In my blind belief that a university is a marketplace of ideas, I was surprised to discover that some Winona State members of Students for Concealed Carry on Campus were posting group posters in Kryzsko Commons—only to come back mere hours later and finding them torn down. Conversations with Joe Reed, student union director, and the student affairs subcommittee of Student Senate revealed the reason why: People were so ‘offended’ by these posters that they were tearing them down and lodging complaints.
The ‘offensive’ posters? One was a picture of a gun with a red line through it, saying “If you were planning on shooting a bunch of innocent people and then yourself, we’re sorry, but that is not allowed here. Get a dose of reality at concealedcampus.com”. The other was a picture of a gun with a red line through it and stylized bullet holes through the sign. It read “Signs can’t stop acts of violence. Armed citizens can.” These posters were stamped and approved by the student union office.
I would like to point out that both posters are factually correct. Shooting innocent people on campus is not allowed here. Signs do not stop violence, and it’s a documented record that armed citizens have.
So when I went into the meeting with the Student Senate subcommittee, I was expecting to hear a plan for protecting our signs from petty vandalism. Instead, I heard how we needed to adjust our signs so that they were ‘less offensive.’ Last I checked, vandalism was a crime and being ‘offensive’ was not.
Nor am I sure how our posters are offensive. We weren’t told at the Student Senate meeting how many people had found our posters offensive, or why. We were only told that “all we needed to know” was that “they were offensive.” Well, rapper Akon offends me, but I haven’t turned into a whiny child and thrown a fit of petulant rage by tearing down UPAC’s posters. I’m simply not going to go to the concert.
I explained to the student senators my feelings that, as a journalism student, protection of free speech was more important than protecting the feelings of anonymous people with unspecified complaints. One of the student senators, with a glare that looked like I’d just announced that I was killing and eating kittens in Satanic rituals, then imperiously asked me if I knew what the “Law of Journalism” was.
I must confess that I do not. Three consecutive years of having the highest GPA in the mass communication department and half a dozen excellent professors have clearly failed me. Is it perhaps like the “Law of the Jungle”? Or more like Newton’s laws of motion, maybe?
The student senators told me that they were representing the best interests of Winona students. Curious, because our accusers never made an appearance at the meeting, so for all I know, they don’t exist. We certainly never got a right to discuss the issue with them. But right now, SCCC has been jailed without charges.