"There's good news and bad news emanating from Montgomery these days, accompanied by wimpiness from college campuses in Tuscaloosa and Auburn.
The bad news? State Sen. Hank Erwin, a Republican from Montevallo, says he's going to reintroduce legislation that would allow some college kids to pack heat on campus.
His irresponsibility is offset somewhat by the good news that a fellow legislator, Bobby Denton, says the proposal faces a certain death in the Senate Education Committee.
"It's DOA or whatever they call it on arrival," Denton promised last week. "Schools can hire security people, and we don't need students walking around with weapons."
That's the kind of frank talk you like to hear from a lawmaker: no soliloquy on the Second Amendment or demagoguery about Americans' right to bear arms. Just a simple but firm "when hell freezes over" response.
Spokeswomen at Auburn University and the University of Alabama should be so firm.
Instead, they were cautiously noncommittal last week after Erwin announced he'll reintroduce his guns-on-campus legislation when the Legislature convenes in February. Their reluctance to condemn the idea is no doubt due to the fact that from time to time, the colleges need funding and favors from legislators.
Still, the senator's idea is a bad one.
Yes, there are occasional criminal incidents on college campuses, and yes, the shootings earlier this year at Virginia Tech were dreadful. But as a whole, campuses are not the Wild, Wild West.
Neither is American society, which is why we don't need armed citizens patrolling the streets and stationed in every business, office building and school.
Public safety is not a matter of who can shoot whom first, and it's not a matter of ordinary civilians deciding who's a lawbreaker and who's not.
We hire and deputize police officers to make those decisions, based on the laws of the land. If you want to own guns for hunting or target shooting or to keep in your home, have at it; but it is the cops' job to protect society from bad people and to be accountable for their actions.
At least the president of little Jacksonville State University in northeast Alabama isn't confused.
"We don't want everybody to carry guns," President William Meehan said after newspapers reported Erwin's intention.
The senator promises that under his proposal, students would have to meet several criteria in order to carry a gun on campus, including being enrolled in an ROTC program, having no felony or misdemeanor convictions, and completing a gun skills course.
As a parent, though, I'd take more comfort from the fact that, as Meehan pointed out, there are officers on campuses "who carry firearms and who are authorized to use deadly force" than I would from the notion that many of my children's fellow students were toting guns in their purses and backpacks.
Frankly, this isn't the first time Hank Erwin has made reasonable people nervous. In 2005, he proclaimed that Hurricane Katrina was God's punishment for the "gambling, sin and wickedness" in New Orleans and on the Mississippi coast.
As for the 3,000 people who died in the storm and its aftermath, including elderly nursing home patients, well, Erwin said, "sin has consequences."
Fortunately for the rest of us, the senator's colleagues ignored him then. With luck, they'll ignore him again when he spouts off next year about arming college kids."
