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Guns arrive on campus today in this context of massive, wholesale collegiate anxiety. DeBrabander is right to worry that they might have a chilling effect on speech, but the chill goes so much deeper, straight to the bone. A concealed-carry campus becomes a campus in which everyone carries a potential gun. And the potential gun is far more powerful than the real gun, because it both issues and revokes a threat all at once. Made habitual and spread atop an already apprehensive base, that sort of mental anguish is nothing short of terrorism.

Think back to those online comments from my students. Even if they were merely playful—which really is all that they were—they suddenly seem threatening once firearms are in the picture. You don’t even need a gun to make it happen. The idea of a gun is sufficient. And that’s just me! I’m the one with the tenured professorship! Now imagine the students, all trying to make it through my class and everything else with all those ideas of guns in the room and on the quad.

An unspoken secret about firearms is that both proponents and opponents of gun laws share a common position: that guns ascribe a feeling of power and control to their bearers. Gun detractors are foolish not to acknowledge this truth of firearms, and they are reckless for sneering at gun owners who seek (legal) refuge in this feature of the weapons. Yes, we pay a dear price, measured in mortal lives, for that feeling of control and power when firearms are used improperly. And yes, as a nation, we seem to have decided that this price is acceptable. But not just from insanity or evil. When violence does erupt, it finds its source in fear and anger and hopelessness more than it does in mental instability. Absent other comforts and certainties, is it any wonder that firearms become such a tempting salve?

Yet in giving in to that temptation, we pay another price, too. It’s harder to see but even more pervasive. It is the quiet, constant apprehension of the idea of the gun in the room, the truly silenced barrel of the firearm that probably doesn’t exist but might, and whose possible existence alters the way we think and behave.

That guns on campus are having their moment right now is no accident. The entire college experience, along with the supposedly prosperous young adulthood into which college spills out, is imploding under the weight of unprecedented apprehension. And worst of all: That apprehension isn’t even neurotic and overzealous. It’s entirely reasonable for young people to fear a future that has never been more tenuous.

There are reasons to fear on college campuses. But those fears are misdirected at hypothetical bad guys with guns against whom good guys with guns would prevail. We’d better spend our worry—and our legislative effort—de-escalating the massive anxiety among college students today. We can do that by providing the resources to teach them well as kids, to give them affordable opportunities to pursue higher education, and to help them secure productive places in society matched to their talents and capacities. The great tragedy and sorrow of the push to extend gun rights to every nook and cranny of American life is not that firearms make people feel greater power and greater control in those contexts. It’s that they are so stripped of that power and control that they should need to seek solace in guns in the first place.

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