Student op-eds are…interesting.
These are younger people who haven’t really lived much of their lives yet, but who have strong opinions on a great many things. That’s fine, obviously, because they have that right. Yet, because many of them lack real-world living experience, their arguments on things like guns can be baffling. Especially when they end up defeating their own argument.
That’s what happened with a student op-ed out of Virginia Commonwealth University. The author has an AR-15 and says he will keep it until the Second Amendment is repealed…and wants to see it repealed.
I am in full support of strict gun regulations, a registry system where every single gun, bullet and augment is stamped and can be traced back to an owner and even repealing the Second Amendment, which would make gun ownership a privilege in this country. However, these beliefs are unlikely to be codified into law and until then, these weapons will be legal.
If they are, then I will absolutely be an owner of one. There is no chance I am sitting back and letting people like my neighbor or any of the 10,000 people at the Jan. 6 riots have weapons like that while I have nothing.
If it comes down to them or me and my family, it is me and my family every single time.
We live under an administration that has no qualms with their immigration enforcement agency murdering people in public in broad daylight, where ICE is stopping vehicles without probable cause, where they raid homes without warrants and where they racially profile brown people, where the Patriot Front, a white supremacist organization, can march on the National Mall chanting about “taking the country back.”
As long as this is the case, I am going to own an assault rifle. If this borderline authoritarian administration continues to make life for marginalized communities increasingly more dangerous, then I will level the playing field.
So what we have here is a young man with an AR-15 — an AR-pistol, to be exact — who says he will have it until the day the Second Amendment vanishes, and the reason he has it is for the exact reason the Second Amendment exists.
This isn’t some strong, reasoned stance by someone facing reality. This is someone who clearly hasn’t thought through his own feelings about guns.
It’s one thing to support gun control.
It’s quite another to articulate the very reason the Second Amendment exists, like being able to face a tyrannical government you vehemently distrust, while simultaneously telling the world you want them to have a monopoly on that level of force.
Wow. I don’t know, that’s just…special.
I don’t know that it’s because he’s young or what, but the truth is that nothing about this “rationale” makes a lick of sense. I get distrusting Trump, particularly considering how the media likes to frame him and how often they lie about his supporters, but if he’s that vile, that dangerous to “marginalized communities,” then why would you willingly hand him the only equalizing power you truly have?
Like, I just don’t get it.
I can’t get it, though, because it makes no sense in the least. It’s the argument that somehow not just ignores the supposed threat the author has articulated, but the threat society as a whole may offer “marginalized communities,” as he put it. After all, marginalized means on the margins. These are the outliers, and thus always vulnerable to the masses. They’re the very people who need guns the most, and to say that the moment guns vanish, they’re safe despite a mob not needing a single firearm to destroy a community.
Honestly, if this is the best we’re getting out of our university system, maybe it’s time to take all that taxpayer money and put it in trade schools.
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