Concealed Carry on Campus Is More Common, and Useful, Than You Thought

Recent tragedies have put a spotlight on the issue of firearms in schools, particularly whether there should be more or fewer armed personnel protecting students in the classroom.

What many do not realize is that students and teachers at some colleges and universities have for years been able to arm themselves on school property.

Which States Allow Guns On Campus, Under What Circumstances

Several states have statutes that explicitly protect the right of licensed individuals to carry concealed firearms at public colleges and universities:

Utah—In 2007, Utah became the first state to explicitly allow concealed weapons permit holders to carry firearms on public college campuses.

Colorado—The Concealed Carry Act of 2003 clarified the state’s concealed carry permit process and established statewide uniform standards establishing carrying restrictions. Then, in 2012, the Colorado Supreme Court determined the University of Colorado system could not prohibit concealed carry permit holders from carrying on campus.

Mississippi—In 2011, the state passed a law prohibiting public universities from enforcing firearms bans on persons with “training-endorsed” firearms permits.

Kansas—In 2013, the state passed a law that allowed for the carrying of concealed handguns on the state’s public university campuses and in university buildings, beginning July 1, 2017.

Idaho—In 2014, Idaho Gov. Butch Otter signed into law a bill that allows enhanced concealed carry permit holders to carry concealed firearms on public university campuses.

Texas—As of 2016, all state four-year colleges and universities must permit individuals with concealed handgun licenses to carry loaded, concealed firearms on campus. This statute took effect for all state two-year and junior colleges in 2017.

Tennessee—As of 2016, full-time employees of state public colleges and universities with concealed carry permits may be armed on campus. Students are still prohibited from carrying firearms on campus.

Arkansas—As of Sept. 1, 2017, individuals 21 or older with concealed carry permits may apply for an enhanced permit to carry on college campuses.

Georgia—In 2017, the state passed a law permitting any person with a valid weapons license to carry concealed firearms on the grounds of public college and university campuses.

Most colleges and universities in states that protect the right to carry concealed weapons on campus have policies prohibiting firearms from being carried in certain sensitive areas and buildings.

For example, the University of Georgia prohibits the concealed carrying of firearms at athletic events, in Greek or university housing, or within “disciplinary action locations.”

Similarly, the University of Texas at Austin allows faculty members to declare their offices as “gun-free zones,” and students are not permitted to keep their weapons stored in their dorm rooms.

Some Universities Refuse to Cooperate

In several more states, the law on the books is complicated by administrative rules from noncooperative colleges and universities.

In Oregon, for example, the law protects the right of individuals to carry concealed firearms on public college and university campuses, and the state’s Court of Appeals in 2011 struck down an institutional policy prohibiting the possession of firearms on campus.

This has not stopped state universities and colleges from continuing to post guidelines purporting to prohibit the concealed carry of firearms on campus, even as county attorneys publicly state these policies cannot be legally enforced under state law.

The state of the law in Wisconsin is even more uncertain.

In 2011, Gov. Scott Walker signed Wisconsin Act 35, which makes it lawful for persons with concealed carry licenses to be armed in public as long as they do not present themselves with criminal or malicious intent.

The law created exceptions for certain public buildings but did not expressly include college or university buildings among those exceptions.

But the University of Wisconsin system continues to enforce an administrative code that prohibits firearms on campus, despite the wording of Wisconsin Act 35.

Allowing Law-Abiding College Students to Defend Themselves Can Save Lives

After Colorado passed its Concealed Carry Act in 2003, the University of Colorado argued that an obscure legal loophole exempted it from the law because it did not expressly state its requirements applied to the university.

Then-Attorney General Ken Salazar issued a nonbinding opinion agreeing with the university, which subsequently continued to prohibit firearms on campus because, officials argued, they “threaten the tranquility of the educational environment in an intimidating way” and “contribute in an offensive manner to an unacceptable climate of violence.”

In the years following the enactment of the concealed carry law, Colorado State University—which permitted concealed firearms on campus—experienced a 60 percent drop in reported crimes.

Meanwhile, the University of Colorado—which continued to prohibit students from defending themselves with firearms until a 2012 Colorado Supreme Court ruling found the prohibition unconstitutional—experienced a 35 percent increase in reported crimes.

In other words, it appears that the University of Colorado created a more threatening and intimidating educational environment by banning firearms than Colorado State University did by allowing students to effectively defend themselves.

