Ricochet is the best place on the internet to discuss the issues of the day, either through commenting on posts or writing your own for our active and dynamic community in a fully moderated environment. In addition, the Ricochet Audio Network offers over 50 original podcasts with new episodes released every day.
“When May I Shoot a Student?”
As a professor, I have academic colleagues forwarding the panicked reactions to the bills in various states allowing weapons to be legally carried on campus. One passed around this New York Times op-ed with the sarcastically-calm title by an Idaho professor “When May I Shoot a Student?” If students are allowed to carry guns on campus, then this professor wants to know under what circumstances he can legally shoot them.
The assumption is that allowing students to carry weapons on campus creates a novel, dangerous, and unprecedented situation. With the column’s mud-thick sarcasm getting in the way, I can’t tell whether he understands that the law already affirms the right of people to carry firearms when he walks around town. Does he also worry about when he can shoot an armed person on the street?
His claim is that students are specially upset at him — by virtue of being in his class and earning bad grades — so he’s at special risk there. I’ve had my share of stressed, upset students over the years, so let’s not dismiss this point. But allowing legal carry on campus doesn’t change the situation. The dangerous ones have always been dangerous and a student with murder in his mind isn’t deterred by a campus rule prohibiting weapons.
So, “when can I shoot a student?” Well, whenever you could shoot anybody else. How often have you needed to shoot people so far, professor?
Then this PowerPoint making the rounds from the University of Houston is getting media attention, especially slide 15:
One of my colleagues posted an article referencing that presentation, with the story being that professors at the University of Houston are being “advised” to save their lives by avoiding sensitive topics in class, dropping curriculum, and meeting with students by appointment only under controlled circumstances. See?! Allowing guns on campus means professors are being told to do these crazy things just to keep from being shot! Therefore the law is a horrible thing.
Except that’s not what’s happening. The presentation is from a UH faculty senate meeting about the new law, and the faculty senate has made a resolution against the law, claiming:
The Faculty of the University of Houston asserts that it cannot carry out its core mission of excellence in education, research and public service where guns are present in educational spaces.
It’s not an external body giving advice to professors. It’s not even the administration. It’s the professors themselves. Read the rest of the presentation. It’s all an anti-gun advocacy session.
Now, I should point out that the existence of this slide is not evidence that the law is a bad thing. In fact, I think this slide was created in order to give the professors a talking point against the law. By encouraging overreaction, they can try to point to it and pretend that it’s a result of the law, rather than of internal coaching. It reminds me of the undignified ways that soccer players will pretend to be gravely injured in order to get a foul against another player.
On the plus side, maybe the whiny, metaphorical use of the silly phrase, “trigger warning” will stop at last (with real triggers to warn against), and we can bring back dueling to let students settle their feelings of offense.
Published in Culture, Education, Guns
I generally completely agree (the number of stock images that are blatant violations of gun safety rules is… depressing). This particular picture, however, is meant to portray what the professor who wrote the NYT piece thinks will happen.
As a former student I would like to know when I can legally shoot a professor? I have considered going back to school but there seems to be more stupid, politically motivated, hacks pretending to be educators than ever before. A culling is definitely called for.
I have heard that sniping in the faculty lounge is an art form. I just assumed that most professors, especially in the liberal arts arena were already combat veterans.
Once you realize that colleges and universities have deluded themselves into believing that they are “free speech” zones where there are no consequences for what’s spoken on-campus, ever, all of this makes sense.
Once they realize that outside of the ivy-covered walls, words have meaning (and consequences), things get scary.
Thanks Tom.
For Brent: This is Sgt. Major Bradley Kasal in the second battle of Fallujah. He’s been shot seven times and hit by over 40 pieces of a fragmentation grenade.
If this man can practice trigger discipline in that state no one has an excuse not to.
Having a) spent ten years of my life making my living by tripping the shutter, b) spent the last ten years hiring photographers and browsing thru iStock, Shutterstock and all manner of websites looking for the right image and c) done a fair amount of gun safety training…
I feel Tom’s pain.
There are so few good stock images out there for guns, it’s hard to find ANYTHING that’s even close to what you’re looking for, nevermind something that follows the Three (or Four) rules of gun safety while doing so, or something that shows off civilian firearms ownership in a positive light.
Could be worse. Could be an H&K catalog cover.
That catalog cover is hilarious, but I’d imagine a dummy has no idea that the bullets are in the clip backward. :)
(Yes, I know I used the wrong terms, because those are the dummy terms. We know that the cartridges are in the magazine in the reverse direction.)
This is the silliest damn thing I’ve seen lately. (not your post, but the hysteria following the passage of Texas’s new gun law)
Will academia take any opportunity to “avoid sensitive topics”?
Is there really going to be an epidemic of college students quick drawing on professors for a critical review of their latest paper? Give me a break.
I’m a law student. I don’t personally own a gun, but if my friends and classmates who did have a license, especially the many who have served in the military, were to bring a gun to class I would actually feel much safer. I’ve often thought that if a gun-wielding maniac came into class, I would have no chance.
The anti gun forces have managed to turn the very existence of a weapon in to a threat. There is a controversy in McLean VA right now because of a gun shop that is being opened near a school.
