Of Arms and the Law: Prof. calls police after student discusses guns in class
“Last October, John Wahlberg and two classmates at Central Connecticut State University gave an oral presentation for a communications class taught by Professor Paula Anderson. The assignment was to discuss a “relevant issue in the media,” and the students presented their view that the death toll in the April 2007 Virginia Tech shooting massacre would have been lower if professors and students had been carrying guns.
That night, police called Wahlberg, a 23-year-old senior, and asked him to come to the station. When he arrived, they they read off a list of firearms that were registered in his name and asked where he kept them. Guns are strictly prohibited on the CCSU campus and residence halls, but Wahlberg says he lives 20 miles off-campus and keeps his gun collection locked up in a safe. No further action was taken by police or administrators.
“I don’t think that Professor Anderson was justified in calling the CCSU police over a clearly non-threatening matter,” Wahlberg told The Recorder, the CCSU student newspaper that first reported the story. “Although the topic of discussion may have made a few individuals uncomfortable, there was no need to label me as a threat.””
This is pure harassment, of course. Nothing but.
But, to get into the spirit of things: if anyone in the good professor’s class had referred to the use of a controlled substance, would the police have been called? How about underage drinking? What if the class presentation had been in favor of legalizing currently illegal substances? Grounds for police intervention?
Somehow, in the professor’s mind, anyone who even speaks of firearms in any non-derogatory way is automatically suspect.
I bet the professor is on the Diversity Council, and preaches far and wide about tolerance and accepting people who have different perspectives than yours.
Any takers? It seems that more and more, the following equation is true:
professor = hypocrite
I wish it was true less often than it seems to be.
