While James travels, I agreed to do some posting at OTB. The following is cross-posted from PoliBlog:
Writes Michelle Malkin at RCP: Wanted: A Culture of Self-Defense
There’s no polite way or time to say it: American colleges and universities have become coddle industries. Big Nanny administrators oversee speech codes, segregated dorms, politically correct academic departments and designated “safe spaces” to protect students selectively from hurtful (conservative) opinions — while allowing mob rule for approved leftist positions (textbook case: Columbia University’s anti-Minuteman Project protesters).
Instead of teaching students to defend their beliefs, American educators shield them from vigorous intellectual debate. Instead of encouraging autonomy, our higher institutions of learning stoke passivity and conflict-avoidance.
And as the erosion of intellectual self-defense goes, so goes the erosion of physical self-defense.
What in the world is going on? First we have Derbyshire and Blake and now this. First, why do we have to find blame in places other than the fact that a truly disturbed individual simply did an unthinkable act and cracked. There is only so much that can be done in a free society to prevent such situations. This attempt to blame a general “liberal” attitude at universities and that this somehow has led to a culture of “conflict avoidance” that somehow, by inference, led to people not defending themselves on Monday–that is utterly ridiculous.
And I’m sorry, but this idea that we need to arm students is simply not a good one. How is that supposed to increase the level of intellectual debate that Malkin is allegedly so concerned about? That’s what we need: armed semi-adults failing exams–that’s a lovely image.
Yes, it is possible (though hardly a guarantee) that if there had been armed persons in the classrooms that Cho could have been stopped. However, given the degree to which Cho planned this attack, had he known that some students had been armed, one guesses he would have planned accordingly.
Need I remind Malkin and her ilk that Timothy McVeigh killed three times as many people as did Cho and he did it with fertilizer. So it isn’t as if arming students would guarantee that no mass murders would ever take place on a college campus ever again.
And the notion that good policy can be made based on one historical anomaly is not smart.
I am truly disgusted by this ongoing narrative by some that someone we have to blame those slaughtered for not exhibiting enough self-defense. And the notion that campuses would be improved by having guns in classrooms is simply off the wall.
And really, there is a segment of US conservatism that needs to get over its irrational phobia of college professors and their eeevil ways. Are there some off the wall ideologues out there? Yes, there are. However, Malkin, David Horowitz and crew have got to get over this notion that universities in America are some kind of bizarre radical brainwashing camps.
