Today was supposed to be the quiet and symbolic protest of how we are forced to be defenseless in trade for our university education. Students strapped on their empty holsters as if to say, “Look, I can defend myself everywhere else, but not here…even though crime has no bounds”.
Today became a tragic reminder of how defenseless we truly are. Today a madman killed 7 people and wounded 3 at Oikos University in Oakland, California. I’d like to start out in saying that our thoughts and prayers are with the families of those lost and with those survivors as they are recovering. It’s unthinkable how any human being could take the life of an innocent person, much less so many. While we struggle to find a reason for such senseless violence and loss of life, we have to also search for a way to potentially help prevent future tragedies. The problem is that we already have a common sense solution, to allow students and faculty the ability to be prepared for such events, to be able to carry concealed on campus.
Our opponents call these tragedies extremely rare, as one leading opponent from the University of Texas once so confidently guaranteed a talk show host in an interview that she would never be in a campus shooting. The problem is that a lot of events in our lives are rare, yet they do happen and we do have to prepare for them. It’s idiocy to believe that we are invincible and nothing bad will happen to us. Bad things happen to good people. It would be a rarity that I would be in a car crash, yet I wear a seat belt in case I am. It’s even rarer still that my car would catch fire or be submerged and I not be able to escape, yet I have a window breaking device in my car. It’s extremely rare that someone would have cardiac arrest in the campus building where I have classes, yet we have a defibrillator. There’s something to be said about preparedness. Preparedness is the proper planning and having the proper tools in case a rare event does happen. We are prepared not because we expect this event to happen, but because we know it does happen, and if it does happen to us, we want to survive it. If a CHL holder decides not to carry concealed one day, he better guess right that the worst two seconds of his life are not going to happen that day.In the case that the next madman runs into our classroom and starts shooting innocents, will we be prepared and be able to stop the threat? Or will we continue to be forced to be unprepared and pay for it with human lives?
How many times must this happen until we realize that disarming innocent, law abiding citizens only serves to protect criminals who do not care for laws, rules, morality, or human life? How many more examples do we need of gun free zones failing? How can anyone possibly believe that criminals will obey these laws or that it is any more difficult for a criminal to smuggle guns in their backpack instead of books? Words and books do not stop mass murderers, but armed citizens can.
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