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University student newspapers show why firearms outreach to journalism schools is vital

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Student-run newspapers at universities aren’t known as bastions of anything but far-Leftism. It’s been like that for as long as I can remember. The brashest far-left among the student body run the newspapers, edging out fellow students with views that are just mildly to the right of the extreme Left. A cursory look at student newspapers reveals endemic bias and what essentially amounts to a single political point of view. What’s worse is that divergent views are treated as ideological hereticism that must be extirpated.

Student newspapers reflect the overall campus climate. There’s a lot of data showing that conservative, libertarian, and classical liberal students are afraid of speaking up, thanks to the dominant and utterly intolerant campus far-left. Their culture of bullying isn’t limited to the student body, as far-Left faculty are very much a part of it and have actively discriminated against and elbowed other faculty out of campus.

In the immediate aftermath of the murder of a Chinese-American professor by a Chinese graduate student at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, there was a campus-wide lockdown as police swept through buildings to catch the perpetrator. From the looks of it, this was a targeted murder, not an attempted mass shooting, but the police can’t make that assumption when there’s an act of violence. They need to do their job methodically. 

The lockdown and the report of shots fired scared a lot of students, which is understandable. But the resulting exploitation of an isolated incident to push for more gun control isn’t (archived links).

Student “journalist” Ms. she/her appears to be a natural in stoking fear and harvesting emotions just like gun controllers do. I have a lot of contempt for what she did, but salute her amazing skills that remind me of a certain highly effective 20th-century propaganda minister.

The UNC Campus is a gun-free zone. As gun rights advocates have pointed out for a long time, it’s a Government-Approved Mass Shooting Zone. No lawful, peaceable student, faculty, or staff member is allowed to carry, and they dutifully obey the written laws and “gun-free zone” signs strewn around campus. Of course, that doesn’t stop a killer from bringing a weapon to campus and committing a murder.

These valid viewpoints from the pro-rights side are worthy of consideration and discussion. But the student newspapers never seem to entertain them, relegating them to the social media underground. Because these student journalists are the ones who will head to mainstream media outlets after college, and within decades become prominent voices shaping the country and culture, it’s important that they are reached out to.

If they are willing and able to learn, if they have an ounce of intellectual honesty and character, exposing them to knowledge will change them. That’s why I strongly believe that the Second Amendment community must conduct outreach in higher education institutions. If you are near a college campus, it will be helpful to learn about the institution and how you can perform outreach activities and get students to learn the basics of firearm safety and gun laws. Hopefully, the spark of knowledge will lead to good things thereon. (Shameless plug: I have written more about reaching out to law school, journalism, and media students in my book.)

The good news is that some journalism students are already seeking out this knowledge. The bad news is that these are few and far between, and not representative of the student body at large.

It’s frustrating to see the lack of fairness and objectivity in the mainstream media. They may be pejoratively referred to as the “legacy media” but they still wield tremendous power. That power is dangerous and will destroy our freedoms unless we make active efforts to tame it. Reaching out to student journalists at universities is a constructive step towards that goal.

Gun control groups use the “Monsters, Inc.” approach to power their movement

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Public mass shootings are statistically very rare. Northeastern University Professor of Criminology James Alan Fox published an op-ed in USA Today (archived links) recently, which I’ve covered here before. To summarize, according to the CDC, the odds of being struck by lightning in a given year are less than one in a million. In comparison, per Prof. Fox, the risk of a student or staff member being killed at school has a 1-in-8 million risk. There were some insights that stood out to me in the op-ed, and they’re worth revisiting:

The real epidemic is fear. Perhaps a better understanding of the data will provide some needed perspective on the actual risk.

Our nation’s schools are safe. In fact, only one-half of 1% of school-age victims of gun homicide are killed at school. Children are safer in school, where they have supervision and structure, than on playgrounds, ball fields and street corners. Indeed, some are safer at school than in their own home.

Fear is a valuable political resource to harness into action. There’s a great quote by H. L. Mencken which says it well:

“The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by an endless series of hobgoblins, most of them imaginary.” 

Gun control groups know this intuitively. Like in the movie Monsters, Inc., they power their enterprise by scaring the public and then harvesting their fear. Every school lockdown and active shooter drill works to their advantage. They pounce on every incident they can exploit, while ignoring obvious counterexamples. Today, they got another opportunity at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill (archived links).

Victim killed in UNC-Chapel Hill’s campus shooting identified as Zijie Yan
The university’s students, faculty and staff were alerted to go inside and lock all doors.

Sources have indicated that an associate professor Zijie Yan has lost their life in the shooting incident.

[***], a UNC doctoral student, was taken into custody.

Earlier today, at 1:02 p.m., UNC Police received reports of gunfire within Caudill Laboratories on our campus.

By around 2:30 p.m., the authorities successfully apprehended the suspect, who is now under custody.

[***] was captured near Williams Circle, located approximately two miles north of the campus, at approximately 2:40 p.m. Law enforcement officers surrounded him, and he was seen sitting on a road in front of a driveway while in handcuffs. He was later escorted to a waiting patrol car.

A notification of an “all clear” for the campus was issued at approximately 4:15 p.m., indicating that there is no longer a pressing danger.

Public mass shootings seem to happen in clusters, with the news of one somehow seeming to precipitate the next in a media-driven contagion. After last weekend’s horrific racist attack in Jacksonville, there was a scare today at UNC Chapel Hill. As the initial fog lifts, it seems that this was not a public mass shooting, attempted or otherwise; this looks like a graduate student killing his Ph.D. advisor for some reason.

But gun grabbers never let any gun-related incident go to waste. Here’s former Congresswoman Gabby Giffords’ namesake organization basking in the fear her side has stoked and harnessing that for political power:

Thanks to your scare tactics, “half of all young people report thinking about a mass shooting each week.”

All you care about is how to use the victims and those you scared as vehicles for your disarmament agenda:

Note that NONE of these organizations or activists would have said a single word if the victim had been stabbed to death. There would have been nothing to exploit. We’ve seen that over and over again; in fact, there was a stabbing incident at a North Carolina high school last year which resulted in 1 death. There was not a peep from these groups. If there’s a gun in the mix, these political vultures swoop in to feast and strengthen their agenda.

I’m totally pessimistic about reasoning with gun controllers. They lie repeatedly, play dirty tricks, exploit victims, and even collude with foreign governments like Benedict Arnold. They avoid debate so their fraud isn’t exposed.

It comes down to raw numbers and voting, even though the Bill of Rights is supposed to protect individual rights and put them outside the grasping hands of the majoritarian mob. We must swell our numbers and grow our ranks. The window of opportunity is narrow and may be closing fast but fight we must, lest America – the last best hope of Liberty in the world – self-destructs into tyranny after disarmament.