Steinmetz says it’s a slippery slope:

[T]he sale of this subway station seems to be a harbinger of more distressing and confusing sales to come. Another commenter satirically encapsulated this worry in “Modern Subway Directions”: “Get on at McDonalds and go five stops to Starbucks. Transfer to the Walmart and continue on to Staples.” And if subway stops are for sale, why not streets? If streets are for sale, why not whole towns? Will Missourian legislators be someday casting votes in Microsoft City?

Let’s not get so attached to the names of our streets and bus stops. Even without corporate sponsors, these names can change. In cases where a street retains its name for decades, people usually forget the original significance anyway. The only problem I can imagine with saying, “Get off at Staples,” is that passengers could be confused whether they should look for a Staples store or a stop named Staples. The ambiguity would diminish as people get used to the new names. Some people were confused when St. Louis Bread Company became Panera, too, but they survived.

Things get murkier when the advertisers aren’t harmless office supply stores. What if, instead of cleaning up trash on a highway, the National Socialist Movement decided to sponsor a bus stop instead? While most drivers overlook the “Adopt-a-Highway” signs, bus stops get more attention. Would we have to rename the neighboring stops to get back at the neo-Nazis?

Such issues regarding advertising in public spaces will need to be sorted out — if only because we can’t name everything after a dead president or a British province.

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The point is that carrying guns around is not justified on the basis that it is a personal freedom; it is justified when exercising that personal freedom can help achieve the end of self-defense, which, given the lack of danger on the MU campus, is not possible (outside of truly extraordinary circumstance) there.

In my worldview, people start out with personal freedoms and have to give some up when they harm others. So I agree with Steinmetz, for example, that we shouldn’t allow people to carry hand grenades around. Hand grenades are a danger, and giving up the freedom to carry them is a small price we pay to enjoy the benefits of civil society.

But guns are a different story. It’s possible to safely carry guns without threatening anyone else’s lives or property. That’s why Missouri, like most other states, allows concealed carry.

Steinmetz says that MU should be different from the rest of the state because of its low crime rate. I don’t think it makes sense to divide up the state into little areas and allow concealed carry in some but not in others. Crime can happen anywhere. Although as Steinmetz points out, school shootings are rare, we see that they have occurred. Opponents of concealed carry at MU argue that the campus police is enough to deal with those rare events, but campus police wasn’t able to prevent the tragedies at Virginia Tech and other schools.

Suppose we were to follow Steinmetz’s reasoning to its logical conclusion and permit concealed carry only on streets with high annual crime rates. (On streets with lower crime rates, crime is a rare event that we shouldn’t legislate based on.) And suppose a murder takes place on my street this month, on a nearby street the next month, on an adjacent street the month after that, and so on. No one would be allowed to carry guns because no particular street would have a high enough crime rate. Steinmetz could argue that my street just had that one murder a while back, so concealed carry isn’t justified on that street. And the next street over also had one murder, so we shouldn’t allow concealed carry on that street either. This is not the approach Missouri law takes to the Second Amendment — it allows concealed carry throughout the state, regardless of the statistical likelihood of crime in individual counties and neighborhoods.

For more on concealed carry and self-defense, I recommend listening to Marcus Bowen’s arguments in this podcast.

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1. It’s a bad idea to legislate based on rare occurrences like school shootings. We should not adopt a risky policy in hopes of averting unlikely disasters.

I agree completely that panic over freak events (like the birth of octuplets) can prompt the creation of ill-considered policies. This just isn’t one of those cases. Steinmetz compares allowing guns at MU to allowing concealed hand grenades as a defense against sharks on the beach; I think that’s a stretch. We don’t allow hand grenades other places for good reason, and it would be foolish to make an exception for beaches because we’re scared of the occasional shark. In the case of guns, Missouri does permit concealed carry across the state. The proposal would change the law for MU to make it like the law for other parts of Missouri — hardly an instance of singling out MU for a departure from the norm.

2. People who carry concealed weapons aren’t always the knights-in-shining-armor they claim to be. Saying that permit holders are nice because they don’t engage in public brawls is faint praise.

The fact is, most states do allow concealed carry, and it hasn’t led to those public brawls critics said it would. Permit holders’ restraint may not be sufficient evidence of heroic virtue, but it does indicate that concealed carry isn’t so risky as Steinmetz fears.

3. People don’t need to carry guns at MU because the campus is very safe. Concealed carry advocates haven’t demonstrated that there’s anything to gain from changing the law.

There is something to gain: The personal freedoms that apply in other parts of the state would be upheld at MU as well. Why should MU be different?

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The column elicited some interesting comments about the downsides of exotic pet regulation, not all of which I agree with. Such as:

While on the surface your logic seems quite appropriate, but may I point out that all species, even your golden retriever, started out as a “wild animal” in some form or another.

Yes, but it’s been a really long time since our ancestors were coaxing wolves to come closer to the fire. The average golden retriever is ready to be a pet. The average wolf isn’t.

Any pet, regardless of species, can be a good pet, as well as be a bad pet. It’s all dependent on the humans involved.

Even lions? I don’t think so. Some big, dangerous, undomesticated animals are just objectively bad pets.

The commenter anticipates my thought about lions:

You may think a lion, tiger, bear, or chimpanzee may seem terribly dangerous, but they actually account for such a miniscule amount of deaths and injuries each year per capita.

Not convincing, because so few people keep those animals. I can accept that a wild cat roaming the mountains and avoiding people by nature isn’t dangerous, and a bear confined in a zoo isn’t dangerous. But it would be dangerous to allow these animals in residential neighborhoods. If more people had them in their houses, they would “account for” more deaths.

This is a good point:

One problem with regulation is it creates a lack of new people learning the regulated skills. The fewer people that live in areas that are “allowed” to own a species, the fewer can have enough contact with the animals to learn to be able to handle that species.

But I still don’t think that outweighs the safety issue. If people want to learn to handle exotic animals, they should work in a zoo, and learn the skills in an environment where they’re less likely to endanger others.

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The academy certainly did provide tear-inspiring social acceptance when I was there, but it is not the state’s responsibility to pay for creating that environment. Nerdy outcasts should by all means huddle together and support one another in the summer months, but they should pay for that privilege – just as young Christians and overweight children and aspiring astronauts do at their respective camps.

She also discusses alternative sources of funding for the camp, which could allow the good times to continue without more appropriations.

It’s clear from the op-ed that Steinmetz’s lighthearted tone didn’t come about by accident. It was the result of careful cultivation; when she was a student at the Scholars Academy, she majored in humor.

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