Op-Ed
Return Fire: Coombs on his S.A. Resolution for Concealed Carry on Campus
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If You Can Keep It
.jpg "If You Can Keep It")
On the morning of Wednesday, Feb. 27, I sent Ryan Lavin ’09 an e-mail.
Ryan is the Executive Vice President of the Student Assembly, and, as such, it is his job to write up the assembly’s weekly agenda and send it out before the Thursday meeting. The smiling Southerner at the top of this page is an S.A. representative who wanted something on last week’s agenda — hence the e-mail.
Simple enough, right?
Alas, how wrong you are, Dear Reader, for how complicated this particular Wednesday would soon become! (Dun dun dun!)
Exactly 119 minutes after I sent Ryan my e-mail, yours truly got an e-mail back from another member of the S.A.
“You’ve established a good name for yourself over time,” the e-mail read — “and I'm afraid you’re about to throw it all away…”
Wait, wait, wait — THROW IT ALL AWAY?!!!
My name, my reputation, my everything — all of it gone in less than two hours on a … a … a Wednesday?
What did this guy know that I didn’t?
What had I done? Where was I going? Would I need a lawyer — or a doctor — or a preacher — when I got there?
Why — why — was my future suddenly in such peril?
Because I, your steadfast Stetsoneer, had dared suggest on the morning of Wednesday, Feb. 27, that the Ancient Eight could learn a thing or two from the pistol-packing cowboys of flyover country.
Needless to say, news like this travels quickly — hence the importunate e-mail from my innominate compatriot.
But wherefore the dire contents?
The American historian Charles Beard once mused that “one of the best ways to get yourself a reputation as a dangerous citizen these days is to go about repeating the very phrases which our founding fathers used in the struggle for independence.”
And, boy.
Dad-gummed if he didn’t get that one right.
Take, say, this phrase: “the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.”
It is a line that I have repeated more than once as of late, most notably within the now-(in)famous Resolution 17 — the piece of legislation I e-mailed Ryan that fateful morn which asks the Student Assembly to signal its support for allowing those who can legally carry concealed weapons most everywhere else in the Empire State the right to legally carry them here on the Hill as well.
Fellow columnist Rob Fishman ’08 offered the quintessential campus response in yesterday’s Sun: “When the Student Assembly’s director of elections, Mark Coombs ’08, asks that we take the proposed resolution for carrying weapons “intellectually and seriously,” I suspect that most of us chuckle.”
Granted, alum Mark C. Elsaesser ’81 probably was not chuckling when he said of the “two badly misguided students” behind Resolution 17 — namely, me and Cornell Republicans chair Ahmed Salem ’08 — that we “appear to have so little common sense that University leaders may have to give serious consideration to not offering them diplomas,” but Rob never said that everybody was laughing, after all.
The Sun, for its part, put out an editorial that not only took on our resolution, but the United States Constitution, writing that when Ahmed and I argue that “the right to bear arms is a fundamental right,” we have — simply put — “got it all wrong.”
So.
Real quick.
Let the Texan tell his side of the story.
Ahmed and I introduced Resolution 17 for one very simple reason: we believe, like the Founding Fathers did, that — as James Monroe put it — “the right of self defense … is among the most sacred, and alike necessary to nations and to individuals,” and we see no reason why that right as contained in the Second Amendment should cease to exist when one sets foot on a college campus.
We know, of course, that Cornell is a private university, and, thus, that it is not bound by the letter of the Law of the Land in this regard, but we as proud Cornellians — and, more importantly, we as We the People — believe that our alma mater is nonetheless bound by the spirit of it.
The spirit of the Second Amendment is clear.
“The conclusion is ... inescapable,” the Subcommittee on the Constitution of the Senate Judiciary Committee declared over a quarter-century ago, “that the history, concept, and wording of the Second Amendment … indicates that what is protected is an individual right of a private citizen to own and carry firearms in a peaceful manner.”
Resolution 17, in short, asks only that the Student Assembly stand by this most American of principles — and, if they disagree, requests that our administrators issue a position paper explaining that disagreement and the reasons for it.
Some 13 states are currently considering some form of legislation that would extend concealed carry to campus; this is already the case in Utah, where, I am happy to report, the sky has not yet fallen.
Really.
Concealed carry on campus is only as unheard of as was, until the American Revolution, the prospect of giving a people the right to keep and bear some very dangerous things.
And I think we all know how that one worked out, Chicken Little.
Mark Coombs is a senior in the College of Arts and Sciences. He can be contacted at mcoombs@cornellsun.com. If You Can Keep It usually appears alternate Fridays this semester.