This makes sense. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention found that firearms are much more likely to be used in a defensive manner than they are to be used for criminal activity and are used defensively somewhere between 500,000 and 3 million times per year.

Not only are firearms invaluable for defense of self or others, but concealed carry permit holders as a group are statistically among the most law-abiding citizens in the nation. It is hardly surprising that, according to John Lott of the Crime Prevention Research Center, “Not once has a permit holder in any of these states [that allow college students to carry concealed firearms] committed a crime on one of these campuses with a gun.”

Disarming Students Has Traumatic Consequences

In 2013, legislation was introduced in the Colorado Legislature that would have prohibited the concealed carry of firearms on campus, even for permit holders. Rape survivor Amanda Collins provided powerful testimony before the Senate State Affairs Committee, highlighting how a similar prohibition in Nevada had resulted in her inability to defend herself against her attacker.

As a 21-year-old college student, Collins possessed a Nevada defensive handgun license, which normally would have permitted her to carry a concealed firearm. But the University of Nevada at Reno prohibited the possession of firearms on campus, regardless of whether a person had a defensive handgun license.

She was raped just a few feet away from an emergency call box, in the parking garage of the campus police station, which had closed for the day.

“Had I been carrying concealed, he wouldn’t have known I had my weapon,” Collins told the committee. “I know without a doubt in my mind at some point I would’ve been able to stop my attack by using my firearm.”

She further demanded to know “[h]ow … rendering me defenseless protect[s] you against a violent crime?”

Collins’ rapist went on to rape two more women and murder another before he was stopped—something Collins could have accomplished had the university not disarmed her.

It is highly likely Collins indeed would have been able to effectively defend herself had she been permitted to carry her firearm that night. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention concluded that “self-defense can be an important crime deterrent,” and that studies evaluating the actual effects of defensive firearm use consistently find “lower injury rates among gun-using crime victims compared with victims who used other self-protective strategies.”

Further, when the Census Bureau interviewed more than 2,000 people who said they had been sexually assaulted between 1992 and 2002, only 26 stated they used a weapon to resist—but not a single one of those 26 cases resulted in complete rapes, because all would-be victims reported that the confrontation ended swiftly after they deployed their firearms.

Collins was a law-abiding citizen with a natural, pre-existing right to defend herself against violent attacks. The Second Amendment exists, in part, to protect her right as a law-abiding citizen to defend herself in the most effective way possible—with a firearm.

Her question remains as valid today as it did in 2013: What did anyone gain from disarming her and rendering her defenseless?

The answer remains: nothing.

SOURCE






STOP INDOCTRINATING OUR CHILDREN

One of the most dangerous developments of the last few decades has been the subversion of our universities by radicals who in the 1960s first tried to burn them down and then, after this strategy of destruction failed, decided to get on the tenure track to take them over. Their generational long march succeeded, possibly beyond their wildest expectations. With the exception of a few rear guard actions by brave conservative students, American higher education is now an indoctrination center for cultural Marxism, identity racism and other anti-American ideas.

But the left’s demolition project is not yet complete. To make the victory complete, it must take over all of American education, including the schooling of our youngest and most vulnerable students.  This effort is now well advanced as radical leftists use their control of the university Ed schools and the teacher unions as a base to extend their ideological campaigns into the K-12 system.  Their shock troops include teachers, administrators and textbook publishers and feature “theorists” such as former Weatherman Bill Ayers (who reinvented himself as an eminent Professor of Early Childhood Education at the University of Illinois when his days as a terrorist had ended) who provide the manuals on “teaching for social justice” that target teacher training programs and ultimately children as early as kindergarten for radical indoctrination.

The effects of this systematic effort to radicalize K-12 education are being felt in school districts all over the country.  No corner of the classroom is immune from indoctrination.  Young students learning arithmetic are given thought problems involving homelessness and the percentage of “undocumented workers” subjected to heartless deportation proceedings.  Social studies is now a race, gender and climate change-obsessed curriculum designed to frighten rather than educate.  In the hands of leftist teachers, America is a nation of victims rather than a nation of immigrants.

Some concerned parents and educators appalled by this new regime have reported educational horror stories that should concern every citizen.  The following give a sense of the scope and intensity of the onslaught our youngest and most vulnerable students face after the school bell has sounded.

Indoctrination on Race and “Social Justice”

*On February 1, 2018, Vermont’s Montpelier High School flew the Black Lives Matter flag for the month of February to mark Black History Month in response to pressure from the Racial Justice Alliance, a student group at the school where 18 of 350 students are African American.

