and they make their determinations based on that bias.

This isn't about whether students should or shouldn't take politics into account. This is about their politics being handed to them.