Quote of the Day

From the “Can’t have a reasonable conversation file,” courtesy of Dennis Henigan:

Ultimately, this is not just a campus safety issue. It also is an issue involving the core values served by institutions of higher education. It is difficult to imagine anything more destructive to an environment of academic freedom – in which controversial issues can be passionately debated free of fear and intimidation – than students or professors “strapped” as they participate in those debates.

Because, you know, armed people just can’t have a passionate debate without someone pulling out a gun and shooting the place up. This is what these people think about you. How can anyone possibly believe they are fine with the right to bear arms?

14 thoughts on “Quote of the Day”

  1. “This is what these people think about you.”

    I think this is actually what they think about themselves. Their arguments are based on emotion, and I’m not sure they can separate the two. So I think the problem may be that they think gun owners would react the same way they do – which might actually be to shoot someone they’re having a heated discussion with. So, good they don’t have guns.

  2. Dead on Mike. We say what Joan Peterson thinks: “it’s only natural to want to kill people”.

  3. Apparently the irony of “environment of freedom” in which people are not free to have means of defending themselves is lost on these people.

  4. Being a graduate of PSU, I’m starting to loose respect for the business of higher education. There are far too many elitists who hide in academia to avoid the real world. They live in a fantasy land where everything is theoretically puppies, rainbows, and happiness.

    They act as if the degrees on the wall make them superior to us common folks who work everyday. They think anyone who hunts, or shoots is just a wannbe cowboy who would be better served reading a book.

    I ccw’d at PSU everyday after I got my LTCF. A gun free zone full of kids who were socialized by prescription drugs is a recipe for disaster.

    Oh, and in all my classes at PSU and all the passionate debates I never shot anyone or “whipped” out my gun.

  5. “in which controversial issues can be passionately debated free of fear and intimidation”

    Really, I’ve seldom seen this occur in ANY college classroom. Usually, the professor is very heavy laden on their viewpoint and degrades any student opposing the professor’s viewpoint.

  6. That’s the nice thing about the engineering fields, Nugun – either the math works, or it doesn’t, and it’s usually easy to test and see.

    As for the liberal arts programs, though… yeah, not going to touch that one.

  7. I suspect this has nothing to do with gun fear but wanting to shape the image that ‘educated people are gun-free people’.

  8. “It also is an issue involving the core values served by institutions of higher education.”

    Markie Marxist sez: “Yeah! Core values! Like communism! We Marxists have to prohibit all private gun ownership everywhere, and my commie compadres in academia are eager to lead the way! Ha! Ha! All your higher education is belong to us!”

  9. “Core values” do not extend to an individual, human right of self defense for the anti-rights crowd. That is why we call them anti-rights bigots.

  10. I remember the debates in Utah, when the University of Utah was trying its darnedest to ban guns on campus, despite a Utah law that said they needed to allow carry. The Utah Supreme Court upheld the law, and now the most that the U of U does is complain when memos suggesting policies of harassing gun-totin’ folk are made public.

    In any case, this exact argument was made then, too…and, funny thing is, I’m not aware of all that many stories of shootouts over arguments in the classroom. Perhaps I missed a few, but you’d think that if there were all that many, then Dennis Henigan would be giving example after example!

    As I read his blog-post to make sure he didn’t have any examples, I ran across this line: “It all started with the Virginia Tech mass shooting of almost four years ago, which prompted ‘gun rights’ proponents to argue that the shooting could have been stopped if one of the students in the targeted classrooms had been carrying a gun and could have returned fire.”

    I’m sorry, Dennis Hennigan, but you are wrong on when it started. The issue I described in Utah happened several years before Virginia Tech.

    Do you really want to know when all this started? It’s hard to say exactly when, but in England, the right to keep and bear arms is specified in their Bill of Rights, 1689. Going further, the Swiss developed a taste for this right when, in 1307, William Tell refused to bow down to Gessler’s hat, and in turn had to shoot an apple from his son’s head.

    It’s hard to say how much further we could go, to find when the debate on this right began. Do you really want to find out?

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