Our View - Wednesday

Young sitting ducks

Arizona’s dangerous double standard

Imagine a place where politicians found a way to protect students from suicidal maniacs who commit mass murder. Pretend the lawmakers enacted the measure, but only to help college kids. Younger, more vulnerable students — even little kindergartners — were left to the whims of psychotics with guns.

Welcome to Arizona, where lawmakers are moving forward a bill that would restore the rights of adults to carry guns for self-defense on the grounds of state colleges and universities. Shockingly, the bill was stalled until its sponsor caved to pressure from critics to remove a provision that would have allowed faculty and administrators to carry guns at public elementary and high schools.

“I still feel our little kindergartners are sitting there as sitting ducks,” complained State Sen. Karen Johnson, the bill’s sponsor, after reluctantly removing K-12 schools.

Gun laws regulate only the behavior of people who obey laws. Suicidal maniacs who carry out plans for mass murder always disobey rules that say “no guns.” Why wouldn’t they? They are planning to murder and then die. Anyone with a semblance of common sense can see that gun restrictions on campus create an imbalance of power in which monsters are guaranteed dense colonies of defenseless, law-abiding victims. Public policy does not get simpler than this: Gun restrictions kill. It’s an exact science.

If this somehow escaped politicians, it must have become clear when psychotic Cho Seung-Hui fatally shot 32 people, in a crime that lasted hours, before killing himself at Virginia Tech. If Virginia Tech somehow didn’t get this point across, any number of similar killing sprees should have done the trick — such as the Valentine’s Day massacre of 2008. In that attack on disarmed teachers and students, Stephen Kazmierczak walked into a Northern Illinois University auditorium and shot 21 people before taking his own life. “Victim-zone” massacres have become so common they’re about as newsworthy as NASA missions when nothing explodes.

Recently, however, a run-of-the-mill mall massacre in Nebraska nearly coincided with a church killing in Colorado Springs — a city that leads the state in per capita concealed carry permits. Unlike most intended massacres, the Colorado Springs shooting spree was quickly stopped by a law-abiding woman with a gun. Though the significance of the event was far under-reported and ignored by most anti-gun crusaders, it caught the attention of enough Arizona legislators that campuses may soon be made safer.

The bill would allow anyone who’s legally entitled to carry a gun to do so on the grounds of community colleges or state universities. It would, beyond question, create a tactical obstacle for those who shoot up crowds.

It’s wonderful that Arizona lawmakers want to eliminate victim zones that endanger adults. It’s unfathomable, however, that the same politicians have buckled under pressure from those who wish to sustain gun-free victim zones at public elementary and high schools.

By eliminating colleges as unarmed victim zones, the legislature has reduced the options of suicidal mass murderers. To successfully kill scores of defenseless students, they’ll be left with public schools.

This is unconscionable. Arizona politicians obviously understand that gun-free zones enable killing, or they wouldn’t be eliminating gun laws at colleges. So what rationale could they possibly have for telling law-abiding principals, teachers and parents to leave their weapons at home? As Johnson said, the compromise will render kindergartners — and all other students through 12th grade — as sitting ducks. It’s irrational, indefensible and immoral.

Ruling supports Internet free speech

A judge has reversed himself and decided not to order the WikiLeaks Web site that touts itself as a good destination for government and corporate whistleblowers taken down from the Internet. It’s a good decision in that continuing the prior order to take down the site would have been a serious infringement on free-speech rights. As U.S. District Judge Jeffrey White also acknowledged, publication on the Internet may be almost impossible for the authorities to control anyway.

WikiLeaks invites leakers from government and corporations to send evidence of wrongdoing or questionable activity to their site, where they will publish it. Among the documents posted, for example, was the purported operating manual for the Guantanamo Bay prison. But the Swiss bank Julius Baer & Co. objected to documents that claimed to show that the bank had helped customers launder money through the Cayman Islands. It claimed both that the documents were forgeries and that releasing them violated the privacy rights of people mentioned by name.

At the first hearing nobody from WikiLeaks showed up to defend its actions, and Judge White ordered the server hosting the site to take it down. That led to organizations such as the Electronic Frontier Foundation and Northern California ACLU to file briefs and ask to be heard in court in opposition to the order.

On Friday, White reversed his injunction to close the Web site. Matt Zimmerman, attorney for the EFF in San Francisco, said in a media interview that his group and the ACLU got almost everything they wanted. The judge said he was concerned about several First Amendment implications, including whether such an order amounted to prior restraint of speech, on which courts traditionally frown. He also noted, however, that technology seems to have outrun jurisprudence.

The Julius Baer bank can still sue WikiLeaks for damages. The good news is that the case does not create a precedent for taking down Web sites just because somebody objects to something they publish.