"Many Professors Anxious About Legally Armed Students in Their Classrooms."

"I’m sure that many professors in the past were uncomfortable about having women, or blacks, or openly gay students in their classrooms, too. But happily, progress marches on and people’s visceral fears and dislikes weren’t allowed to rule."

Writes Glenn Reynolds.

I can see how it's disturbing to know that students might have guns, but I'm puzzling over the way knowing there are guns becomes more disturbing when you know that some of the people who have guns have them because it's not against the law. You might say, it's irrational to be disturbed, since using the gun other than in self-defense or the defense of others would be against the law, and if you're only worried about people doing things that are against the law, the legality of having guns should be irrelevant (or should cut the other way, since it's possible that a law-abiding, gun-bearing person might defend you against the law-violating, gun-bearing person).

But — as I was saying the other day — a professor could be worried about students who impulsively become violent and, because they have a gun with them, do far more damage than if they were unarmed when they suddenly become murderous.

Anyway, a student with a concealed weapon is not like a student who is female, black, or openly gay. For one thing, you don't have the easy option of leaving your femaleness, blackness, or open gayness back at home. It's possible to cover up these things, but for most of us, it's not easy. A gun isn't a necessary component of your physical being, and carrying a gun is behavior that you can chose to engage in or not. Schools impose many limitations on behavior, frequently based on fairly superficial distaste about things that involve essential personal freedom, such as how you dress and whether you can talk and move around. It's not the case that teachers must learn to tolerate students exercising their personal freedoms in the classroom.