Teaching controversial topics in class, and guns

At the Chronicle of Higher Education, Erik Gilbert writes that academics should calm down about college campuses being moved by legislation to allow the concealed carry of firearms. He concludes:

People who are terrified by the prospect of a few students who have gone though background checks bringing concealed weapons to class are being just as irrational in their risk assessment as people who won’t leave the house unarmed.

Speaking of flawed risk assessment, suggestions that Texas faculty avoid teaching controversial topics are predicated on the notion that students are so intensely engaged with the material in their classes that they are willing to risk doing 20 to life (and not receiving a passing grade) to challenge our ideas with gunfire. I find this utterly implausible. In every other context where we talk about student engagement, it is to decry its absence. This is especially true in the humanities (and I am guessing that it’s not the accounting faculty who are being advised to keep mum about their radical ideas on valuing inventories so their students won’t fly off the handle). Most of us complain that our students won’t even read, and now we are worrying about them being so engaged that they might throw caution to the wind and start shooting?

Cowboy up, Texas professors! Teach however and whatever you want. Don’t worry about the presence of legally carried guns in your classrooms. If you are going to worry, worry about someone illegally bringing a gun on campus with the intention of causing mayhem, not someone who legally carries a gun in the hope of protecting himself from harm. And those students whose faces cloud with anger when you attack their complacently bourgeois understanding of Jane Austen, they are probably just reacting to something on their phones. And, anyway, they’re too worried about their grades to shoot you.

I live in a somewhat lefty college town. Here are two bumper stickers I have seen this year, on different vehicles, each containing a number of pro-gun messages:

• ‘An armed society is a polite society’
• ‘First rule of gun safety: don’t piss me off’

I’m going to guess that the intersection of the sets of (1) people against any expansion of firearm regulation, and (2) people who think ‘political correctness’ on campuses is a problem, is not an empty set. But I will remind Mr Gilbert that it is gun advocates who are telling the rest of us to watch what we say.