GUN RIGHTS POLICY CONFERENCE 2011 CHICAGO

Above is a collage of a few of the bumper stickers and decals distributed by the Second Amendment Foundation, the host of the conference.

Below, please find the three-page agenda highlighting the many accomplished speakers, authors, scholars, attorneys and gun culture activists who gathered there--a horizontal interpretive community that has created the new political-social reality of American Gun Culture. If you wish to understand, in part, why America is such a great and creative nation, then you should attend this conference next year. Here there are gathered many people worthy of emulation. Virtue is not merely an old-fashioned word.

Below, at the end of this entry, overlaying the third page of the agenda, are the notes from my presentation. The only similarity I can claim with the Gettysburg Address is that both were written on an envelope.

The Administrative Hermeneutic Versus the Free World

The above sign appeared one night on all the exterior doors at my University. It must have been quite an undertaking, sticking on all these decals before the sun rose. A couple of comments:

Smokers have now been transformed on campus into the equivalent of medieval lepers. Unclean! Unclean! In order to smoke they no longer merely need to go outside somewhere. They are now officially sequestered in a few little designated pens and bus-stop like enclosures. I am thinking about taking up smoking cigars in public just so I can find out what they talk about in their holding pens. Might be interesting, anthropological. Of more interest, however, would be what administrators are talking about in their secretive meetings.

Regarding the weapons portion of the sign, state law already prohibits LEGAL concealed pistol license holders from carrying in university classrooms and buildings. CPL holders, who have been through the safety training required by state law, know this and need no such signs. How this sign is going to deter an illegal, felonious gun toter or a so-called active shooter remains unclear. It seemingly functions as eyewash, making administrators appear as if they could exercise some control over the sociopaths and the violent. As for campus shooters, the only gun killing on campus, 15 or so years back, was done by a university police officer who murdered a coed with his service weapon in what was apparently some sort of sexually-motivated attack. Will the prominently-placed little red sign prevent recurrence? No doubt in years to come, Students for Concealed Carry on Campus and other civil rights groups will prevail in extending Right-to-Carry laws to campuses, so that qualified, licensed, responsible persons may carry guns if they wish (over 21 years of age) and that they need not depend for their safety on red signs put up by administrators in need of conspicuous ways to justify their salaries.

The smokers will have to politically mobilize on their own--before administrators require them to live in self-contained breathing units or something.

The Best Part of Professoring

Ms. Erica Stearns, a student in my Group Communication and Communication Theory classes earlier this year, drew the pictures below. As I had expressed interest, she very kindly gave them to me tied up with string after the classes were over. These are marvelous drawings--very Jungian, made amidst her class lecture notes--and I admire her ability to create them. Those shown here are only a selection. Being able to meet and talk with motivated, creative people is perhaps the best part of the professor vocation.

MORNINGSTAR

LEFTFACE

FLOWERS?

HYPOLOVE

REICHIAN BUTTERFLY

INFLUENCE?