Washington Week: Student Voices (O)

COLUMN: Wheres 'none of the above' option on presidential ballot
By Jennifer Cheney
Daily Toreador (Texas Tech)
06/15/2007

(U-WIRE) LUBBOCK, Texas — In Texas — for the most part — the Second Amendment is considered nearly as holy as your religion of choice. We like our firearms, we like our freedom and we like having the ability to use the one to protect the other. That's one reason so many people in our lovely state are looking at the presidential hopefuls in the 2008 election and asking for another option.

One major bone of contention is keeping guns out of the hands of those who show "warning signs" of becoming violent. This is absolutely useless and an invasion of privacy. A biased personality test would be able to show a meek pacifist as a potential committer of gun violence simply by asking leading questions or only giving answer choices that would indicate a violent temperament. A non-biased personality test would be as useless as a biased one simply because answers to said tests are highly dependent on the mood one is in when he or she takes the test. This has the potential of barring one from owning a gun simply because he or she had a bad day at work. If this potential for "warning signs" is not determined by personality tests, it might be determined by more invasive or downright otherwise illegal maneuvers, which is even worse.

Another grappling point is the "gun-show loophole," which means there are no background checks on buyers at gun shows. This simply denies equality. It means a person whose background check denied them a gun because of prior gun related felonies and crimes can just wander into a gun show and buy a gun to continue with those crimes. It means people like D.C. snipers John Allen Muhammed and John Lee Malvo, Lee Harvey Oswald and John Wilkes Booth could walk into a gun show and get a gun. That idea unnerves me, as it does most of the American public. Equal rights means all people, not just specific purchasers, should be subject to background checks.

More problems come to light in the issue of a required written test to have a gun license. This makes perfect sense. If one can not pass a simple test on gun safety, maintenance and law, then one should not be allowed to own a gun. There are laws governing the acquirement of a driver's license, which is many times less deadly than a firearm. The idea of a person who doesn't even know the barrel from the butt of gun owning a semiautomatic is a little frightening.

Yet another issue is trigger locks: These are locks placed on the trigger of a gun to make sure the gun doesn't fall into the wrong hands. This is a nice idea to ensure children can't accidentally fire a gun, but what about home protection? Trigger locks, especially the way most are designed, make the weapon pretty useless for this purpose. With laws like the so-called "Make My Day" law, which allows you to shoot intruders in your home with few qualms, and other home defense laws, many Texans don't care for the idea of trigger locks. Most prefer the idea of separating guns and ammo and other methods to keep guns out of the wrong hands.

In light of these issues, many Texans are looking at characters like Hillary Clinton, John Edwards, John McCain and Barak Obama and cringing. These presidential hopefuls will strip away our rights to defend ourselves, eliminate the Second Amendment and end one of Texas' fundamental pastimes: hunting. Like many Texans and Second Amendment supporters I'm asking a very simple question: Where's the answer choice "None of the above?"

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