THE CAMPUS-CARRY MOVEMENT: Alex Hannaford’s Atlantic article is written much-too-much for the magazine’s bobo audience (i.e. people like me); I’m not wild about it.  It’s transparently condescending, for example, to express grave wonderment that anyone could think that Barack Obama is on the side of gun-controllers – look at all the gun-rights laws he’s passed!! – rather than looking at what he tells those to whom he unburdens his soul about bitter clingers, etc.  It strikes me as at least possible that Jerry Brown has actually changed his minds about guns, at least when it comes to him owning them; Barack Obama, naw.

As to campus-carry, however, I myself am torn.  Beloved Daughter is about to go off to college in Texas, as I mentioned, and she is interested in firearms training.  I am a strong supporter of gun rights – and also think that urban kids like my daughter, who has shot a gun once in her life at age 12 in God’s Own Country (that’s the Owens Valley to the rest of you) and does not come from gun culture, needs a lot of real, honest to goodness training in safety and shooting and how one behaves in situations of self-defence with guns.  That’s a lot more than some on-line gun course, and here’s your license.  I want her to be able to carry – but I want her knowledge and training to be real.

And that’s true for the rest of the campus community.  I understand fully the way in which permits and training requirements are manipulated to be a backdoor route to gun control; I also wouldn’t want my kid carrying a gun unless she had a whole lot of it, and updated on a regular basis.  I want her to come back from school not just owning a handgun as a toy, but competent to use it. (Thanks to reader DM for the recommendation on a training course in our area.)