Reply #11: If you go through a graduate program without [View All]

[rrneck]

being profoundly changed you wasted your money. At least that's the way it was for the program I was in, and I wouldn't take anything for it.

I started to find some analogy for the university experience to flesh out what I was talking about, sort of like the stresses LEO's experience as opposed to citizens carrying, but I couldn't think of one.

Universities exist to promote intellectual conflict. Students are required to push what they believe to be true far beyond anything they will experience after they get out of college, and there are emotional risks associated with the discovery that one is just plain wrong about stuff they thought was true all their short lives. They require people to stake out positions and defend them that may be grossly overstated or completely wrong, and that can cause a lot of stress. They're like - well - DU forums only a lot more in your face and a lot more expensive.

The university environment that demands that people push the intellectual envelope (and back up what they say) is the same environment that suffers from the correlated effects of requiring people to indulge in excessive intellectual behavior, which include excessive substance abuse, the abuse of women, the destruction of property, and the general failure to conduct oneself as a responsible citizen and an adult.

I wouldn't trust a seven year old child to cary a firearm. Or a ten year old. Or seventeen. Eighteen is not legal yet either. There isn't some big gong in the sky that declares someone to be a responsible adult on their twenty first birthday. A university setting is unique in that it has to regulate and promote the same impulses at the same time in a population that cannot (and should not) be separated and at a time in life when are just beginning to understand what being an adult is all about.

Over and over I hear gun owners tell those who are dubious about their rationality to "just go to the range and talk to the people there and you find out that they're not crazy". That's because they're not. Most graduate students who are gun owners are stable people who hang around other stable people and I think they start to assume all graduate students are like them. They're not. Frequently they have a huge axe to grind, they're dating some undergraduate who got molested by some drunk undergrad at a frat party, and they may well be still trying to work through the "drunk college phase" of their own lives. I'm not saying they can't carry, I'm just saying that at that time and at that place with that population there are unique circumstances that call for more training that can ultimately be put to use in ways in and out of the university.