Author: Sebastian

Eugene Volokh linked to this criticism of National Opt-Out Day:

The day before Thanksgiving is the busiest airport day of the year.  The airport is full of families, many of whom are not frequent fliers, going home to see Grandma for the holidays.  People who fly long distances between non-hub airports generally have to make connections.  When you have a connection, a delay is not just a delay.  It may mean not making it to your destination at all.  Most families planning to travel tomorrow have nonrefundable tickets.  Canceling is not an option.

I am sympathetic to the overall argument, but I would point Kent Scheidegger and Professor Volokh to Ilya Somin’s excellent body of work on the problem of political ignorance. That Opt-Out day is going to cause disruption to people who may only interact with TSA once a year is entirely the point. The point is to make them understand what their government is doing, instead of just quietly passing through security, blissfully unaware that a government agent in a remote room is looking at naked pictures of their children. They will see out in the open and clear as day what the government we voted for is doing, and what the consequences of it are.

So yes, it sucks that this is going to be a serious problem for some people. But we didn’t create this system. TSA did. And I don’t see that any American has any obligation to play along with their game for the sake of efficiency or expediency. To cause any social change you have to raise awareness first. That’s the first rule of activism. In this sense, National Opt-Out Day is a good idea.

I find it difficult to accept that there are people who value freedom out there suggesting that everyone should submit to a virtual strip search for the sake of everyone else’s convenience. The choice is now between that and groping. There’s no longer an option to just go through under the old procedures. It seems we have to endure quite a lot of hardship for the sake of freedom. Many have died for it. Missing grandma’s mashed potatoes seems a small price to pay in comparison.

From our favorite Brady Board Member:

If you spent any time with Colin Goddard and heard him describe the scene at VT, you would know that his having a gun would not have made a difference. In fact, he has said that if he had had a gun that day, he probably would have been shot to death by Cho.

This is the scene as described by Colin Goddard at the time of the Virginia Tech mass shooting:

Goddard’s ordeal began during French class, when he and fellow students first heard gunfire coming from a hallway, his mother said.

Professor Jocelyne Couture-Nowak told her students to dial 911, just seconds before Cho entered the room and sprayed bullets, wounding Colin in the leg. Cho “went first through one row of desks and started shooting just randomly,” Ann Goddard said.

Cho then left the classroom, she said, and returned minutes later.

Colin lay on the classroom floor, playing dead. He “turned his head and actually saw the shooter’s shoes come right up next to his body,” Ann Goddard said. “The shooter was standing right next to him.”

Her son was “absolutely scared to death,” she said. “He kept his wits about him, but he was scared to death.”

If you had time to hear the gunshots, you had the time to draw a gun had you had one. Probably even time to find or create reasonable cover. A reasonably trained shooter can go from leather to well placed shot in under 2 seconds. You had the advantage of knowing where the shooter was going to appear from and that he was coming. It’s certainly not a guarantee you won’t get shot. Gunfights aren’t exactly safe, even if your opponent is a lousy shot. The key to winning a gun fight is to be mentally prepared to win, and to keep landing well placed shots on your attacker until he’s down. I’d be curious to know what Colin thinks the fundamental tactical difficulty would have been in taking Cho down had he had a firearm that day, other than his emotional state, which can’t be discounted.

Goddard was frightened into inaction, by his own account. I don’t mean that as any kind of admonition; the same thing happens even to trained soldiers and police officers. No one can predict what their reaction is going to be when bullets start flying, and I won’t blame anyone for being petrified by fear in a situation like that. Since I’ve never been in a situation where someone is shooting at me, I have no idea whether I’d react any better. Dan McKown certainly wasn’t exempt in a similar situation, even though he was carrying a firearm.

But just because being frozen by fear was one person’s reaction doesn’t mean it will be everyone’s. Many of the young adults involved in the campus carry movement are people who are not unfamiliar with being shot at, since a lot of them are veterans completing their education after serving our country in Afghanistan and Iraq. I’m skeptical that enough college students are going to carry firearms to make any significant difference in a potential mass shooting situation, but the odds at least won’t be zero. I don’t see any reason why someone who is licensed to carry everywhere else shouldn’t be able to carry onto campus. In short, I just don’t see any reason not to allow it.