Would your university recognize this student organization?

Students for Concealed Carry reportedly has grown from a Facebook focal point to a significant organization.  It's founder is a Texan and Texas has been in the news this year for its concealed-carry law.  The law, among other things, requires public universities in the Lone Star State to permit students to carry concealed firearms into their classroom (though not their dorms).

The founder reportedly grew up a gun lover.  That's easy to understand.  As a boy, I and my friends played soldiers all the time in the words surrounding our Pennsylvania hometown.  "LIttle men" for me and my best friend (who later did three tours as a Screaming Eagle in Vietnam) meant playing with our toy soldiers.  "Big men" meant playing at soldiers ourselves.  Every kid whose dad had served in WWII had memorabilia from the war.  My brother and I had a (disarmed) Japanese mortar shell, our father's campaign knife, and assorted other mementoes, which we supplemented with toy guns.  These included cap pistols that ignited little dots of gun powder that came on rolls of red paper that were fed through the toy guns, and BB guns that fired little brass pellets (think of the film "A Christmas Story",  in which Robbie is told by the department store Santa, "You're gonna shoot your eye out, kid.")

Later we had 22 caliber rifles.  A good Sunday started with mass and ended with Sunday dinner.  What made it good was the trip in between to the town dump (not a landfill, mind you), where we shot rats for an hour or so.  No wonder we grew up loving guns.

Students for Concealed Carry isn't the only anti-PC organization challenging the dominant college culture today.  FIRE is also out there making waves.  The Foundation for Individual Rights in Education presents itself this way:

The mission of FIRE is to defend and sustain individual rights at America’s colleges and universities. These rights include freedom of speech, legal equality, due process, religious liberty, and sanctity of conscience—the essential qualities of individual liberty and dignity. FIRE’s core mission is to protect the unprotected and to educate the public and communities of concerned Americans about the threats to these rights on our campuses and about the means to preserve them.

FIRE was founded in 1999 by University of Pennsylvania professor Alan Charles Kors and Boston civil liberties attorney Harvey Silverglate after the overwhelming response to their 1998 book The Shadow University: The Betrayal Of Liberty On America’s Campuses.

The website goes on to say:

Freedom of speech is a fundamental American freedom and a human right, and there’s no place that this right should be more valued and protected than America’s colleges and universities. A university exists to educate students and advance the frontiers of human knowledge, and does so by acting as a “marketplace of ideas” where ideas compete. The intellectual vitality of a university depends on this competition—something that cannot happen properly when students or faculty members fear punishment for expressing views that might be unpopular with the public at large or disfavored by university administrators.

Nevertheless, freedom of speech is under continuous threat at many of America’s campuses, pushed aside in favor of politics, comfort, or simply a desire to avoid controversy. As a result, speech codes dictating what may or may not be said, “free speech zones” confining free speech to tiny areas of campus, and administrative attempts to punish or repress speech on a case-by-case basis are common today in academia.

Both Students for Concealed Carry and FIRE  are intriguing contre temps to the stereotypical image of the overwhelming liberal college campus.  Both are worth keeping an eye on.