Apparently, the guns are likely to rise up out of the store and start shooting students willy nilly at any moment!
I ask, if the gun shop were 10 blocks farther from the school, would that make students safer somehow?
Edit: I just saw that this gun shop is moving to just behind the school from three blocks away. So even three blocks closer is considered a threat! Parents are actually taking their children out of the school because of the danger of a gun store so close by…
“Planet” Pluto Lover…….over a oversized hunk of ice… for shame. ;-)
Anti-dwarf [planet] bigot!
The thing I find most amusing about the assumption a student angry at a professor would shoot the professor is there is a much easier (and safer) way of taking down a college faculty member – file an accusation of sexual misbehavior.
Claim the professor offered to raise your grade in exchange for sexual favors and/or threatened to lower your grade if you did not extend them. Nowadays those accusations do not even need to be credible to end up causing misery. Dead is dead, but an academic inquisition is forever.
Seawriter
Chicago-style deep dish pizza is better than New York style slices.
It just is.
As a child I grew up in New York (Long Island), Kevin you are now dead to me…..
Awesome.
Imagine their horror to find out that until recent decades schools had their own shooting teams and it was not uncommon for youngsters to bring their own rifles and shotguns to school with them for hunting or protection on the way to and from home.
Guns in schools? Of course! How else are you going to respond to threats or hunt on your way?
Good Grief is that bad.
Every CHL class I always have at least one new shooter tries to do that and I have to tell them stop it or they will shoot themselves in the face.
I am usually the only one that gets the joke.
I can’t remember if I shared this in a post, but I got in trouble (a scolding, nothing more) last semester because the promotion committee found out that for years, I’ve been putting the required boilerplate legalese in my syllabus under the heading of “Bureaucratic Boilerplate.”
The committee’s recommendation for my promotion was unanimous, but this little incident got mentioned in a vague way, when they wrote that I had “put inappropriate language in the course syllabi.”
Do you know what that sounds like?! My goodness, I wish they’d quoted the language verbatim. This makes it sound like I was telling dirty jokes in the syllabus! I was worried the next level of administration to see this would think I was due for sexual harassment training.
That has layers. Layers and layers. I like it.
At least they admitted the required boilerplate legalese is inappropriate language. That has been my belief for years.
Seawriter
Heh. That was my first thought when I saw that picture a few weeks ago.
On one of the last combat simulations I led in ROTC, one of the 1st-year cadets was walking with the safety off and his finger on his rifle’s trigger (we were using MILES gear, which is basically laser tag with blanks). I should have noticed it, but didn’t.
Unsurprisingly, he tripped and fired a round just as we were approaching the 4th-year cadets who were playing the bad guys we supposed to observe. I assumed we were under fire and a firefight ensued. As you might imagine, I subsequently and rightly got a very mixed score on what had going quite well up to that point.
If nothing else, the incident instilled good trigger discipline in me.
In our area there are still a few schools with gun clubs as well as ROTC and the 4H clubs. Even a couple fraternal organizations with gun clubs. We sponsor and volunteer with our local Friends of the NRA to gather money to support these groups, ranges and equipment. These groups still exist but it is sad how few there are left and hostile people are getting to any gun related activity. At our fundraising gatherings the GOP candidates show up but you never find a Democrat. I just do not know where the Dems think our military and police come from if not the gun culture youth.
And, of course, let’s ponder just WHO a professor has most to fear on a modern-day college campus. Of the gun-bearers I know, they aren’t the ones to get angry at a professor for stupid comments and lash out with violence in their hearts.
The consistently most-volatile personae on campuses are the coddled drinkers of the Leftist Kool-aid… the easily-triggered, fragile, hothouse orchids… the perpetual victim class… who need safe-spaces whenever George Will visits campus.
The Left has spent multiple decades fomenting a spirit of rebellion, and disregard for order and authority. Now… maybe… they begin to see value in being respectful, and calm, and using your words instead of blind rage. (sigh)
I don’t know if you have union representation in your school, but I do believe that is a mark that I would not have tolerated without a fight from the union.
Yeah, at least until some bureaucrat threatens to remove Federal funding if the university doesn’t teach LGBTLMNOP astrophysics.
I remember a roll call one night when the Sgt. informed us a prolific armed robbery suspect had passed away. He was holding his pistol in one hand and as he was taking the panty hose off his head he shot himself in the head. I am almost ashamed to admit that there was some laughter in the roll call room, almost is the key word.
jmelvin—Actually, we do have a faculty, union, but I’m very pointedly not a member of it. Nevertheless, if the phrase “inappropriate language” had turned out to be an issue after that point, I would have insisted on a clarification. Happily, the next level up review was even more glowing, with no negative comments at all, and they unanimously recommended me for full professor, as well. So I don’t feel any need to bring it up now.
Owen Findy—I laugh about the LGBTQRSTUV Astrophysics, but yes, there are a few who push almost exactly that. My perennial example is Chanda Hsu Prescod-Weinstein. Check out her posts at Medium:
http://medium.com/@chanda
Just scroll down and keep your jaw off the floor.