Packing a pistol on college campuses?

The University of Illinois "quad" is the new battleground in the state's political fight over firearms. Should people be allowed to carry holstered firearms while walking amidst the students studying under a tree, lying in the sun, or playing frisbee? Photograph provided by University of Illinois.

Although it has been nearly 28 years, there are two moments I remember clearly from my “freshman orientation” session just before I began college.

One was the cute blonde sitting a couple of seats from me (who wound up having next to no interest in me whatsoever during the course of the next four years), while the other was the moment that we were all told that any firearms we might own were not allowed on the Bloomington-based Illinois Wesleyan University campus.

“DON’T BRING YOUR guns,” we were told. “You won’t need them here.”

That actually turned out to be the case, as the only violent crime I remember occurring in Bloomington, Ill., during my time living there as a college student involved the death of the Hendricks family, for which husband/father David Hendricks was tried, convicted, sent to prison, then later acquitted once the appeals courts overturned his conviction (It remains officially an unsolved crime).

The idea that I would have required a pistol in order to keep me safe is just downright absurd. The very real argument could be made that anybody packing a pistol on campus would have been a threat, instead of a protection.

And no, I don’t remember anybody, not even my fellow students who came from rural communities who had hunted in their lifetimes, actually bringing their shotgun – or any other weapon – to campus. A firearm would have been out-of-place.

SO IT IS from that perspective that I ponder the political people who seriously are debating whether or not people should be able to carry a pistol on their person when they’re on a state university property.

It is all part of the “concealed carry” legislation now pending in the Illinois General Assembly. A legislative committee dominated by rural members gave the bill its recommendation, and there is some belief (including reports by the Capital Fax newsletter) that the urban majority that controls the state Legislature is going to throw the “blue dog” Dems this one “bone” as compensation, of sorts, for the fact that we now no longer have a death penalty in Illinois and that the income tax is going up this year.

Of course, the key to reviewing the effectiveness of any piece of legislation is to study how many exemptions exist. The General Assembly may have approved a tougher Freedom of Information Act to make it easier for people to get public information. But they also have been creating many exemptions that some people now believe the FOI act to be weak and toothless.

So in the spirit of exemptions, the universities are saying they want to be exempted from the “concealed carry” act – should it become law.

THAT PERSON WALKING down the street with a pistol in a shoulder holster would find that his concealed carry “permit” would not be worth the cardboard it is printed on once he sets foot on university property.

That has the National Rifle Association upset. The Bloomington Pantagraph newspaper (the hometown publication for the communities that host my alma mater AND Illinois State University) reports that the NRA is determined to fight the idea of a total campus ban on weapons.

They want to create the image of some person bringing their child to college, and having to fight off a vicious attack – but being unable to because their holstered pistol would suddenly become illegal.

That last sentence creates such an absurd image that it ought to be readily apparent. About the biggest conflict I could see occurring on that college “move-in” day is a fight for the best parking spot while the family unloads junior’s belongings from the van or rented truck.

THERE IS SOME talk of political “compromise” on this issue, although the compromise being discussed comes across as ridiculous – allow the exemption inside university buildings, but not for the entire campus.

How many exemptions will be granted here?

Firearms proponents argue that many college campuses are extensive properties that dominate their host cities, and some are adjacent to major thoroughfares through town. In short, an outright ban could also restrict firearms possession and movement in their municipalities.

Which wouldn’t be the worst thing possible, if one looks at the issue rationally. But I don’t know how one says that the holstered firearm is illegal inside the university building, but becomes legal once one walks out the door.

Do we really need students walking across the quadrangle at the University of Illinois while packing “heat?” Would we require students who are carrying a pistol to check it in once they enter an academic building?

IT’S ALSO NOT like an exemption for academia is unheard of. The bill being considered by the General Assembly already exempts elementary and secondary schools, and childcare facilities, among other types of places. Does that mean that once a person turns 18, they lose the right to be protected from armed people?

This argument is more about scoring ideological points. The NRA types who are trying to push this down academia’s throat likely are more interested in telling university officials what they should be doing, rather than trying to do anything that would bolster campus security.

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Durbin DREAMs of immigration reform to benefit the youth of “America”

It’s “tick off” time.

Sen. Richard Durbin, D-Ill., managed to “tick off” a certain segment of the population with his participation Friday in a forum at DePaul University, and now I’m going to irritate those same individuals by calling them out for their ignorance.

THE LINCOLN PARK neighborhood-based university was the site of an immigration forum where the senator told us the same thing that Democrats have been saying for months.

