Reality free zones
We refer to the media and the universities, and a significant portion of the government apparatus. Mark Steyn writes on the subject today; he says “Let’s be realistic about reality“:
Within hours of the Virginia Tech massacre, the New York Times had identified the problem: ”What is needed, urgently, is stronger controls over the lethal weapons that cause such wasteful carnage and such unbearable loss.” According to the Canadian blogger Kate MacMillan, a caller to her local radio station went further and said she was teaching her children to ”fear guns.”
Overseas, meanwhile, the German network NTV was first to identify the perpetrator: To accompany their report on the shootings, they flashed up a picture of Charlton Heston touting his rifle at an NRA confab. And at Yale, the dean of student affairs, Betty Trachtenberg, reacted to the Virginia Tech murders by taking decisive action: She banned all stage weapons from plays performed on campus. After protests from the drama department, she modified her decisive action to “permit the use of obviously fake weapons” such as plastic swords…
The “gun-free zone” fraud isn’t just about banning firearms or even a symptom of academia’s distaste for an entire sensibility of which the Second Amendment is part and parcel but part of a deeper reluctance of critical segments of our culture to engage with reality. Michelle Malkin wrote a column a few days ago connecting the prohibition against physical self-defense with “the erosion of intellectual self-defense,” and the retreat of college campuses into a smothering security blanket of speech codes and “safe spaces” that’s the very opposite of the principles of honest enquiry and vigorous debate on which university life was founded. And so we “fear guns,” and “verbal violence,” and excessively realistic swashbuckling in the varsity production of ”The Three Musketeers.” What kind of functioning society can emerge from such a cocoon?
One answer to Steyn’s question is that over time, the aggressor sets the agenda. At some point, he will likely slit the cocoon, and then we’ll just have to see what happens.