Releasing the Demonic Liberal Within Me: Guns on Campus

So...you guys hear about that shooting that happened last year? Yeah...it was a pretty low profile event, something about some crazy Vietnamese kid, and some college down in Virginia. I don't remember the exact details, since it was barely covered by the news, like, at all. [/sarcasm]

Well, apparently in the wake of the Virginia Tech Massacre, every campus in America has students looking around with shifty, fearful eyes, wondering if they will be next. It is a wonderful paranoia that flies in the face of reason, and is inspired directly from remembering a single tragic event that is etched in one's memory rather than realizing that such horrific and memorable shootings happen incredibly rarely, and claims relatively few lives compared to almost any other conceivable way of dying. School shootings have resulted in a total of 323 deaths over the course of 40 years, which, in light of the fact that the city of Detroit alone had 418 murder cases in 2006, one should seriously be paranoid of being killed wherever you go if you seriously fear being killed in a schools shooting. It reminds of me when kids in middle school (and some teachers) were seriously concerned with the possibility of a terrorist attack in the wake of 9/11. never realizing for a moment that we were a school of 400 students in the middle of nowhere that was of little concern to anyone.

The basic point is that you can't let a few extreme cases of a psychopath going wild define your perception of reality. Because, if you do, then suddenly there are mafia hitmen, serial killers, and Illuminati members around every corner (or at least, that is what you insist to be the case). But, what are campuses across America trying to do in order to address these fears of a possible school shooting devastating their own university? They're entertaining the idea of letting the students overcome these fears by allowing them carry concealed weapons on campus! Now, I don't know about you, but personally I am far more comfortable with the idea of some random student getting pissed off, going berserk, and killing a few people (because it is incredibly unlikely to happen on any given campus), than letting every other person on campus pack heat as a precaution against such a rare, improbable occurence. The problems of trying to fight paranoia by making students believe that they have to be armed in order to be safe is counter-intuitive to an extent that makes me wonder about how logical it is for grown adults to buy into the same concept.

But, that's just my two cents. Also: take away second ammendment rights! Anarchy! Watch it all burn, burn like a thousand gasoline-fueled forest fires! Yes! Yes!