We’re not getting immigration reform this year, even though some members of Congress (including Rep. Luis Gutierrez, D-Ill.) have hinted they are drafting bills that could be introduced before year’s end.

Democrats in Congress are so focused on getting something that can be described as health care reform approved so that President Barack Obama can sign it into law that they’re pushing all kinds of crucial issues aside.

That includes the serious revamping of the nation’s immigration laws, which the president has said will occur some time in 2010, and which Durbin reiterated will occur some time next year.

THE FACT THAT the rhetoric is so vague makes me wonder if the debate won’t even start until late in 2010 – the better to not give the nativists yet another excuse to drag out their cheap and stupid rhetoric for the November general elections.

But Durbin on Friday made it clear he, at least, will be supportive.

The senior senator from Illinois for years has been a supporter of the “DREAM Act,” the measure that is meant to help those young people who have lived the bulk of their lives in the United States and are fairly well assimilated – but were born elsewhere so their citizenship status is mucked up.

There are many cases across the country of families that are split on the immigration issue – some are U.S. citizens while others aren’t.

BUT WHILE PEOPLE of logic would figure that the solution to this confusion is to figure out the way to fully naturalize these families, the kind of people upset by Durbin are the ones who would use the non-citizen family members as the excuse to deport the whole family!

In the case of the non-citizen children, their lack of U.S. citizenship makes it impossible for them to apply for the standard sources of financial aid that most people in this country use to help them pay for a college education, particularly in states where the local government officials have gone out of their way to pass punitive measures meant to hold people back.

The DREAM Act would make it possible for those students caught between countries to be regarded the same as U.S. citizens, which would make it possible for those who otherwise would naturally advance to a college education to do so.

In the process, they will educate themselves and become of greater use to our society. Durbin on Friday let it be known that his individual measure will be included in any overall immigration reform proposal that eventually gets considered by Congress.

PERSONALLY, I HAVE always thought that the only people who truly get worked up over this particular issue are the people who, for whatever reason, don’t have as many opportunities to advance academically, and they see they are being surpassed by others.

Opposition to this particular act strikes me as being cheap and petty, and an attempt to hold other people down to their level.

In the long run, it hurts our society if the people who are here are not given the chance to advance themselves to their full potential. Note that I’m not saying they are entitled to achieve that potential – only that they should not be held back just because of some lunk-headed partisan politics that reek of xenophobia.

I know this issue will tick some people off. If you doubt me, check out the website of the Daily Herald newspaper of suburban Arlington Heights.

THEIR PUBLICATION OF a story announcing Durbin’s intention to partake in the forum triggered a reader commentary that reeks of ridiculousness.

“Liberal garbage,” “douche bag” and “clown” were among the phrases used to describe Durbin, while one would-be wit-less pundit suggested that Immigration and Customs Enforcement deport everybody who bothered to attend the forum – on the assumption that only non-citizens would be interested in hearing Durbin.

One of the reasons I write as much as I do about immigration reform, even though nothing is happening yet, is that I am trying to brace people for the intellectual level that the debate will take once the issue does finally get discussed.

For those who think that the partisan rhetoric over health care reform has become nasty or petty or vindictive, all I have to say is (with apologies to Bachman Turner Overdrive), “You Ain’t Seen Nothin’ Yet.”

DURBIN TELLING US Friday he will never give up on the concept of the DREAM Act brought out some of the trash talk.

But I’m convinced that historians some five or six decades from now will look at the health care partisanship as hugs and smooches, compared to the level of trash talk we will get next year. Because that will be where the partisans align with the nativists to try to take this issue down and hold our society back into some vision they have.

Let’s also hope those historians don’t remember our era as the time when our society’s weaker half holds us back.

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EDITOR’S NOTE: Read the commentary for yourself. What is particularly sad about these comments (http://www.dailyherald.com/story/?id=331175&src=143) is that they’re not at all unique to anyone who has studied the partisanship involved in immigration reform.

A lot of “*,” but no real punishment

When it comes to the concept of high school kids skipping directly to professional basketball, I have never been one of those people who got all worked up.

I do believe those young people would be better off going to college, being exposed to the academic atmosphere, and possibly even learning something in their courses.

BUT I AM realistic enough to know that some people have little to no interest in academia. Some aren’t cut out for it. There may very well be some young people who spend their every spare minute practicing their dribble and their jump shot – out of the delusion that they will be the one in the few who will be able to play in the National Basketball Association for a long enough time period that they will be able to stash away enough money that they never have to work a real job in their lives.

Probably the only reason many of these young people pay attention to colleges at all is because they know that the NBA uses NCAA Division 1 athletic programs as their minor leagues.

