Giving a Whole New Meaning to “Concealed Carry” and a Brief Rumination on What It Might Mean in the College Classroom

What follows is the brief summary of a news story by Quinn Ford written originally for DNAinfo Chicago. The summary was published in HuffPost Chicago.

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COOK COUNTY CRIMINAL COURTHOUSE — A Little Village gang member is being held on $20,000 bail after he admitted to police he was hiding a loaded gun in his buttocks, authorities said.

“I’m gonna be real with you, I have a gun in my a–,” Marco Alvarado, 20, told police after he was pulled over early Thursday, according to court records.

Alvarado, who has “Kreepy” tattooed on his shoulder, wasn’t lying, police said.

They found a loaded .22-caliber gun exactly where he claimed. Alvarado admitted he had just fired it three times into the air, according to a police report.

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I will admit that I was initially intrigued by—confounded by–the anatomical requirements for concealing a handgun in this manner.

But, I eventually got somewhat past that issue. As any readers who have been following my contributions to this blog may recall, I have written several posts about the efforts in many states to reverse the longstanding prohibitions against bringing guns onto college and university campuses. I have argued that the potential hazards created by such a change in policy will far outweigh any possible benefits in effecting it.

In fact, although my posts on guns on campuses have seemed to attract a larger readership than some of my posts on other topics, the comments submitted by many of those new readers have been so rabidly insistent about the incontestable rights of gun owners that they have done nothing but reinforce my worst fears about how concealed carry will transform campus life and, more specifically, classroom instruction.

Imagine, for instance, that Mr. Alvarado were a student in one of your courses, and in the middle of one of your lectures, he began to shift uneasily in his seat. You would, quite naturally, wonder if he was simply finding the seat very uncomfortable or if he was, perhaps, so terribly bored by your lecture that he was getting visibly restless.

Imagine, then, if you also had to wonder if his weapon had slipped awkwardly out of its “place” and was possibly about to go off accidentally or if he was shifting about in order to facilitate the retrieval of his weapon.

When I shared all of this with a colleague who is a professor of criminal justice, he could not resist pointing out that the phrase “a load in the pants” has a whole new meaning if “load” refers to the “charge for a firearm.”

I am admittedly being very self-indulgent here, but I don’t really mean to make light of the possibility of gun violence on our campuses or anywhere else.

These kinds of crude (if irresistible) jokes serve, I think, to highlight the idiocy of inserting guns into any everyday situation in which only the most remote and terrible possibilities would make it necessary to have them on our persons.

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My previous posts related to guns on campuses have included:

“The Simple Logic of Self-Defense”: https://academeblog.org/2013/05/27/the-simple-logic-of-self-defense/

“Several Indications of Common Sense Related to Guns on Campus”: https://academeblog.org/2013/05/13/several-indications-of-common-sense-related-to-guns-on-campus/

“Guns on Campus, Discouraging News”: https://academeblog.org/2013/05/13/guns-on-campus-discouraging-news/

“Common Sense about Guns on Campus, Addendum 1”: https://academeblog.org/2013/05/28/common-sense-about-guns-on-campus-addendum-1/

2 thoughts on “Giving a Whole New Meaning to “Concealed Carry” and a Brief Rumination on What It Might Mean in the College Classroom

  1. Pingback: Guns on Campus, Idaho Edition | Academe Blog

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