LA Times: ‘Silly’ to Allow Law-Abiding College Students To Be Armed for Self-Defense

In a January 17 editorial, the Los Angeles Times argues that allowing concealed carry permit holders to be armed on campus is “dangerous” and “silly.”

In case those two assertions don’t work, the Times also suggests law-abiding citizens rarely use a gun for self-defense, so campus carry is pointless to begin with.

According to the Times:

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 goes on to cite the “irony” of the fact that Texas’ campus carry law went into effect on August 1, 2016, which was the anniversary of a firearm-based attack carried out by a criminal on the University of Texas campus 50 years ago. Lost on the Times is the irony that they fail to see that campus carry is an answer to such criminal attacks; it is a way for law-abiding citizens to shoot back in defense of themselves and others.

Yet the Times argues against campus carry, never realizing or admitting that the Virginia Tech attack (April 16, 2007), the Umpqua Community College attack (October 1, 2015), and the UCLA murder-suicide (June 1, 2016), all occurred in zones where there was no campus carry; where there was no way to fight back.

More recently–on November 28, 2016–unarmed students on the Ohio State Campus were chased by an Islamist with a butcher knife. Ohio lawmakers quickly corrected this problem by passing campus carry for their state and Governor John Kasich (R) signed it into law. But the Times suggests that allowing law-abiding college students to be armed for self-defense is “silly.”

In large part, the Times’ suggestion turns on their position that a good guy with a gun is ineffective against a bad guy with a gun. They put it this way:

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.

Yet the Times did not provide even one example of a time when a bad guy with a gun struck a target that was other than gun-free. Instead they quickly transitioned to arguments against “lax gun control” and quoted Michael Bloomberg-funded Everytown for Gun Safety in an effort to claim that it is dangerous for women to have guns in the home for self-defense.

AWR Hawkins is the Second Amendment columnist for Breitbart News and host of “Bullets with AWR Hawkins,” a Breitbart News podcast. He is also the political analyst for Armed American Radio. Follow him on Twitter: @AWRHawkins. Reach him directly at awrhawkins@breitbart.com.