College campuses have become infamous for “safe spaces” where supposedly “offensive” viewpoints must be concealed. But now a concealed-carry gun law designed to make a whole campus a safer space is being protested in a truly offensive way, with, as New York’s Daily News put it, students “fighting firearms with phalluses.” As the paper reports:
Texas’s new state law, which went into effect on Aug. 1, allows concealed guns in classrooms and on college campuses, while obscenity rules still ban sex toys being openly carried at universities.
On the first day of classes on Wednesday, a student protest flooded the University of Texas Austin with dildos as a protest over the “absurdities” .
“Texas has decided it is not all obnoxious or illegal to allow deadly concealed weapons on campus. But walking around with a dildo could land you in trouble,” Jessica Jin, the leader of the “Cocks Not Glocks” protest said.
Hundreds of sex toys were given away at the rally on Wednesday, with more than 4,500 donations from Hustler, several pornographic film companies, and the Austin sex shop Dreamer’s.
Of course, it is odd, in today’s “enlightened” time of identities and isms, that these female activists (along with the male ones) would protest using a symbol epitomizing the male, “cisgender,” patriarchal conception of power. Do these women need the phallus to defeat firearms? Why do they instinctively fall back on it? Isn’t there a female body part that could blow the guns away? Perhaps not. That may be okay if you want interminable monologues, Eve Ensler-style or otherwise. But if you really want action, well, even the feminists know who to call.
But what should we call their thesis that gun-free zones are safe spaces? Untrue is a good start. Between January 2009 and July 2014, 92 percent of mass public shootings took place in gun-free zones, reported Breitbart. And even leftists will sometimes acknowledge this — that is, via their actions, which speak louder than their words.
Just consider a largely forgotten 2013 video (shown below) in which Project Veritas undercover operatives approached liberal, anti-Second Amendment New York/New Jersey journalists and asked them if they would post on their lawns a sign stating “THIS HOME IS PROUDLY GUN FREE.”
Not one accepted.
One journalist said, “I do believe in it, but I think I’ll pass on it” — which means he believes in it for others. Another stated, “I agree with you and I am on your side on this, but I’m just wondering if that’s not an invitation to somebody with a gun … an invitation to come barging in!”
Despite this, anti-gun activists continue to barge in with irresponsible policy proposals and statements. Jessica Jin, for example, again paid homage to male power and said that “dildos were ‘just about as effective at protecting us from sociopathic shooters, but much safer for recreational play,’” wrote the Daily News. But while we’ve never witnessed an unwanted pregnancy or STD result from recreational shooting, there are innumerable stories of average citizens stopping crime and saving lives with firearms. Twelve are recounted here, including that of an assistant principal who halted a school shooting with his .45. And note: He could have stopped it sooner if he could have carried the weapon instead of having to retrieve it from his truck.
Moreover, these anecdotes merely reflect a bigger picture, which is that there simply is no correlation between stricter gun-control laws and lower homicide rates. There are nations with far tighter gun restrictions than the United States but higher murder rates, such as Russia, Mexico, and Brazil; and countries with high gun-ownership rates but very little homicide, such as Israel and Switzerland (which has the world’s ninth-lowest murder rate). As for the United States, allegedly a wild west of gun-owning murder and mayhem, our nation actually ranks only 98th in homicide rate on a list of 194 countries — in the bottom 50 percent.
Breaking it down further, further breaks down the anti-gun argument. While pundits such as Piers Morgan often use the United Kingdom and its low homicide rate as a poster boy for gun control, the reality is that New Hampshire has both a much higher gun-ownership rate than Britain and a slightly lower murder rate. Explanation?
Demographics.
As Dr. Thomas Sowell put it in 2012, “Neither guns nor gun control is the reason for the difference in murder rates. People [are] the difference.” Case in point: Japan has strict gun control and “technically” the world’s fifth-lowest homicide rate (critics point out that, due to the application of different criteria, that nation’s actual rate is twice the reported one). Yet Japanese-descent Americans living in the United States — with our relatively easy access to guns — have a murder rate half that of Japanese living in Japan.
And since people are the difference, we should take note of a correlation that does exist: between increasing decadence and a rise in crime and social ills. While the Houston Chronicle states that the UT Austin protest is “as American as apple pie” even with the sex toys, this is nonsense. Widespread firearm availability is what’s as American as apple pie; for most of our history, boys were taught to shoot when young and gun-control laws were rare. Why, even in NYC in the 1940s and ’50s, boys would take rifles on city subways because they had target shooting after school. What was unprecedented, in America, is using decadence to make political points.
But it has greater precedent elsewhere, and history tells a cautionary tale. While pornography had no place in the American Revolution, the soon-to-follow French Revolution was a different matter, with some of the most obscene images imaginable (warning — graphic depictions) used to degrade Marie Antoinette. Given how she was degraded, is it any wonder the mob could happily put her to the guillotine?
Yet the larger issue is that such behavior degrades those engaging in it and the wider society. As cultural observer James McCammon pointed out, “It was during the [French] Revolution itself, and directly preceding it, that the largest effusion of political pornography was released.” And it showed. The revolution was authored by leftist radicals so hateful of Christianity that they sought to restart the calendar and institute 10-day weeks that omitted the Lord’s Day. They also perpetrated the “Reign of Terror,” during which thousands were murdered. And 10 years after the revolution, one of its sons, Napoleon Bonaparte, would help plunge Europe into war.
Weimar Republic Germany — the fertile soil for the Nazis’ rise — also was a land of increasing decadence, loosening sexual mores, feminism, homosexual openness, and sexually explicit entertainment. Is there a connection here? History’s greatest thinkers thought so. Irish statesman and philosopher Edmund Burke once warned, “It is written in the eternal constitution of things that men of intemperate minds cannot be free. Their passions forge their fetters.” And Benjamin Franklin likewise observed, “Only a virtuous people are capable of freedom. As nations become more corrupt and vicious, they have more need of masters.”
So perhaps the UT Austin protesters’ implication is correct. Maybe, in a sense, phallus imagery really is mightier than the gun.
Photo at top: AP Images
