Love that top down control

Now I'm really steamed. I read a report in the local paper that some university in Colorado instituted a "no concealed weapons on campus" policy. Now, I'm not a gun nut; don't own a single assault weapon, but the whole tenor of the thing bothers me, for a couple of reasons.
First, what is it about liberals that they don't want people to be able to defend themselves? The reasons they give are pathetic. One is, "The police are there to protect you." That's false on two counts (Oh, oh, I'm getting buried in lists here). The first reason it's false is that, legally, the police are not, in fact, there to protect you. Oh, sure, they will if it happens to be convenient, but if they were really legally required to protect us, we could sue if they don't. If you don't believe me, just ask a jurist who will be honest with you. The second reason it's false is because they just aren't there to protect you most of the time. They're out giving tickets or eating doughnuts. You're on your own.
The second reason liberals give for taking away our means of protecting us is the old, "You can't take the law into your own hands," argument. Actually, we can. The law provides that we can use even deadly force to protect ourselves and those close to us.
Second reason I'm steamed: The university is both targeting the wrong folk and exposing them to danger. A "no gun" zone is, as I've mentioned before, a huge flashing sign to nutcases that says, "C'mon in with your AK47. There's no opposition. Shoot at will for 15 or 20 minutes until the fuzz get organized." (A cop told me that one) And, the argument that regular people with guns will shoot up the place is ludicrous. In my town, every tenth person carries a concealed weapon, and no one knows who is packing and who is not. Those people who have gone to the trouble of learning the laws of weapons and have qualified at the shooting range and the least likely to fire a shot in anger.
But reality has never made much of an impact on political stances.

Fraternity redux

I keep coming back to the problem of the young man who died of alcohol poisoning. I think it's that I am having trouble picking out the threads that weave through it, and the motives behind the persons making decisions. One curious thing seems to be that the death of the young man and the allegations of hazing have drifted apart. It seems clear that the partying (or hazing) incident gave an opportunity for the young man to overindulge, but didn't actually cause it. This comes from a kind of grudging account in the newspapers, which early on quoted someone as saying that the young man was "made" to drink vodka to a later admission that he wasn't forced to do anything.
The charges that have been filed on students include hazing and offering alcohol to a minor. The second is almost certainly true. The first may be also, but I'd be interested in finding out just what happened. The young man was "abducted" by two coeds, duct taped, and painted blue, if I remember what the newspapers said. Is that all of it? And, more importantly, did he object? Fight? Cry for help? Or did he go along with it.
The laws against hazing are there to protect people from getting hurt. In the past people have been seriously injured or even killed as a result of hazing. On the other hand, the only real pain I see in this one is when someone rips the duct tape off. That stuff really sticks.
No charges have been filed in the death.
The university president has called for a "task force" to look into hazing practices. Well and good. We're facing a huge financial crisis and we still have time to worry about painting people blue.
The tragedy of the young man's death is already sinking beneath the froth of hazing charges. Those charged, by the way, have pleaded innocent. Now, if I were a lawyer for one of the people charged, and the city had a really good case, I'd recommend pleading down to a slap on the wrist and getting it over with. If, on the other hand, the city's case was lousy, I might recommend pleading innocent and fighting it out in court.
One wonders about all the fuss and bother. I simply can't see why so much of our resources are being spent on a bubble. On the other hand, I don't have all the information I need to make an informed guess, as I'm limited to what I get from the paper.

Fraternity revisited

This thing about the fraternity and the young man's death keeps hanging around in my mind. I am bothered by the events it generated, and I think I have figured out why. It's all about presumption. There's an old rhetorical doctrine that nobody thinks much about anymore, but that is very operative in our lives. It's called the "doctrine of presumption." What the doctrine says is that in nearly all situations in which we have to make a decision, you can make presumptions about the argument. In the case we know best, consider a guilty/innocent problem. The doctrine of presumption here is that, in America at least, a person is presumed innocent. This means that the "guilty" forces have to prove their case; the "innocent" forces don't have to. In other countries, the doctrine might be different: that one is guilty unless proven innocent.
Another of the cases where the doctrine might hold is in the matter of change. Traditionally, the doctrine has been that a new "ism" has to prove its case before it can replace the status quo. Conservatives like this presumption. Liberals, on the other hand, would rather, I think, prefer that the new is presumed to be better than the old.
Back to the frat question. The situation seems to me to be that the university acted on a presumption that if something bad happened, the fraternity had a hand in it. Thus the speed of the action that banned the fraternity from campus.
There is nothing inherently wrong in a presumption of guilt approach. Sometimes you just gotta pull the trigger when you're not quite sure.
In this case though, I wonder if it doesn't spring from either PR or CYA, rather than a desire for justice. But, as I've said, not all the evidence is available to me.

Confusion on Campus

About a week ago, a young man attending my university did some serious drinking off campus, lay down and, sometime during the night, died of alcohol poisoning.
That's what we know. Details are frustratingly rare and couched in tentative terms. The Utah Statesman, the campus paper, said, "The drinking was part of an initiation " into a fraternity, "which could consititue hazing." Coulda woulda shoulda. Again, from lack of details, I'd assume that frat-rats were involved in the drinking, but haven't the faintest clue whether it was countenanced by the fraternity (If it was, the fraternity is dumb as a post. If they were getting around campus regs, they're criminal to boot).
We can assume the young man got the booze from somewhere, and that means that at least one law was broken in the process, since the young man was under the legal drinking age.
However, people assumed a lot more than that, at least from the published reports. The university president immediately shut down the fraternity and a sorority, though there doesn't seem to be any evidence forthcoming that they were culpable in the young man's death. Sort of a "shoot from the hip and ask questions later," approach. The words "hazing incident" were also bruited about, and a round-robin of finger pointing ensued.
As I write this a week later, the account from today's newspaper tells me nothing new. The frat and the sorority are still closed, and police are investigating.
First off, the death was horrible. It was devastating to the young man's friends and family.
But. Was there hazing? Hard to tell, but from what I know so far (very skimpy, true) I'd say probably not. Somebody gave the young man booze. That's wrong and stupid to boot. But unless someone sat on his chest and poured vodka down his throat, it doesn't seem to be hazing. Nor does evidence point to active involvment by the fraternity.
But -- and here's the crux of this problem for me. The attitude seems to be: The young man died and someone has to pay. In all this pother, no one has thought to concentrate on the person most responsible for the young man's death -- the young man himself. He played a major role in his own death. That sounds harsh, doesn't it? Yet that has to be taken into account as we assign blame and punishment.

The doctrine of an eye for an eye was never meant to be taken literally. It was simply a way of assessing what a transgressor owed those he or she had transgressed against. A life has been lost. But who the transgressors are and what the transgressions were is a more difficult problem. You can't simply say: "A young man died; someone must pay." At least not at the life-for-a-life level. The part the young man played in his own death has to be taken into account, as painful as that may be.

I honestly think that as the investigation stretches out it will become less of an emotional posse gettin th' varmints and more of a rational process under the guidelines of law. After all, that's what the law is for. Here's what I think will happen. A couple of people will be charged with offenses like providing alcohol for a minor. The frat and the sorority will be quietly reinstated, and that will be it.
It's entirely possible, though, that the lives of more than one young person will be ruined because they were stupid and weak. I hope not. It's also possible that the fraternity and sorority will be closed permanently. I won't grieve over this, as the greek system has always seemed to me a place where lead-heads get together to convince each other that they are superior. But I wouldn't like for them to get railroaded either.
I am sincerely sorry for the loss of this young man. I hope, though, that the loss doesn't lead to a rush to make somebody pay at all costs.