Last week the Los Angeles Times ran a staff editorial claiming it would be a "silly, and dangerous idea" to allow concealed carry permit holders to be armed on campus. What is “silly” is the Times also argued that guns are rarely used by citizens for protection, so there’s no need for them to be on campus. The Times seems to forget about this little thing called a Second Amendment.
The Times even uses alcohol on campus as a lame excuse for why there shouldn’t be concealed carry permit holders:
College, we like to think, is a time of intellectual inquiry. But it is also, as anyone who has spent any time on a campus knows, a time of boundary-testing, experimentation and alcohol-fueled parties. Not exactly the kind of place where it makes sense to let folks wander around carrying hidden weapons. Yet that is exactly what gun-rights advocates are pushing for around the country. They succeeded most recently in Texas with a law that allows people licensed to carry concealed weapons to do so on college campuses.
The Times cited the notorious campus shootings of Virginia Tech, Umpqua Community College, and UCLA to try and push its anti-gun agenda -- never once mentioning the fact that all of these were no campus carry. What is probably the dumbest paragraph written in the entire editorial (as if the entire piece wasn’t dumb enough), the Times believes that once someone is armed, there’s nothing that can be done!
As the nation has learned so painfully, there is little that can be done once someone has armed himself — and it is almost always a him — and starts shooting up a school or a workplace or a neighborhood, intending to kill as many people as possible. Lax gun control and the pernicious influence of the NRA have made access to military-style firearms far too easy, thus making people with a violent impulse — born of mental illness, anger or an insatiable grudge — all the more deadly.
Of course, the Times didn’t factor in the possibility if an area allowed concealed carry permits, perhaps one of those holders could do something to keep a tragedy from happening in the first place.
