College, Guns, and Texas

This is going to be the most bloggy type blog I've written in a while. I just read that the Texas senate passed a bill allowing college students and employees to carry guns on campus and into college buildings, given that they are over 21 and are licensed to carry concealed handguns. It does make a little sense. College students are walking targets, since by law they are forbidden from arming themselves, and everybody knows that police arrive on the scene AFTER the shooting happened. College students aren't safe in their own dorms, either. There is/was a serial rapist in San Diego who picked his victims in student housing at UCSD. There are basically no guards there, and I only knew of one student who kept a gun (and she wasn't supposed to). Needless to say, the guy struck more than once. Had he perceived a culture of gun ownership and use at the site, he might not have picked his targets there. And had there actually have been a culture of gun ownership and use, he might not have been able to strike more than once.

Now, if the method of deterring violent crime is to make known a culture of gun ownership and use, why allow students to only conceal and carry? Why not open carry? Would a man be deterred by guns that are tucked away under case books and laptops in girls' tote bags? Conceal and carry might be enough to allow a culture of gun use, which would be enough to stop violent crime when it happens on campus. But it won't be enough to prevent the crime from happening in the first place. Prevention requires a way to instantly command respect. And you know what would make a man respect a young woman? A gun on her hip.

I shouldn't be coming off as so pro-gun, however, because really I'm not. I just see guns as a temporary solution. Saying that a woman has a right to carry a gun and use it on whoever she perceives as a threat to her life is to allow a subjective standard. Proportionality is then defined in terms of what the woman perceives, rather than what threat is actually posed. If we had non-lethal weapons that neutralize the target as well as guns do, we wouldn't have to worry about people shooting to death scarry-looking men who they thought were going to kill them. (I should say, however, that some subjectivity is inevitable, since in the future days of non-lethal defence a woman would still be free to use her non-lethal weapon in accordance with her perception of the threat. But the risk of killing men who mean no harm would practically be zero.) Until those days, though, allowing individuals to carry handguns in holsters is the only way to ensure that an individual can protect him or herself.