Tuesday, February 23, 2010

Laptop, textbook, pistol

Colorado students fight for gun rights - Americas, World - The Independent

What seemed like common sense to some is nothing less than an assault on the US Constitution to others, which is why a governors meeting at Colorado State University today to approve a ban on students bearing concealed weapons on its main campus in Fort Collins is likely to be rowdy.

Preventing bloodshed is the first thing on the board's mind. It is three years since the shooting rampage at Virginia Tech that took the lives of 32 students and staff and just under two weeks since Amy Bishop, a professor at the University of Alabama, allegedly shot six of her colleagues, killing three of them.

Yet there has been such a push-back against the plan that the board may defer a decision today to await further public comment.
According to the article, "the student's governing body voted overwhelmingly to resist the gun ban." Sounds like student unionism in the US is a very different creature from student unionism here.

This part is also surprising:
Since the Virginia shootings, state legislatures across the US have debated a variety of laws concerning guns in lecture halls, but few have taken significant action. The most recent big change came in Utah in 2004, which voted to lift a decades-old gun ban for the 44,000-strong University of Utah.
Even if you allow any student with a gun licence to bring it to campus, just how many would do it as a precautionary measure for the next student/lecturer massacre? How many times have we ever read of individual with their own concealed weapon taking decisive action against a workplace/school/university shooting?

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