Written by John Turner   

I’ve been wondering about people who want to make it legal to carry guns on college campuses. Have they ever been in a college classroom? Have they ever talked to college students?

I tried to teach college students for several decades -- with what results I’m still not sure -- and on the basis of that experience I would try hard to stay away from a room where college students had guns. And so should anyone else unless he were of a suicidal disposition.

I realize that people who love guns are caught up in something that’s beyond rational discourse. Whether or not it’s sexual I can’t say, though I do admit to suspicions. But even if it is, you would think they would constrain their passions enough to avoid setting up obviously lethal situations.

The argument of gun lovers seems to be that if most people carried guns then the good people with guns would kill the bad people with guns. Such advocates really need to conduct a classroom discussion and try to discover what the prevailing notions of good and bad are among typical college students. They might hear some moral theories they had not yet contemplated.

A characteristic of college students, when they are not sunk in lethargy, is that they can get highly excited. They can get excited over things that you wouldn’t imagine would excite anyone. A student passionately told me once, with tears streaming down her face, that Marcus Aurelius should be banned from college classrooms because he had said some things in his Meditations that she really, really, really didn’t like. She also implied, pretty strongly, that he had done it specifically to wound her sensibilities. She left me with the impression that if she had a gun and could get at Marcus, she would blow him away. Though Marcus was fairly well outside her range -- time being the unreasonable force it is -- it wasn’t hard for me to imagine that she could develop similar attitudes towards persons still in the realm of the living. I suspected that I, myself, might be one of those persons since I had committed the sin of putting the Meditations in front of her. I’ll admit that, probably, this young woman would not have harmed anyone. Still, I wouldn’t have enjoyed being in a room with with her had she been armed. Furthermore, she was not close to being the only student I encountered who left me with a similar feeling.

If you took a poll among persons who actually try to teach college students, I wonder what percentage would approve of the idea of students entering the classroom packing guns? I wouldn’t mind betting on that percentage, if I had a chance, and I would bet on a very small number.

We need also to recall that classrooms are not the only venues on college campuses. There are snack bars, athletic dressing rooms, parking lots, and dormitories -- dormitories, those pits of vitriolic hatred perhaps more intense than any other setting on earth.

Mix guns liberally with all the other things present on a college campus and you get a stew I wouldn’t want to sniff, much less taste.

Even if the campus were in Arizona, where students are more rational and steady than they are in degraded states, I still don’t think I would want to stroll around on it if it were filled up with guns.

I realize that persons who view guns as one of the primary instruments of salvation won’t find anything persuasive in what I have just written. I would not presume to try to persuade them -- of anything. But among others, who have not yet got religion, I hope there will be a careful process before guns are infused into the groves of higher learning. Even if they didn’t bring forth a wave of violence, they would certainly impede the purposes for which colleges are presumably established. It’s had to believe that open discourse would thrive in rooms where guns were strapped on waists or lying on desk tops. There’s something about them that doesn’t encourage frank and sincere expression.

I understand that there are quite a few persons who dislike the kind of expression that takes place in many college classrooms. It doesn’t fit with their ideas of right thinking and, therefore, it needs to be repressed. But that’s an issue for educational debate more than it is for gun liberalization. I think there are enough questions about the latter that we shouldn’t rush to turn campuses into armed camps.