Playing a year or two in college ball is the key to catching the attention of NBA scouts. Otherwise, why bother. The last thing most of them have any interest in doing is playing for all four years of a college athletic career.

That clearly is the mentality behind Derrick Rose, the Chicago Bulls star who once was the big shot ballplayer of a nationally ranked high school team out of Simeon Career Academy – which published reports in the Chicago Sun-Times indicate had people who were willing to tamper with his high school transcripts to bolster his shot of getting into college.

AS IT TURNED out, Rose did one year at the University of Memphis, helping to lead the Tigers to a Final Four appearance before moving on to the NBA and the Bulls – where he may very well be the guy who someday leads Chicago to its seventh NBA title (and its first ever without Michael Jordan).

Officials are investigating whether Rose’s “D’s” were bolstered to “C’s,” and whether someone took the SAT college entrance examination for Rose, in order to improve his chances of being accepted to college.

After all, what good would Rose’s athletic ability be if he weren’t able to take it any higher than leading the South Side high school to state championships?

Admittedly, nothing has yet been proven. This is not a court of law, but Rose is entitled to the same “innocent until proven guilty” standard that everyone in this country is supposed to get when they are confronted with an allegation.

BUT THE SPORTS pundits already are speaking out about the punishment, which is really a joke.

The official record of Illinois High School Association basketball may very well be changed to say that Simeon’s state championship isn’t legitimate because of a player participating in inappropriate activity.

Memphis fans will continue to remember the stellar play that led their favorite collegiate team to a Final Four appearance in the NCAA tourney – even if some sort of asterisk will be put aside their record to indicate that something funky took place.

And somehow, I doubt the Bulls are going to care much – so long as Rose plays well on the court. If he doesn’t, he’ll get traded away, just like the last local high school star who was supposed to lead the Bulls to a championship – Eddy Curry.

A WHOLE LOT of asterisks will clutter up the athletic record books to create the impression that “justice” took place and that punishment was administered. Yet I don’t see it that way.

It’s like a whole lot of athletic record keepers were trained in the old Soviet Union, where negative aspects of history were written out of the books in revised editions. A whole lot of people at Simeon and Memphis will try to act as though Rose is somehow a non-person.

But they’re not about to do anything to get at the real problem, which is kids who probably don’t belong in an academic environment being used by universities so long as their athletic skills can help those athletic departments make a few bucks for their home colleges.

It goes back to the issue of whether kids directly from high school should be playing in the NBA. I say why not, and not just because there are the occasional high schoolers (and younger when one considers the rush of Dominican teenagers who get to play minor league baseball) who make it to the U.S. major leagues.

I’M NOT A professional basketball fan. What interest I have in the game goes to the college level, and I’d rather have that level of the game kept free of this kind of grade-altering (or even the appearance of it).

If it means that the level of ball played at the college level declines somewhat, I can still enjoy the game because my interest in it is in all that athletic “rah rah” spirit. I’d rather not have the ballplayers whose only interest in being on campus is to use the school as the equivalent of a year in the minor leagues before going on to the NBA.

And for those who might be concerned about what happens to Rose, I’m not overly worried about that part of this story. He got through, and he’s a professional.

Rose got the big payoff (unlike the kid who’s a second too slow and never advances beyond small-school basketball), and is now focusing on playing well enough without getting injured to have a lengthy (and wealthy) athletic career.

HE’S NOT GOING to suffer from this. Nobody else will either, in all likelihood.

That is what we should be outraged about.

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EDITOR’S NOTE: Derrick Rose’s exceptional athletic abilities are hard to find, which is why someone (http://northcarolina.scout.com/2/493218.html) may have thought that a mere “D” was not worth derailing his potential for a life in professional basketball.

Surrender, or accepting reality?

I don’t know if I support them, but I can understand where a few dozen college presidents are coming from when they say the age at which one can legally drink alcoholic beverages ought to be reduced.

I remember my time in college two decades ago as a period where the attitude was constantly pushed that part of the “college experience” included getting overserved with cheap beer coming straight from the keg.

WHILE I DON’T hang around college campuses much anymore (being around 18-year-olds these days is creepy, it almost feels like stalking), I doubt much has changed in the mentality of the student bodies that are gathering on campuses across the state and nation this month for yet another year of academia at work.

The parties that make up a part of the college experience are going to include alcohol for those students old enough to consume it, and those students really aren’t going to care much if some kid who’s only a year or two underage doesn’t have enough sense to know when to stop drinking.

