Legislating your vulnerability

At the state capitol there are House and Senate bills on the floor that will allow Georgia residents with the proper conceal-and-carry permits to take their weapons to virtually any public place in the state, including onto university campuses.

At first blush this can seem like a terrible, horrifying overreach from a few way-out-there gun nuts, but the more you consider the option, the more it makes sense.

Opponents of House Bill 615 include state reps. and senators; 37 USG university presidents and directors and the Board of Regents; and probably a not insubstantial number of Georgia voters. Their argument against the bills almost always boils down to essentially this: "Letting guns on campus legally will turn schools into the Wild West and many more school shootings will occur."

The logic behind this is laughable. First and foremost, murder is probably the most serious crime anyone can commit (a strong argument can be made for high treason, too), and anyone willing to plan it and carry it out is already well beyond the line of reasoned thought. It'd be like passing a law to prevent car jackers from changing the radio presets.

There's an old quote that no one can find the true source of, it always comes up in these discussions: "If you outlaw guns, only the outlaws will have guns." It was true 100 years ago, it is still true today. Law-abiding gun owners and permit carriers respect the state laws and don't bring their guns to places where they are legally forbidden to do so.

Criminals and people intending to kill their fellow students and faculty don't really care about the consequences of breaking such a law. By their very definition, criminals don't obey laws. This leaves those law abiding citizens vulnerable to crime. It strips law abiding citizens of their right to protect themselves against aggression.

On Feb. 13 of this year there was a shooting at the University of Alabama-Huntsville, three people were killed; three others were severely wounded. The mass shooting was allegedly carried out by Amy Bishop, a biology professor who had recently been denied tenure. It is illegal to carry guns on university campuses in Alabama. The same goes for college campuses in Virginia. And Texas.

When deranged people finally leap over that last, appalling hurdle, they just don't care about the law.

Joseph Stack picked flying a small plane into an IRS building to make his point. The twisted minds of would-be mass murderers search out the best way to air their grievances and make others suffer for the wrongs they perceive against them, and they almost always seem perfectly normal in the days leading up to the murders.

In a free society, people have freedom of movement and association, they also have the ability to become pathological or go insane; it's a price we pay for not having Thought Police.

I don't want to have to rely on responding police, who often have to wait outside of a shooter's location because they lack authorization to intervene or don't have enough tactical information. People die waiting for those issues to be resolved.

I, for one, want the right to protect myself. And I want you to be able to protect yourself if you wish as well. Criminally insane people will find a way to hurt others without any regard for the law; if there is even a small chance that someone can stop them in their tracks and save more lives, shouldn't we take it?