*A teacher at Norman North High School in Oklahoma was recorded by a student stating in class,  “To be white is racist, period.”  The teacher who made the comment was white. Despite being part-Hispanic, the student who taped the teacher and her family took offense at the comments. “Why is it ok to demonize one race to children that you’re supposed to be teaching a curriculum?” her father wondered.

*Students in a literature composition class at Aloha High School in Aloha, Oregon were given a “White Privilege Survey” to complete as homework. The assignment included such questions as “I can go shopping alone most of the time, pretty well assured that I will not be followed or harassed” and “I can turn on the television or open to the front page of the newspaper and see people of my race widely and positively represented.”  A school district spokeswoman attempted to excuse the exercise by stating that the class covers current issues including race and that the goal is for students to “gain empathy, understanding and to build bridges,” but the father of one student in the class stated, “The way this survey is read, it almost wants to like, shame you for being white.”

*Highlands Elementary School located in Edina, Minnesota—one of the state’s highest ranked  elementary schools based on standardized tests—has instituted several initiatives on racial inequality and social justice. Kindergarten classes, for instance, spend weeks participating in the “Melanin project,” which involves, among other things, coloring images of their hands which were attached to a banner reading “Stop thinking your skin color is better than anyone else’s!”  Meanwhile, first graders were to write poems about social justice and fourth and fifth graders participate in a performance project that links the anti police and racially divisive Black Lives Matter movement with peace.  The principal’s page on the website of Highlands Elementary School in Edina, Minnesota, effusively praises Black Lives Matter and reproduced the entry on the BLM’s own website which states, “We are committed to disrupting the Western-prescribed nuclear family structure requirement by supporting each other as extended families and ‘villages.’”  The  school principal also reported on her page that “students of color” had experienced 291 “microaggresions” in a 90 day period, meaning that they had been encouraged by the school’s racialized atmosphere to convert imagined slights all around them into instances of white racism and to inform on their fellow students.  

*Teach for America is partnering with the organization EdX to craft a six-week online course for middle school teachers called “Teaching Social Justice through Secondary Mathematics.”  A course overview states “This education and teacher training course will help you blend secondary math instruction with topics such as inequity, poverty, and privilege…” Ideas for sample math lessons include instruction on “Unpaid Work Hours in the Home by Gender” and “Race and Imprisonment Rates in the United States.” There is no lesson on violent crime rates by race so the inevitable conclusion is that if more blacks are incarcerated than their proportion in the population, white racism must be responsible. 

*In February 2017, teachers and staff serving in the Rochester City School District in upstate New York received an email stating that February 17 would be designated “Black Lives Matter at School.”  The email urged staff to purchase a “Black Lives Matter at School” T-shirt and included links to leftist websites featuring propaganda about why the phrase “all lives matter” is racist. The email explained that educational goals for students will include “Understands inequities based on race”; “Affirms that the lives of people of color matter”; and “Believes that we all have a responsibility to work for equity.” In other words the lesson is that inequalities are solely the result of racism, with differential abilities, application and individual talent playing little or no role in social outcomes.

*In January 2017 an activist group within the Philadelphia Federation of Teachers called the Caucus of Working Educators launched an optional lesson plan for the city’s kindergarten-to-12th grade students that included six days of “social justice action.”  Children in lower grades were required to work on   “The Revolution Is Always Now” coloring book; older students had science lessons about the biology of skin color. The focus in all classrooms was on imbuing children with a heightened awareness of “white privilege” while fostering feelings of racial resentment and guilt. Teachers were also encouraged to wear Black Lives Matter T-shirts.  Some Philadelphia teachers objected to such blatant politicization in the classroom, not to mention its racist overtones. One English teacher caused controversy by stating, “I don’t think kids should be taught that Western society is perpetrating a war on black people.”

*At Highlands Elementary School in Edina, Minnesota, one of the publications principal Kate Mahoney touts for younger students in her space on the school blog is an A-B-C book titled A is for Activist.  The pages feature text such as this: “A is for Activist.  Are you an Activist?  C is for Creative Counter to Corporate Vultures.  T is for Trans. X is for Malcolm. As in Malcolm X.”

