“A woman who demands further gun control legislation is like a chicken who roots for Colonel Sanders.” —Larry Elder
House Bill 334 will now go to the full floor for a vote. New Hampshire’s colleges currently set their own policies on possession of guns. Currently they all ban them. HB 334, sponsored by Mark Proulx, R-Manchester would bring such regulatory reach back into the purview of State authority. Now the colleges push back.
As reported in the Union Leader, Security personnel from the Granite States’ colleges and universities, wrote emphasizing “dangers in eliminating academia’s ability to ban gun possession on a college campus,” they wrote. “Thousands of young people attend New Hampshire’s colleges, sharing close quarters in residential, social, academic and other group activities. At this age, judgment and behaviors are still being developed and tested.” Interesting. So on the one hand, these institutions hold themselves out to be the first foray into the adult world where a kid can go to college and ply ones’ self with “adult” libations, voting, living, working, and all the other thumbnail trappings of adult life….But on the other hand, when it comes to guns, we will still be the mommy and daddy.
On April 16, 2007, Seung-Hui Cho, A Virginia Polytechnic Institute student, killed thirty-two people and wounded 25 others in an on-campus shooting that took place in two separate attacks over a two-hour period. Thereafter, he committed suicide. The Virginia Tech massacre by far, has been the deadliest shooting incident by a single gunman in U.S. history.
How come nobody has asked why one guy with two semi-auto pistols could cause harm to fifty-seven people? People running, scrambling, hiding, ducking for cover as he moved about shooting? How come nobody was able to effectively confront this threat? Because nobody, but the shooter, had a gun. Everybody was unarmed. Virginia Tech was a “Gun Free Zone” by school policy. But the Virginia Tech Gun policy made no impact on Seung-Hui Cho. Rather, it enhanced his body-count potential. How many of those people would be alive today if just one student, armed, stood and met the threat? That is a question we will never know the answer to.
I don’t know if Representative Proulx is completely right when he says the policy will stop such attacks, but most reasonable people will agree that the deterrence for such attacks is substantially enhanced, while the ability to meet such threats with equal force is now on the table. Bad people are bad people, no matter who is armed.
Finally, whatever happened to the law of percentages? When University officials talk about their student bodies, they claim the bad actors are just a very miniscule number of the larger well-behaved, responsible body. It is disingenuous for the Academic hackarama to advocate for a carved out legislative exception, when the current restrictions on alcohol and drugs do little to deter the bad actors.
For the record, ALL current institutions of higher learning in the Granite State have gun bans. Their opposition to this law has little to do with safety and more to do with maintaining their anti-second amendment leftist academia bent in creating socialist sheeple. The safety argument is a foil as demonstrated by the Virginia Tech Massacre.
