Guns On Campus: Virginia Tech Settlement Still Stubborn and Indecent

By John Longenecker

I've written before that the Colleges refusing to recognize student rights are indecent. I write often that in forcing liberty enthusiast students to obtain 'counseling', to face suspension or other punishment even for inquiring about handgun policy within right-to-carry states, they force adult students to choose between felony and funeral. This is indecent for public servants to tell the citizen authority how much authority we have. Indecent. It is technically wrong and tortious.

This is a finding in contrast to the decent elsewhere in higher education, where concealed carry for adult students is not quarreled, but affirmed, and proudly as part of the heritage. This is not a political choice, but a purposeful affirmation of understanding and knowledge - yes, knowledge - of the nature of the relationship between adult students (citizens) and the trustees (public servants). They get it right. In the indecent, it is purely a political vexation, beyond question, and it always turns out badly. This is not ignorance, it is indecency of being stubborn at the expense of lives. Sue everybody.

One of the ugliest political battles we are fighting in 2008 is how our very lives are held hostage by official defiance of the law. The officials care not for the lives they had a hand in taking, they care only for their circled wagons and prestige. There is no grief within them, only ego and defiance, as they stubbornly hold on to their positions and will not learn from experience of having lost so many. How many do we have to lose before these institutions begin to learn? Something else is driving them into these depths of indecency in self-interest at the cost of the very people they are sworn to serve.

It's The Liberty, Stupid! It's not guns, it's citizen authority to act when facing grave danger alone when police aren't around. Citizen authority trumps trustee authority. Interference with this is actionable, which brings us to the report of an $11 Million settlement.

The recent decision to pay $11 million to survivors is yet another mark of trustee indecency, and shows that they just don't get it. Instead, the indecency factor kicks in and the first thing they think of is to close ranks and go into damage control. If their experts really gave Loss Prevention any thought, they would have been able to avoid the deaths of so many students, but noooooo. This morbid defense mechanism which has them believing they are doing the right thing in ‘fiscal responsibility' is that same reality distortion which blinded them from the deeper responsibility of student safety. For $11 Million, all they can think of is to lick their own wounds. By comparison, they don't have a scratch. 33 are dead, thanks to stubbornness and defiance of the law without penalty.

In order for real reform to take, V-Tech trustees themselves must be found liable, jointly and severally. The idea of sovereign immunity for the university must be pierced as one pierces the corporate veil when individuals exceed the scope of their authority or commit tortious interference outside their duties. This could be a finding and sticking to it instead of settlement could mean change nationwide.

Virginia Tech claims that they have a duty to keep students safe, but other campuses don't believe that lip service protects their students, since that is one duty utterly impossible to meet by remote control; they have found that getting out of the way and affirming students as the first line of their own defense works much better. It always does. The target is always the first line of defense in time of crime, according to most experts (except certain trustees who can make you choose between felony and funeral). It is reasonable, it is lawful and it is proper. Combined with citizen authority to act, you have the ultimate homeland security. It works well on campuses, too.

The truth is that a new policy of armed students will humiliate the trustees for their hard-headedness and eventual tortious liability. It will humiliate the entire gun control movement as an interference with personal safety, community safety and law.

Individual liability in tort is what is needed for real reform, and settling is just another indecency, sweeping it under the carpet with no real reform. The indecency is in the fact that the trustees may then continue to compel students to sue for their rights again and again, only to defy the law as it is handed down. The key is to sue the individuals, pierce the veil, and send a message to campuses and workplace everywhere.

A consent decree might be worth its weight in Gold if the college finds it's mandate which it said so vociferously it would honor, as it announced in the V-Tech Review Panel. Well, we're waiting.

Civil Rights litigators, call your office. Sue everybody. Go for the individual liability and get your mandate instead, and split the difference of the $11 million they offered, if it isn't too late. If it is, then it will also be too late for the next students to be killed in their victim disarmament zones.

Reform – painful reform for the trustees – would be good for the students, it would be good for Virginia, and it would be good for the country.

John Longenecker is President and CEO of Good For The Country Foundation, a patriotic non-profit organization.