My grandmother once told me that she wished my grades had been a bit better because she secretly wanted me to go to Brown University. That was never in the cards--my grades would have had to be a whole lot better--but she admitted that it was because some ancestor of ours was a president of Brown and that I could go for free or something.
I don't know if that's true, but in hindsight and based on the shooting there, I'm really glad my grades were merely acceptable. The whole security fiasco there makes it clear that the campus is anything but safe.
It took them a week to identify a suspect in the shooting, with pretty much no security at all anywhere near the campus to have stopped him, detected him when he left, or anything else.
But an op-ed at USA Today thinks that the problem wasn't the lack of security.
While the horror of events in Rhode Island sinks in, it is inevitable that, just as night follows day, defenders of mass gun culture across the United States will rush to blame Brown University for not having enough security barriers to entry at the classroom building where the shooting took place.
For them, it is always something else, not the way our nation lives awash in easily available high-capacity firearms, that is at fault. This time, let’s stop the “more security” fallacy before the propaganda machine backing it kicks into high gear.
I am a college teacher, and of course I want my students to be as safe as possible. I have even discussed with students the possibility of a mass shooting event on campus, especially when teaching in classrooms with no opening windows. However, I also do not want students to pay $10,000 more in annual fees to have an army of armed guards in armor stationed at every door or swarms of security drones hovering everywhere.
Hyperbole much?
I'm sorry, but if, as a parent, I'm spending that kind of money for my child to go to college, I damn well expect there to be some effort to keep him and other students safe.
Yet no one is talking about an army of guards or drone swarms hovering about. Even some security cameras would have been nice. Keeping non-students out of classrooms somehow might have been beneficial. Brown did nothing at all.
See, the author here goes on to say we can't harden everywhere, which is true, but Brown wasn't everywhere. It was an Ivy League university that basically acknowledged that its security is so lax that once a shooting suspect steps out of the building, he's lost in the wind.
Moreover, while the author here makes a big deal about "high-capacity firearms," despite there being no such thing--guns don't have a capacity in and of themselves, as that's a magazine thing, and those "high-capacity magazines" are the standard capacity--he omits that Rhode Island and most of the surrounding states have every bit of gun control he could possibly want and expect to survive any test of constitutionality, plus a few that there's no way they should, and this still happened.
Brown University itself, like most universities in this country, is a gun-free zone. That law alone is billed as essential in preventing school shootings, and yet what happens? Killers routinely ignore that law just as they do the ones regarding murder.
Gun control has been tried. Even the left-leaning RAND acknowledges that there's little evidence of most gun control measures accomplishing anything at all, and they're trying to find that evidence.
So, while the author of this piece, John Davenport, seems to think we should try gun control, my response is very simple. We have. It doesn't work, it'll never work, and no amount of demonizing our side of this discussion will change that very simple fact.
Editor's Note: Christmas is coming a little early here at Bearing Arms!
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