on guns, privilege, and true liberty

[martasfic]

Originally published at Faith Seeking Understanding. You can comment here or there.

Over at Inside Higher Education, Tyro Tracts blogged about the prospect of legislators allowing guns on campuses in his state. I highly recommend it.

I started reading it because of the gun angle, but it’s not really about that. Rather, he’s using the gun debate to talk about some important topics, like freedom and self-possession and the things we can and can’t accept than about gun policy. He claims to be pretty comfortable with guns in general and the piece is actually framed around a walk through the woods hunting grouse. And I believe him. Just because you’re okay with guns in some contexts doesn’t mean you can’t recognize the inappropriateness of guns in certain contexts.

I feel the same way about guns in churches, actually, and in Greensboro I had to quit going to a church that allowed open-carrying. (I never was clear on whether that was actually legal…) I also think that guns on campuses are in general a bad idea because students are usually young, stressed and (quite often) inebriated, making them IMO a high-risk group when it comes to gun ownership. I never felt that schools were a sanctuary, perhaps because they’re also the homes of large groups of people, not just a place you go. I can appreciate, though, how invasive it would feel to have to deal with this prospect in an area you did think of as holy.

What most struck me about this piece, though, was the way Dr. Tracts talks about the good life. He writes,

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