About 100 college presidents are part of an effort to urge state Legislatures to reduce the drinking age to 18, saying the mentality of campus life is such that they just can’t stop these kids from drinking.

They would prefer it if student activity were no longer illegal. That would make a large part of their problem go away, and allow them to treat over-consumption of alcohol as more of a public health issue.

NOW KEEP IN mind that I went to a slightly offbeat college campus with regards to the alcohol issue. My alma mater actually banned possession of alcohol on campus, even if you were legally old enough to drink.

Illinois Wesleyan University in Bloomington felt that it was easier to enforce the laws setting the legal drinking age at 21 by not letting anybody have alcohol – after all, it was an illegal substance for most of the student body. But it’s not like IWU was Wheaton College, where students sign pledges to abstain from alcohol (among other substances and activities) entirely in their lives.

Yet a strict “alcohol policy” didn’t stop us from feeling “the need” to get bombed. It didn’t make it impossible to get liquor. In fact, all it really seemed to do was create the perception that alcohol was somehow a desired commodity, rather than just some cheap, nasty-tasting swill (which is what most of the liquor we consumed back then really was).

At other college campuses where there were no such rules (such as Illinois State University in neighboring Normal), the alcoholic atmosphere seemed like a free for all. I can remember being surrounded by the tavern ads encouraging us to come on by for weekend drink specials and other events meant to make life in a central Illinois college town seem a little more feisty.

I ALWAYS CHUCKLED at the “rules” that were in force at the University of Illinois in Urbana, where people had to be at least 21 to legally order a drink at the taverns that catered to campus life, but only had to be 19 to enter. So a 21-year-old guy could bring his 19-year-old girlfriend to the bar for a “date.” If somebody looked the other way and she got “served” by mistake, oh well.

I even remember the protests of 1984 on the ISU campus, where students upset that police were enforcing the drinking age laws marched through the downtown area and committed tens of thousands of dollars in vandalism. They “rampaged” through Normal, Ill., for beer.

There's also the fact that I had my first "legal" drink of alcohol some three days before I turned 21. I happened to be in the District of Columbia, where at the time the legal drinking age remained 18. So my first drink was the ultimate non-event.

What is worth mentioning of my college “experience” is that it is not at all out of the ordinary. And apparently, it really hasn’t changed much to this day.

THAT IS WHAT is behind the Amethyst Initiative, the effort by presidents from colleges as diverse as Dartmouth and Ohio State to accept what they see as “reality” and lower the drinking age.

They note it was at 18 or 19 (depending the particular state) for so many years, and they doubt that the safety of the general public has seriously been increased by raising the age to 21.

Call it surrender, or an acknowledgement of reality.

They just want to accept that students are going to drink alcohol. They’d like to think that removing the taint of scandal that now exists for 18-year-olds to get drunk would make them less likely to drink too much because it would not be some “big deal.”

THEY EVEN CITE studies showing that binge drinking is connected to some 500,000 injuries and 1,700 deaths of college students per year. It could be true. I remember the one significant student fatality that took place in Bloomington-Normal, Ill., when I was a student was an ISU student who was hit by a train when his foot got caught in the rails – in large part because he was inebriated.

It’s not like having rules against alcohol consumption stopped any of this drinking from taking place. Perhaps it is time to consider that the higher drinking age is as successful at stopping 18-year-olds from drinking as prohibition was from preventing the population at large from getting ahold of bootleg beer.

Like I said before, I went to a college that tried banning alcohol on campus (even though it was permitted back when the drinking age in Illinois was lower). That didn’t stop us from getting our hands on beer kegs or other stuff.

It didn’t stop me from having a couple of embarrassing moments that people who remember me from college always go out of their way to remind me of when I (too infrequently) see them.

AND I MUST confess, the one time during my four years of college that I got into sufficient trouble to have to see the Dean of Students was for a violation of the university alcohol policy, where I got the equivalent of the lecture Dean Wormer gave to Kent Dorfman in the film “Animal House.”

You remember, “Fat, drunk and stupid is no way to go through life, son.”

I can’t help but wonder how many teenagers would be willing to take such advice, if liquor weren’t given such a “glamorous” image on campus.

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EDITOR’S NOTES: University officials across the country are starting to wonder if a legal drinking age of 21 (http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/nationworld/chi-college-drinkingaug19,0,7039288.story) is realistic.

Not all academics feel this way. Officials (http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/chi-ap-il-bradleypresident-,0,6477952.story) at Bradley University in Peoria want the drinking age in Illinois to remain at 21.

The one fact that all sides of this issue ought to agree on is that the “status quo” is (http://www.collegedrinkingprevention.gov/) unacceptable.