Marquette Warrior: Marquette Center Urges Anti-Gun Protest

Friday, March 23, 2018

Marquette Center Urges Anti-Gun Protest

From the Marquette University Center for Peacemaking:


March For Our Lives - Milwaukee
Saturday, March 24 | 10 am | Milwaukee County Courthouse (901 N. 9th St.)
Optional: Meet with other MU marchers at 9:30 am outside the Brew in the lower level of the AMU

This Saturday, March 24, the kids and families of March For Our Lives will take to the streets around the world to demand that their lives and safety become a priority and that we end gun violence and mass shootings in our schools today.

You are welcome to join the March For Our Lives in Milwaukee from the Milwaukee County Courthouse to City Hall. If you want to march as a group with other Marquette people, please meet at 9:30 am outside of the Brew in the lower level of the AMU.

On Thursday and Friday you are welcome to visit the Schroeder Complex, 146, the Hartman Literacy and Learning Center, or the Center for Peacemaking (1616 W. Wells St.) to make a poster to carry in the march. Poster board, markers, and space to make your sign are provided at both locations.

Marquette University Center for Peacemaking
So what is wrong with this? Students have a right to protest, don’t they?

The problem, which is endemic among the activists, is that students are encouraged to march, but they are not encouraged to think.

Any idiot can make a poster demanding that “the violence stop.” Knowing what to do about it is a different matter. It involves learning. It involves hearing both sides (or sometimes several sides) of the debate. It involves knowing some of the complexities. It involves thinking.

But to the activist mentality, none of this is necessary. There are no complexities, like the bothersome Second Amendment, or the fact that when the U.S. had an assault weapons ban it did nothing to reduce gun violence.

It’s enough to believe that only the U.S. has mass shootings, and that only the machinations of the NRA and the cowardice of politicians allows shootings to continue.

Marquette’s Role

The Center for Peacemaking is a generally independent center established with money from a leftist alumni couple, so this isn’t something the central administration did. But the central Marquette administration did something about as bad: encouraging potential applicants for admission to violate school rules and walk out of class in an anti-gun protest.

Universities are not generally in the business of promoting virtue and discouraging vice. Mostly, that has to be done by family, society and the church. But one kind of virtue universities should promote is intellectual virtue.

Encouraging self-righteous but thoughtless political action flatly contradicts this.

Labels: , , , , ,

0 Comments:

Post a Comment

<< Home