NYT's Frank Bruni Want to Protect Fragile College-Age Texans From Frightening Gun Thoughts

By Clay Waters | October 4, 2015 | 9:35 PM EDT

For his New York Times column Sunday, Frank Bruni traveled to Austin, Texas, a blue patch of academic liberalism in a red state, to quail in horror at the prospect – a year away – of concealed firearms being permitted in college classrooms at the University of Texas: "Guns, Campuses and Madness." Bruni, a former White House correspondent for the Times, at least found a novel angle to attack gun rights after the killings on a college campus in Oregon, by bizarrely suggesting conservatives want to infiltrate campuses with gun-toters as a way to (metaphorically?) attack liberal colleges.

I’m not sure if this meets the exact definition of irony, but it definitely meets the exact definition of insanity:

Across the country, there’s so much concern for college students’ emotional safety that some schools add “trigger warnings” to novels and other texts. But in Texas, there’s so little concern for college students’ physical safety that concealed firearms will be permitted in classrooms at public universities like the state flagship here.

Notice that Bruni has little problem with "trigger warnings" – the idea that citizens old enough to vote must nevertheless be shielded from the depredations of such traumatic fare as The Great Gatsby and Huckleberry Finn. By the way, there already seems to be plenty of guns on the UT campus, judging from photos on the campus security website.

This wasn’t the doing or desire of administrators and faculty at the University of Texas -- most of whom, it seems, are horrified -- but of conservative Texas lawmakers on a tireless mission to loosen gun restrictions whenever, however and wherever they can.

To be or not to be armed in Shakespeare class? Your choice!

Guns in dorms? Just the ticket for a good night’s sleep!

Of course, Bruni lacked the self-control to bring up Charles Starkweather's massacre on the University of Texas campus from almost 50 years ago. Then he came up with another blindingly original argument, playing the macho-gun-nut card.

This is madness. When it comes to guns, we have lost our bearings in this country, allowing misguided chest-thumping about a constitutional amendment penned in an entirely different epoch, under entirely different circumstances, to trump all prudence and decency.

Does Bruni also think that the First Amendment needs altering, given that it also was "penned in an entirely different epoch"?

The columnist quoted approvingly a fearful rant from retired Admiral and University of Texas chancellor William McRaven, who thinks that allowing the full freedom of the Second Amendment would cripple the use on campus of the First Amendment.

“I absolutely understand the Second Amendment....I have spent my life fighting for the Second Amendment. You know, you have to ask yourself why did the founding fathers put freedom of speech as the First Amendment? They may have done that because freedom of speech is incredibly important, and if you have guns on campus, I question whether or not that will somehow inhibit our freedom of speech.”

Pressed to elaborate, McRaven continued: “If you’re in a heated debate with somebody in the middle of a classroom and you don’t know whether or not that individual is carrying, how does that inhibit the interaction between students and faculty?”

Bruni found the idea of both gun-free and gun-carry zones "a jolting intrusion into the business of learning." But that worry looks hypocritical, considering that "free speech zones" actually exist on college campuses, with no outcry from the Times news pages or stable of concerned liberal columnists.

Bruni even suggested that conservatives were pushing for Second Amendment rights on campus as a way to attack tolerant universities.

“A big majority of campus was against this,” Xavier Rotnofsky, the student body president at U.T. Austin, told me, adding that he and others found it absurd and offensive that lawmakers acted knowingly “without the consent of the stakeholders.”

Possibly that just encouraged the lawmakers. “Universities are uniquely liberal institutions and they’re targets for conservatives,” Neuberger noted, adding that campus carry may well have been their way of “attacking the bedrock of liberal values that the university represents.”

Actually, the seething hostility on the average quad toward guns, traditional marriage, pro-life views, and anything remotely conservative gives the lie to the flattering idea that universities care about the traditional "liberal values" of open inquiry.

Bruni goes along with the infantalizing liberal concept of college students as fragile, overgrown children who require coddling from frightening thoughts about firearms.

Maybe just a few more guns find their way onto campus. Isn’t that a few guns too many, especially in an environment where excessive drinking occurs, among people at an age when anxiety and depression can be acute?

Do we really want to do anything at all to unsettle young men and women in the phase of life when they’re trying to polish the confidence and optimism that will help them tackle the world?