Arming students is a risky proposition

Shootings last year at Virginia Tech and this year at Northern Illinois University have spurred calls for more restrictions on who can have guns. On the other end of the spectrum, the incidents have prompted others to call for having more guns on campus, by allowing students and others to carry concealed weapons. Illinois doesn't have a concealed-carry permit program for any location. But it's worth pointing out the problems such a practice would cause.

Even if extensive training in gun handling and safety were required before a concealed-carry permit was issued, few of these permit holders would come close to the expertise of fully trained police officers making regular trips to a shooting range. In the adrenaline-fueled chaos of a shooting incident like the ones at Virginia Tech or NIU, it is expecting a lot to have a civilian to coolly and rationally react and shoot on target.

What if several students had been armed in the NIU classroom where Steven Kazmierczak opened fire? How would other students know whether the next person pulling out a gun was intending to stop the shooter or join in the carnage? Once students fled the building -- some with guns drawn -- how would the police know who was the "bad guy" and who was a would-be hero?

If greater security is needed, it should be provided by well-trained, armed police -- not by potential vigilantes, some barely out of high school.

Absentee panel

The Blagojevich administration likes to rave about how many state jobs it has eliminated… But it's missed at least one substantive job: executive director of the do-nothing Governor's Commission on Discrimination and Hate Crimes. The commission hasn't met in two years. It has a Web site that reports that its last annual report was written in 2002 and that apparently its last community forum was almost six years ago. Still, it has an executive director, Kimberly M. White, who makes $96,000 a year.

That prompts several questions: What does she do to earn that money? More importantly, isn't this an undeniable sign that the commission isn't needed, that here's a way to save at least $100,000 a year, and shouldn't someone review how many other people in state government hold politically important but governmentally useless jobs?