Boy meets girl. Girl meets boy. It’s the timeless formula for love and romance. These are tumultuous times in the vulnerable lives of young men and women as they learn to understand themselves and their peers. Exploring gender differences and the nature of human sexuality while learning how to manage the physical and emotional tensions they can foster is a tough challenge for today’s youth.
Politicians aren’t making it any easier. According to The New York Times, this year ten states are pushing bills that would permit the carrying of firearms on campus. The Texas legislature already passed a law permitting college students to bear arms. By manipulating the national spotlight on sexual assault, lobbyists hope to pass their measures. Gun advocate, Assemblywoman, Michele Fiore of Nevada, comments, admittedly with some élan: “If these young, hot little girls on campus have a firearm, I wonder how many men will want to assault them.” She assures us that sexual assaults “ . . . would go down once these sexual predators get a bullet in their head.” She’s right about the dead guys not being a threat any more; I’ll give her that much. However, the smoking gun will indict her on charges of naiveté if not irresponsibility.
Introducing guns to control sexual assaults on a college campus rates right up there with other unnatural acts.
Protecting students by creating an armed climate is certain to increase interpersonal tensions. The presence of guns generates suspicion, produces adversarial relationships between young people who, in that stage of their lives, are already uncertain of themselves and each other. They’re struggling to get along and to understand their own issues of intimacy, sexuality, and aggression. Arming students would create a tribal mentality on campus; it would regulate gender behavior by sanctioned uses of lethal force, as in some Middle East countries, where a woman can be stoned for adultery. Firearms, or stones, for that matter, successfully force compliance, but never make for enduring solutions.
If, in attempts to settle racial inequities and abuses in the states, Dr. King had advocated legally arming victims, we’d have had a national blood bath still going on today. Instead, he achieved one of the most successful and comparatively bloodless social revolutions in history. Like rape, racial oppression is an abuse of power. Dr. King forced national awareness of racial abuses while beginning a conversation between oppressors and the oppressed. Change didn’t happen overnight. It wasn’t guns that saved the day; it was confronting the problem openly and keeping potential adversaries talking to each other.
Typically, colleges are young people’s first home away from home. Colleges empower young people. Being empowered and having power are different. To understand one’s self is to be empowered. Possessing power and being ignorant of one’s self is a prescription for disaster, like the proverbial loose canon. Managed by mature, informed and competent adults, colleges provide the ideal setting for empowering our youth, offering them opportunities, during their formative years, to explore their feelings about sexuality, intimacy and aggression in a safe and respectful environment.
I’d hate to think that if my grandsons or granddaughters become romantically involved when in college, that my granddaughter will feel safe with the guy only if she’s armed; or that my grandson’s first concern will be whether or not his date’s packing a piece. We can do better than that. Which brings me to the good news.
The majority of college students, young men and women, oppose guns on campus. Our kids are thinking more like adults than our legislators. There’s hope.
Mary Wood says
Thank you George Merrill. It is hard to believe an intelligent person could think that a deadly weapon could solve a problem.