It wasn’t enough to have guns everywhere…
Georgia residents can now carry guns into bars, nightclubs, school classrooms, and certain government buildings that lack security personnel or devices – with a license to carry, of course.
Nope. Just not good enough.
The Georgia Senate on Friday gave final passage to a bill that for the first time would legalize firearms on all public colleges in Georgia, following an emotional two-hour floor debate over the wisdom of letting students carry concealed guns on campus.
Well, among other observations I would have, I’d say this is a great day for the Powell Manifesto.
In 1971, Lewis Powell, then a corporate lawyer and member of the boards of 11 corporations, wrote a memo to his friend Eugene Sydnor, Jr., the Director of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. The memorandum was dated August 23, 1971, two months prior to Powell’s nomination by President Nixon to the U.S. Supreme Court.
Powell makes a gratuitous comment suggesting that liberal thought is "necessary” for “balance” in academia, but he felt that things were way too liberally biased and laid out ideas how to counter this filthy liberal ideology on the college campus.
The assault on the enterprise system was not mounted in a few months. It has gradually evolved over the past two decades, barely perceptible in its origins and benefiting (sic) from a gradualism that provoked little awareness much less any real reaction.
Although origins, sources and causes are complex and interrelated, and obviously difficult to identify without careful qualification, there is reason to believe that the campus is the single most dynamic source. The social science faculties usually include members who are unsympathetic to the enterprise system. They may range from a Herbert Marcuse, Marxist faculty member at the University of California at San Diego, and convinced socialists, to the ambivalent liberal critic who finds more to condemn than to commend. Such faculty members need not be in a majority. They are often personally attractive and magnetic; they are stimulating teachers, and their controversy attracts student following; they are prolific writers and lecturers; they author many of the textbooks, and they exert enormous influence — far out of proportion to their numbers — on their colleagues and in the academic world.
Social science faculties (the political scientist, economist, sociologist and many of the historians) tend to be liberally oriented, even when leftists are not present. This is not a criticism per se, as the need for liberal thought is essential to a balanced viewpoint. The difficulty is that “balance” is conspicuous by its absence on many campuses, with relatively few members being of conservatives or moderate persuasion and even the relatively few often being less articulate and aggressive than their crusading colleagues.
This was, again, 1971. If you read the manifesto in its entirety it has clearly served as a blueprint for most of the conservative onslaught against what Rush Limbaugh has vilified as “liberalism.”
By 1981, Reagan was president and, again, this manifesto, to me, seems like a huge part of the administration’s game plan and part and parcel of Republican dogma. That’s how far back this goes.
I mean: have the Republicans NOT waged an outright war on education since then?
Is it not still going on to this very day?
I mean, Texas edits slavery out of history while Alabama puts creationism stickers on science books, and Georgia got its hand slapped for doing just that some time ago. I don’t think much needs to be done to establish how awful the GOP/conservative war on education has been.
And speaking of Texas, the "guns on campus" bill in Texas already has sparked criticisms that it has a real chilling effect on what professors might teach and say.
The law does not go into effect until Aug. 1, but professors at the University of Houston have started preparing guidelines for dealing with gun-toting students that include warning faculty to steer clear of "sensitive topics" and dropping hot button issues from their curricula, according to a UH Faculty Senate.
The proposed guidelines also advise faculty to not "'go there' if you sense anger" and "limit student access off hours."
"Only meet 'that student' in controlled circumstances," the guidelines state.
"It's not official policy," Faculty Senate President Jonathan Snow told NBC News on Wednesday. "The faculty is waking up now and saying, 'Oh my. Come August I will be teaching classes with students who could be carrying guns."
That, my friends, is a chilling effect on teaching. Period.
And that is a large part of what I think this is about, over and above outright gun worship.
It's not nice to stereotype but it’s impossible to avoid a Venn diagram in which those who would tend to be more conservative and more critical of liberalism and those who tend to be more of the gun-worshiping sort, would most likely or easily fall into a potential group of "people who would shoot professors for various and sundry reasons related to the delusions by which they run their lives”.
It is a fine time to remember how hard the right has worked to vilify liberalism since at least the mid-1980’s.
Remember the stochastic terrorism of FOX news sorts Sean Hannity and Glenn Beck. There are a good number of people who would fit this little stereotype of armed and hostile to liberal thought.
It will be the same thing here in Georgia. Despite the denials. All the “guns don’t kill” and Second Amendment recitations.
This is gun worship at work: the gun is more important than human life and that this mentality will demand zero limits be placed on where any gun can go and more people, not fewer, will be injured.
Needlessly.