Glad I'm Not The Only One

This is an interesting OP-ED piece from a professor who has had encounters like I documented below (but more intimidating than mine). She also wonders where personal rights end and the university community rights begin. Good reading from the NYT.

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/19/opinion/19oakley.html

This has definitely started a discussion that has been long overdue: personal rights, personal safety, the downsides of a gun culture. Canada has more guns per capita than the U.S., but far, far less gun violence per capita. But Canada doesn't have the huge amount of hand guns that we have. As one student pointed out in class (and he is a hunter and a gun owner) "Cho would have had a harder time not being stopped/detected if he had been carrying a thirty-ought-six." Polls show that most U.S. citizens want better gun control, but it has been presented as the fallacious "either/or" argument by the lobbyists: "Either you allow 50 mm guns, or you are taking away all our gun rights." There has to be some sort of sane compromise. The fact that Cho had been involuntarily committed to a psychiatric institution within the past 48 months is reason enough to deny him a gun, but this sort of mental health material is not taken into consideration in the majority (if not all) states when one applies for a gun permit, unless the psychiatric episode involved a felony. I wonder if most people know this? I used to work in community mental health and know this fact too well; I remember the suicides of at least two clients who had legally purchased guns.