A credibility issue mistaken as a safety issue. 

As most of my readers know, I do not write for gun owners, but specifically for the Non-gun owners. What do 80 million gun owners know that non-gun owners don't know? Self-defense is not an opinion or a side of the aisle, it is a life skill. A totally non-partisan survival skill. It is this which is deliberately ignored by officials on their political say-so backed by force.

Though a household may plan for root canal, unemployment, illness or car accident – how the household will meet and even survive criminal violence is the most neglected area of household management. This, of course, extends to family members away from home, as in workplace or school campus. You do not check your citizen authority at the Admissions Office.

When will they learn? Well, we need them to learn now. Workplace or campus bans of personal weapons gives the shooter an enormous tactical advantage, and acts to the detriment of the students and workers. In this manner, the campus might as well hold the coat of the next shooter.

And campuses must learn this: We will never stop the next school shooter – or any school or workplace shooters – by psychoanalyzing or profiling them, giving them time and opportunity of their choosing, but by better preparing the target to respond immediately. Disarming students means waiting for someone to arrive. It means waiting for someone else to protect you, or get kicked out of school. All the profiling is nothing more than a stalling tactic to avoid the obvious: arming students and workers as they choose in order that they operate on their citizen authority when facing grave danger in the absence of first responders. The lesson to learn is Citizen Authority.

This defect and refusal to learn is emphasized by the fact that Dover cannot locate the shooter at the time of this piece. Keep trying.

Citizens play a vital role in crime control, and excluding citizens from the process is dangerous on so many levels.

Learn this, too, plese: when it comes to school shootings, it's a further concentration of power in the hands of officials, and this further excludes the citizen (and our authority) to the citizen's detriment. It is pure Dependency; Forced dependency on officials is what officials live for. What campuses refuse to acknowledge is that their obnoxious exclusions, penalties and abuses of power have been only to the detriment of the students.

In fact, disarming willing students is to force all to choose between felony or funeral, including visitors, such as parents, and including staff. Virginia Tech chose funeral for 32 of its students. Delaware State is a late arrival. What about the next school shooting - and there will be more. Citizen Authority prevails, or it should. Why does a learned University hide this? Why quarrel with constituents? Why punish the exercise of citizen authority with expulsion?

Do you understand now how officials cannot teach until they learn? Officials cannot boast of safe campuses when they hide the authority of citizen students who study there. It's a credibility question, and not a matter of opinion. Targets are not safe when they cannot respond when attacked without being expelled. It's a credibility issue represented as a safety issue to hide who is really in Authority: YOU. All gun control obfuscates citizen authority to act. Gun control isn't about safety - it never was.

Irrespective of your political position, campuses have to learn that they are in charge only so far as the people authorize them - this means that student [citizen] authority trumps that of the servants who serve us. Recast, repeal or rewrite that delegated authority and you begin to solve your campus shooter problem. Actually being safe (being armed) - not merely feeling safe (silly policies) - is a non-partisan issue.

As I say often: gun control affects non-gun owners profoundly when all constituents begin to fear their public servants more than they fear murderous criminals. The student is then held hostage by both. Very American. We're all held hostage this way.

Isn't this what it comes down to? Felony or funeral (or merely expulsion)?

The education is that our Independence and individual authority can protect students better than Administrators can.

Remember that if you think the cost of a good education is expensive, try the cost of ignorance.

Or of official stubbornness. That luxury, that perk, is purchased with lives.

It's time for officials to be much more faithful to the students and to their oath -- even if it has to be litigated.

It would be good for the country.
____________________

John Longenecker is President and CEO of the Good For The Country Foundation, a patriotic non-profit at www.GoodForTheCountry.org