MI Campus Gun Ban Recalls ‘Very Sound Policy’ of Years Gone By

U.S.A. – -(Ammoland.com)- “Campus community reacts to legal challenge to University’s campus firearm ban,” The Michigan Daily reported Sunday. “Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel filed an amicus brief on March 1 against Joshua Wade, an Ann Arbor resident who challenged the University of Michigan’s on-campus firearm ban. According to the amicus brief, it is within the University’s constitutional rights to enact a firearm ban on campus.”

Of course, she’d say that. She’s a doctrinaire Monopoly of Violence Democrat endorsed by Gun Sense Voter who never met an infringement she didn’t like. If she had her druthers, the gun ban would extend off-campus and into your home. But it’s the statement of another “official” I’d like to focus on.

“Guns have been banned for decades and courts have upheld the University’s right to prohibit weapons from campus,” university spokesman Rick Fitzgerald pontificated. “The safety of the University community is one of our highest priorities as a University. Allowing weapons on campus undermines those efforts.”

That bit of unsubstantiated nonsense defending defenselessness reminds me of nothing so much as another idiot declaration from years ago that backfired horribly.

Back in 2008, The New York Times thought it would be a fine idea to do a “One  Year After” look back at the Virginia Tech slaughters with an eye toward “justifying” more infringements against peaceable gun owners. They figured the best way to do that was to pit one obscure “gun rights blogger,” me, against a panel of half-a-dozen committed anti-gun “professionals”: The director of the Institute of Law, Psychiatry and Public Policy at the University of Virginia; the director of the State Office of Homeland Security and Preparedness; the pastor to the Blacksburg Police Department; the executive director of the Coalition to Stop Gun Violence; the chief of mental health services for Harvard University Health Services; and the general counsel for the American Council on Education.

They had to make sure it was a fair fight. The resulting comments suggest they miscalculated and may explain why they never invited me back. Despite all the gun-grabber blather that proved utterly ineffectual at stopping a massacre, the truth was something my fellow “panelists” could deny but not suppress.

“Nine months before the shootings, graduate student Bradford B. Wiles wrote a letter to The Roanoke Times in response to a campus manhunt for a murder suspect,” I noted in one of my turns at-bat.

“I am licensed to carry a concealed handgun in the commonwealth of Virginia,” Wiles wrote. “However, because I am a Virginia Tech student, I am prohibited from carrying at school because of Virginia Tech’s student policy…”

The published response from University Vice President Larry Hincker was one of ridicule.

“[I]t is absolutely mind-boggling to see the opinions of Bradford Wiles,” he wrote, using terms like “out of touch … inane [and] absurd” to underscore his points.

“Guns don’t belong in classrooms,” he concluded. “They never will. Virginia Tech has a very sound policy preventing same.”

We saw Mr. Hincker’s “very sound policy” play out and prevent nothing. We saw 32 innocents slain without a chance, even though the police response to a campus shooter had begun two hours before the mass slayings at Norris Hall.

There’s really no difference between Fitzgerald’s smug blathering and Hincker’s utter incompetence at accounting for reality. One can only hope for the sake of those attending the University of Michigan that no evil person decides its “gun-free guarantee” presents a situation where a high expectation of “success” for whatever they have planned can be presumed.

In the interests of hoping those in decision-making capacities might be persuaded to reconsider their criminally negligent prohibition, I’d invite university officials to do a little thought experiment:

You’re sitting in your office. All of a sudden you hear what sounds like shots. Then you hear screaming. Then terrified faculty and students are stampeding, screaming past your office door. And you hear more shots, closer this time. And closer…

What are YOU prepared to do about it?

Note I’m asking the school administrators, and you, flack Fitzgerald, not AG Nessel. She has access to well-armed and trained security details courtesy of the taxpayers, so what happens resulting from her amicus brief won’t be any skin off her precious hindquarters.

In a tangentially-related development, Campus Reform is reporting students at public colleges in Montana will soon be able to carry concealed on campus. Do you think they might be able to fare better than  Mr. Hincker, Mr. Fitzgerald, and their “very sound policy” should the need arise?

About David Codrea:

David Codrea is the winner of multiple journalist awards for investigating/defending the RKBA and a long-time gun owner rights advocate who defiantly challenges the folly of citizen disarmament. He blogs at “The War on Guns: Notes from the Resistance,” is a regularly featured contributor to Firearms News, and posts on Twitter: @dcodrea and Facebook.