UPDATED: Viriginia Tech and security rationing: a left market anarchist analysis

So much for “Gun Free Zones”. Today, the Virginia Tech Massacre took 32 innocent lives. Yet in 2002 the Appalachian Law School shooting, also in Virginia, resulted in only three deaths as it was stopped by armed students. Note carefully the joy with which the Virginia Tech establishment greeted the prospect of continued student disarmament last year:

Virginia Tech spokesman Larry Hincker was happy to hear the bill was defeated. “I’m sure the university community is appreciative of the General Assembly’s actions because this will help parents, students, faculty and visitors feel safe on our campus.”

Yet one armed student on the Virginia Tech campus could have made the difference between 32 dead and perhaps 3, as the Appalachian Law School shooting demonstrates. Whose interests are at
stake here, in light of Hincker’s comment above? Larry Hincker is an example of the mixed “business & state” managerial class of statist corporatism, with its Orwellian “Human Resources” departments and government policy wonkery. The managerial class always prefers to keep students and workers in a state of authority-dependent false consciousness, mentally unable to take initiative lest they potentially organize and get uppity.

“No one knew what to do. No one knew where to go.”

One of the key artificial psychological impediments this neo-liberal establishment uses to keep us regular folk in line is “security rationing“. By prohibiting individuals from attempting to make reasonable provisions for their own security, security service provision is restricted on the supply side (in terms of supply and demand). That is, after the manner of all monopolists and cartelists backed by coercive government-doled privilege, supply is not allowed to grow, despite the price of security services being kept artificially high (you ever try to hire a bodyguard?), as a consequence of suppliers being restricted to only approved service providers — police and corporate security organs. Do-It-Yourself, the typical market response of the lower classes to temporary unaffordability of important services, is not allowed at all or is severely curtailed by means of statist restrictions both blatant and subtle. Even in states where concealed carry licenses are doled out to the most trusted and subservient sheep, for example, corporate human resources and legal departments typically choose to restrict the ability of workers to carry arms in the workplace. The monopolists themselves, of course, are front and center in the effort to restrict supply via protecting the exclusivity of their own state-granted privilege:

“Some gun owners questioned the university’s authority, while the Virginia Association of Chiefs of Police came out against the presence of guns on campus.”

By allowing provision of security services only by establishment controlled sources, we are kept in a perpetual state of helpless infantile dependency — unaccustomed to notions of independence and personal responsibility the ruling class might find inconvenient. Maslow’s hierarchy of needs is turned by the ruling classes toward the end of keeping the exploited classes in a constant state of anxiety. Like a monopolistic drug dealer with a safe turf protected by bribed cops, the product of security is doled out solely at the convenience of the people in charge, so as to keep the junkies enslaved. The result is a systematic inculcation of learned helplessness of the sort domestic violence opponents would surely recognize. Its impact on the oppressed is not confined to strictly the issue of arms and crime, as this security rationing induced helplessness shapes the overall attitude of the oppressed.

The right to bear arms is an aspect of the basic, fundamental human right of self-defense. The Virginia Tech administration has blood on its hands by reason of its disallowal of student carry. I hope they get sued into oblivion.

See also: Uncivil Defense, Disloyal Opposition, Independent Country, End the War on Freedom, Winter Patriot, Black Krishna, Guerillas in the Matrix, Paul Craig Roberts and (for the anti-war angle, in particular) No Quarter.

UPDATE: The news story and quote from Larry Hincker above are dated January 31, 2006. We now learn that after the August 2006 escaped inmate security scare at the Virginia Tech campus, a student gun-owner published an editorial begging for students to be allowed to carry firearms in the future. The editorial was met with a rebuttal published in the same paper just a few days later by the same Larry Hincker from the Virginia Tech administration. Quoth Larry:

The writer would have us believe that a university campus, with tens of thousands of young people, is safer with everyone packing heat. Imagine the continual fear of students in that scenario. We’ve seen that fear here, and we don’t want to see it again.
…
Guns don’t belong in classrooms. They never will. Virginia Tech has a very sound policy preventing same.

The only thing Larry Hincker has “prevented” by his opposition to student self-defense is student survival in at least 32 cases. Mr. Hincker is the Virginia Tech Associate Vice President for University Relations. If you’d like to politely let him know how you feel, his work phone number can be found here.

Hat tip to: Kent McManigal