Ready, aim, threaten!
Danielle Ramirez is a bright, pretty 20-year-old who has managed with a few hundred words to arouse gun advocates to a degree of unified rage not unlike the loathing Jane Fonda might receive sauntering into a meeting of the VFW.
Fonda never has been forgiven for her "peace mission" to Hanoi during the Vietnam War, even though we've forgiven every enemy in every conflict since an army of British redcoats burned Washington, D.C., 200 years ago.
And now Ramirez, a fourth-year student at UC Davis, has earned the wrath of those who believe that the presence of guns anywhere is, by God, a right guaranteed by the 2nd Amendment of the U.S. Constitution. (At least that's what they've been told by the people who sell guns for a living.)
Ramirez earned their ire by writing a column in the school newspaper challenging the idea that students be allowed to carry concealed weapons on campus, which has been under consideration by a dozen states after last February's deadly attack at Northern Illinois University.
Bad idea.
College students are at an age of emotional unpredictability and can respond with tears and rage over broken love affairs, damaged egos or lousy grades.
Being bullied can turn a kid into a cowboy with blood on his mind.
Ramirez, whose family lives in L.A., writes for the university's weekday California Aggie, one of the oldest campus newspapers in the state.
She's been a columnist for only a few months and has already been awash in e-mails from as far away as Colorado that seem vaguely threatening.
The anti-gun column emerged in response to posters distributed by a group that calls itself Students for Concealed Carry on Campus. Opposed to firearms generally and to campus weapons particularly, Ramirez felt like ripping the posters off the walls, but instead turned to her computer and to the column she calls "And Then I Found Five Dollars." It's a throwaway line that completes a story with no point, which wasn't the case here.
The column was a satirical review that listed the advantages of carrying weapons on campus, among them their use as a method of dealing with the overpopulation of squirrels: "We have resorted to researching squirrel birth control to bring the numbers down," Ramirez wrote. "Well, if students were allowed to carry weapons -- hasta la vista, rodent infestation."
