Professor Anderson Makes Me Scared And Uncomfortable. Investigate Her!

As a woman who never outgrew her annoying childhood habit of being one of the smallest people in the room, I take a dim view of anyone who opposes the Constitutional right to self-defense (read the Second Amendment if you don’t know what I’m talking about). I’d even go so far as to say such people make me “scared and uncomfortable.” Seriously: there’s something disturbing about anyone who believes “If a violent thug wants to rape or kill me, I should NOT have a legal means of defending myself.”

Scary thought. Yet being scared is not the same as being a coward. To understand the difference, consider a professor from the university campus in New Britain, Connecticut (one town over from me) who sicced campus police on a student who gave an in-class presentation about the Second Amendment right to bear arms. *

The Recorder, newspaper of Central Connecticut State University, has the story:

On October 3, 2008, [John] Wahlberg and two other classmates prepared to give an oral presentation for a Communication 140 class that was required to discuss a “relevant issue in the media”. Wahlberg and his group chose to discuss school violence due to recent events such as the Virginia Tech shootings that occurred in 2007.

Shortly after his professor, Paula Anderson, filed a complaint with the CCSU Police against her student. During the presentation Wahlberg made the point that if students were permitted to conceal carry guns on campus, the violence could have been stopped earlier in many of these cases. He also touched on the controversial idea of free gun zones on college campuses.

That night at work, Wahlberg received a message stating that the campus police “requested his presence”. Upon entering the police station, the officers began to list off firearms that were registered under his name, and questioned him about where he kept them.

They told Wahlberg that they had received a complaint from his professor that his presentation was making students feel “scared and uncomfortable”.

You know what else makes students feel scared and uncomfortable? A professor who calls the cops on them for expressing opinions she doesn’t like. It also makes taxpayers like me scared and uncomfortable, to think our tax dollars pay the salaries of professors who teach such freedom-squelching, authoritarian ideas to the Leaders of Tomorrow.

On the other hand, we don’t know what exactly Wahlberg said to frighten Professor Anderson so. The Recorder did not provide transcripts of the chat. Perhaps his exact words were “I think we should dismantle gun-free zones because I hate you all and want to be the agent of your destruction ha ha HA,” in which case I can’t really blame Professor Paula Anderson for thinking “Hmm, this is a scary and uncomfortable statement the police should maybe investigate.” If that’s what Wahlberg said, I owe Professor Anderson an apology for thinking she cannot be trusted with authority over college students, or any life form more advanced than bathroom mold.

I wrote about on-campus gun possession in a column last December, which started as follows:

You know those amusement-park shooting galleries where you use an air rifle to knock down multiple rows of moving mechanical ducks? The way they work is, you shoot at the targets all you want, and none of the targets can shoot back.

Most schools and workplaces operate on the same principle.

Since this column never ran in the Recorder, the CCSU campus police never had reason to investigate me. But when John Wahlberg suggested letting college students – a.k.a. Our Precious Children – be something more than shooting-gallery targets, he did face a police investigation, because the thought of shooting-gallery targets having a chance at survival makes Professor Paula Anderson scared and uncomfortable.

*Scroll your cursor over the link, and look at the full web address in your browser. It ends with the letters W-T-F. Speaking of WTF, CCSU is the same school whose president two years ago said that the first amendment does not apply to speech that is offensive. I’m scared and uncomfortable knowing my local public university teaches that your right to free speech takes a backseat to everyone else’s right to never have their feelings hurt. Perhaps the police should investigate this.