Are you feeling lucky, punk?

Most students think university professors are unbearable or maybe tolerable.

Now students might have to bear professors bearing guns, provided they are concealed.

Delegate Bob Marshall, a Republican's Republican, beneficiary of the NRA and the National Federation of Independent Business, wants to make it happen.

Bob's bill, HB 1411, proposes that faculty members of Virginia's institutes of higher education, an implausible and impious description, can pack some heat on campus.

In a legislature controlled by Republicans, it is more than just likely, though not entirely certain, that the bill will sluice through the legislature and wreck on the desk of Gov. Terry McAuliffe, a democrat.

It may wreck but not because of McAuliffe. 

The measure would lift a prohibition on weapons on campuses though not everyone would be able to freely foist a gun, according to the bill. The bill is very specific about nonspecific details.

Sorry adjuncts, you can't carry one. Sorry instructors, you can't carry one either. Sorry administrative staff, you are excluded, as well. Only full-time faculty members will be able to holster a gun before they can sling it.

Here again, full-fledged professors will enjoy the right to be right though most of them think they are already right.

Ah, the sting of elitism.

Del Marshall assumes, quite wrongly, that full-time faculty can shoot a gun though he assumes, quite rightly, that they can fondle a gun.

Many professors, I imagine, would spend hours describing in excruciating and irritating detail a gun as a symbol of male paternalism, as the worst in patriarchy and an example of gender-based blood lust.

Others might describe a gun in mechanistic or stochastic terms and language or marvel at its efficient killing power and elucidate in several peer reviewed papers the physical and chemical properties of its power.

Even better, some professors might see the gun, any gun, as the militarization of America and the dwindling power of American citizens.

Dirty Harry resonates in the Virginia legislature.

“I have one question for you. Are you feeling lucky today, punk?”

Such a question might be asked by a gun-toting professor of an unarmed student. The student, trembling with fear, might urinate on the pristine professor's leg with fear.

Quite a scenario.

Unless a student had a gun, as well.

Which makes the bill somewhat inequitable, don't you think?

In America, everyone has the right to bear arms, according to the Second Amendment of the Constitution, but only in some places.

Those places don't include institutes of higher education. Yet Del Bob wants to change the rules. But the rules aren't for everyone.

Quite the contrary.

You have to wonder if this a tenure thing: get tenure, carry a concealed weapon.

Go on, say it.

“Go ahead, make my day.”

Note: Delegate Mark Berg, a Republican introduced a similar bill, HB 1389

Quotes courtesy of Dirty Harry.

We are
Born like this
Into this
Into these carefully mad wars
Into the sight of broken factory windows of emptiness
Into bars where people no longer speak to each other
Into fist fights that end as shootings and knifings
Born into this
Into hospitals which are so expensive that it’s cheaper to die
Into lawyers who charge so much it’s cheaper to plead guilty
Into a country where the jails are full and the madhouses closed
Into a place where the masses elevate fools into rich heroes” 
― Charles Bukowski