I’m not going to say anything, except that I agree with Steve H. Well, I will say this: I don’t think that any Western country outside of Israel (which is a Western country despite its location) will break free of the dreamworld notion of a “violence free” academic environment any time soon, so I’m not holding my breath waiting for gun bans to be dropped from more than a handful of institutions. We simply have too much cultural baggage invested in the idea that university is a place where people focus on scholarly and spiritual pursuits — a.k.a. “the life of the mind” — safe from the mundane problems of the crass and grubby “real world.” I used to believe in that fantasy myself, despite also knowing for some time that colleges and universities have become (if they haven’t always been so) nothing more than holding tanks for people who aren’t ready to leave high school (this includes most of the instructors).
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