XDA

There was a movie critic for Time magazine in the late 70s who was so awful, so bereft of judgment, that his reviews became a negative recommendation. If he liked a movie, it invariably sucked; if he hated a movie, it was even money it was good. Now some editorialists at the NYT are approaching Jay Cocks* levels of wrongness. Like today's great work from restaurant critic Frank Bruni, who is still struggling with bulimia.




Let's start with the basics. Almost all of the horrific mass murders by guns here in America and elsewhere have taken place in Gun Free Zones. None of the horrific mass murders by guns have taken place at gun shows. The left can't seem to get their collective head around that simple fact. Most of the anti-gun ilk seem to think that guns, in and of themselves, cause bad behavior and more guns cause more bad behavior and less guns cause less bad behavior. This of course doesn't explain why there have been no mass murders at gun shows, where there are thousands of guns lying around, but plenty of mass murders at gun free schools, where there are no guns but the ones the murderers bring with them, but perhaps I'm asking for too sophisticated an evaluation when I question why gun control law advocates never take this into account.




Bruni thinks it's madness to allow concealed carry permit holders to have their guns on a college campus. That thought is so foreign to history, common sense and proper analysis as to boggle my ability to comprehend it. But let's try to see if it makes any sense whatsoever.

But in Texas, there’s so little concern for college students’ physical safety that concealed firearms will be permitted in classrooms at public universities like the state flagship here.

Why is allowing the well vetted and somewhat trained ordinary citizen to have his gun wherever he or she desires putting the student's physical safety at risk? Do concealed carry permit holders go on to commit horrendous gun crimes often? At all? In 2013 in Texas, concealed handgun licencees' conviction rate for any crime was .3016% or 3 per 1,000. Not a huge crime rate to start with and not all the crimes they were convicted of involved a gun. There was a disturbing number of sex crimes on children. There was a single conviction under the murder rubric for "Capitol Murder by Terror Threat/Other Felon" but I have no idea what that crime is about. Still, very little gun crime from the people who can obtain a concealed carry permit. Bruni doesn't seem aware of this easily obtainable statistic. He's big on the hypothetical threat though.

“If you’re in a heated debate with somebody in the middle of a classroom and you don’t know whether or not that individual is carrying, how does that inhibit the interaction between students and faculty?”

Yeah, it is a very common thing for a person carrying concealed to shoot the person besting him in a "heated debate." (sarcasm).

Maybe just a few more guns find their way onto campus. Isn’t that a few guns too many, especially in an environment where excessive drinking occurs, among people at an age when anxiety and depression can be acute?

The argument that more guns will cause more crime is made by liberals every time the law expands where citizens can legally go armed (concealed) and it's never true. There is no bloodbath that follows when the law allows more people to obtain concealed carry permits and indeed, the rate of violent crime goes down.

Do we really want to do anything at all to unsettle young men and women in the phase of life when they’re trying to polish the confidence and optimism that will help them tackle the world? 

If disarming young men and women in that developmental phase makes it even slightly more likely that they can be murdered by the next loser/nutcase looking for quick infamy, that might be a bit unsettling. Certainly their being murdered might be a bit unsettling too.


Earlier in the article, Bruni remarked on the irony of UT Austin getting concealed carry when it was the site of a mass murder in 1966 (Charles Whitman). He seems to know some of the story:

It happened right here, at the University of Texas at Austin, where an engineering student climbed to the top of the iconic tower in the center of campus and, for an agonizing hour and a half, sprayed the surrounding area with bullets, killing 14 people and injuring more than 30.

What he apparently doesn't know is that ordinary citizens began to fire at Whitman with their hunting rifles which caused him to keep his head down and not shoot anyone else and kept him otherwise occupied until his position could be stormed by police and he shot dead. For Bruni and his ilk guns are bad and can never help. He's as wrong about that as he is to continue, at this late date, to support the supreme madness of gun free zones.



So, no, Bruni makes no sense whatsoever. He couldn't be more wrong.









*Cocks apparently left film criticism to become a screen writer and for some of his work he was nominated for Oscars. But I think that his work is horrible. The worst thing about Strange Days was the script, ditto The Gangs of New York. Need I say more?

Labels: Gun Violence; Gun Free Zones Frank Bruni