*The Edina School District’s employees must take “Edina School District Equity and Racial Justice Training: Moving from a Diversity to a Social Justice Lens.” This includes bus drivers, who are instructed that “dismantling white privilege” is “the core of our work as white folks,” and that working for the Edina schools requires “a major paradigm shift in the thinking of white people.” Drivers were exhorted to acknowledge their racial guilt, and embrace the district’s “equity” ideology.

*In October 2016 2,000 Seattle educators wore Black Lives Matter shirts at their schools in a district-wide action. The event was organized by Social Equality Educators, a group of Seattle teachers.  At Chief Sealth International High School, dozens of educators and students gathered outside the building and held up banners and signs that said  “Black Lives Matter” and “We Stand Together” with logos in the shape of a clenched fist.

More HERE 






Backlash Hits University Attacking ‘Christian Privilege’ Days After Easter

Nonsense dreamed up by a homosexual

For liberals, just being white isn’t bad enough anymore. According to a 90-minute training session being offered by George Washington University, whites who happen to be Christian are even worse.

But judging by the response on social media so far, Christians aren’t exactly turning the other cheek.

First reported by the Christian Post, GWU is using the first week after Easter to host a session on so-called “Christian privilege” to teach all those bigoted believers in the Christian faith how they can recognize “bias” and “microaggression” in their own lives.

Dubbed “Christian Privilege: But Our Founding Fathers Were All Christian, Right?”, the seminar, scheduled for Thursday, purports to explore how belief in Christianity results in unmerited benefits for the baptized.

“Let’s reflect upon ways we can live up to our personal and national values that make room for all religious and secular identities on an equal playing field,” the university’s website states.

Well, Twitter users decided to do a little reflecting of their own about the condition of Christians in the world today. And what they came up with wasn’t likely what the seminar organizers had in mind.

There’s no need to get into a big “we’re-more-persecuted-than-you-are” argument here. But the facts are the facts, and the facts are that major legal battles are being fought even today over the rights of Christians to believe what they choose — even in a country where their freedom of religion is guaranteed by the Constitution.

The Little Sisters of the Poor had to fight to the Supreme Court to prevent the federal government from forcing an order of nuns to provide birth control to employees in violation of their religious beliefs (the court dodged a final ruling in 2016, but as David French pointed out at National Review, it was still a victory for the sisters).

During this very term, the high court is deciding whether a Christian bakery in Colorado was within its rights to decline to bake a cake to celebrate a homosexual wedding that its owner felt violated his beliefs. A decision on that case, Masterpiece Cakeshop, Ltd. v. Colorado Civil Rights Commission, is expected in June, according to Fox News.

So, spare us the “Christian privilege” argument.

As more than a few commenters pointed out, Christianity is the only religion in America today where it’s open season for pop-culture mockery.

 Christian Privilege is when you're the only religion that's allowed to be openly mocked and ridiculed. Dont say anything about Islam, might get into trouble.

Is this really trending? The only thing I see happening in today's America is the Mainstream Media and Liberals shaming anyone who is a Christian for their beliefs..

 The "privilege" to be discriminated against, mocked and derided by major academic institutions, dominant cultural institutions and the media.

Basically, Americans were tired enough of having their skin color constantly thrown in their faces by their alleged moral superiors — no matter what their race.

The decision by GWU to host a seminar to explore how biased the country is in favor of Christianity is just another insult.

Even the question in the seminar’s title is a bait for the unaware. No, strictly speaking, the Founding Fathers weren’t all Christian. Thomas Jefferson, for instance, famously created his own “bible” that literally cut out mentions of the New Testament’s miracles, according to the Smithsonian magazine.

But what they all were — to a man — were products of the Christian civilization of Western Europe and the Enlightenment, steeped in the foundational beliefs of the worth of the individual, and the rights of the individual against the overpowering might of the state.

And it was those beliefs that gave birth to the idea of America, and the American exceptionalism the whole world envies but American liberals despise.

It doesn’t take too long of a look around today’s political landscape to see which side favors the rights of Christians — and everyone –- and which side favors the power of the state to make decisions about individual lives.

The liberals at George Washington University might well believe they’re doing God’s work with a seminar like this. But it’s just as likely that there’s a political agenda here — and it’s not one that favors traditional Christianity, or American conservatives.

The man in charge, Timothy Kane, is, according to his GWU biography, “a proud gay member of the LGBT community as GW. His master’s thesis was titled ‘Solidarity as the Greatest Hope for the Gay and Lesbian Community.’”

Does anyone seriously question which side Kane voted for in 2016? And what the message of this seminar really is?

SOURCE