Monday, February 21, 2011

Somebody Needs to Educate Texas Students

Here's the headline of a news article from the Dallas Morning News:
Legislation to allow concealed handguns on Texas campuses worries Dallas-area students
These students obviously haven't had a civics course where they would learn that politicians are driven by a solicitude for their citizens. Politicians have the highest regard for the health, safety, and welfare of their citizens. So obviously these legislators have discovered some previously unknown educational benefit acquired while sitting in a lecture and nervously fingering a Glock pistol, you know, the same kind that was used in Tucson a few weeks ago by a political activist who decided to veto a socialist "Meet Your Congress Woman" gathering held by Gabrielle Giffords at a Safeway grocery store.

I simply can't understand these statments of worry by Dallas students:
Supporters of legislation that would allow students and faculty to carry concealed handguns at colleges and universities in Texas say their goal is to make campuses safer.

But some of the Dallas-area students they hope to protect say they’d feel less secure knowing their peers might be armed.

“If the gun was out there, I would feel uneasy,” said Russell Ansley, a junior at the University of Texas at Dallas. “It could create an atmosphere of hostility.”
Obviously being armed to the teeth is the most secure way to manage person-to-person contacts. Just ask any Somali pirate. And everybody knows that Somalia where guns abound is one of the safest places on Earth!

If the students at Virginia Tech had all been armed to the teeth, then Seung-Hui Cho would have been stopped after killing a handful of people. That's the good news. The downside is that there might be a lot of dead bodies scattered about because a lot of young lovers may not take their romantic breakups well and decide they are being "dissed" by their ex and need to plug them with lead to stop that. Oh... and the cooks at the Virginia Tech cafeterias would have gotten a whole lot better in their cooking, or they wouldn't get a second chance to deliver up sub-standard fare for the students.

The article ends with this observation:
Texas’ concealed handgun law, enacted in 1995, allows people 21 or older to carry weapons after they pass a training course and a background check.

Regardless of the training and safeguards, Denise Paquette Boots, an associate professor of criminology at UTD, said she believes law enforcement officers are far better equipped than any student to defuse a dangerous situation.

The former Border Patrol agent noted that police who respond to a shooting wouldn’t know the gunman from the armed students defending themselves.
“I don't want one of my students taken out because he was being a hero that day,” she said.
Yeah... what a bummer. Police arrive at a shooting on a campus and take out the class president who was standing with a gun in his hand. He looked like the shooter. How were the police to know that he had come to the aid of the lovely victim now lying dead and put his life on the line to take out the deranged gunman. To the police he looks like a calculating murder who has just finished off a loving couple. How are they supposed to know?

Oh... maybe there is solution and in the most unlikely place. Remember how Hitler had a problem deciding who to ship off to the gas chambers? His solution was brilliant. Have them wear a sign saying "take me!". Texas should pass a law that says that all killers sew on a "gun sight" to their shirts so that the police will be able to easily identify the bad guys before they some charging into a crime scene. Just take out anybody wearing the gun sight sign. Now everybody can wave a gun around and the cops will know exactly who should be taken out. Yep. That should fix the problem. And given their track record on coming up with first class legislation, I trust the Texas legislature to find just the right "sartorial law" to pass to fix this problem about police being confused by "who is the gunmen" in a crowd of students all packing heat.

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