Cutting A Board With A Fish
By Mitch Berg
I’ve commented in the past about the futility of bureaucratic approaches to spree killers like last week’s tragic – and preventable – shooting at Northern Illinois University.
My comments have been largely caustic, because the bureaucratic solutions – “lockdowns”, communications (NIU, like Virginia Tech, sent out emails to students). My attitude about bureaucratic responses is a matter of record.
Joe Olson – professor of law at Hamline University and the avatar of Minnesota’s second amendment movement – has a more systematic approach.
Oh, no worries – the conclusions are exactly the same:
As the latest cycle moves to the planning phase — Connecticut hopes to have its latest reactive conference on school safety in March — expect efforts to focus on measures that will be as effective in stopping armed killers as the NIU e-mails were. It won’t dawn on conferees that rampages don’t occur at state police barracks, National Guard armories or military bases. Cowardly killers are nuts, but they’re not crazy enough to go where their victims might be armed.
Acknowledging that would require policymakers and educators to admit gun control in America has been wrong-headed, lethally so. So rather than consider conceal-carry laws for professors, ROTC students and others with gun training, they will reaffirm their no-gun policies, take “meaningful action to prevent gun violence” that doesn’t rise to the level of window-dressing and declare the nation’s campuses safe again. Until the next “disturbed individual” goes on a rampage.
Read, as they say, the whole goldurn thing.
