Sooner or later I knew that the attempt by a student-led coalition at the University of Texas campus to protest the law allowing guns on campus would lead to efforts by various factions of Gun-nut Nation to remind everyone that walking around with a gun is a good thing. And the reason that we should allow guns to be carried anywhere and everywhere is that we all know that guns protect us from crime. After all, a majority of Americans now believe that a gun makes you safer than if you don’t have a gun, so it must be true.

Back in 2008, you may recall that there was a little Supreme Court decision, District of Columbia vs. Heller, which defined the 2nd Amendment as giving Americans the Constitutional protection to keep a handgun in their home. But the reason I call this s ‘little’ decision is that from the moment the opinion was announced, Gun-nut Nation has been trying to pretend that anything and everything they want to do with a gun comes under the protection of 2nd-Amendment rights. Want to walk into a Starbucks with an AR slung over your shoulder? You’re just exercising your 2nd-Amendment rights. Want to walk around with a pistol in your pocket without having to demonstrate that you even know how to load the damn thing, never mind actually use it? You’re just exercising your 2nd-Amendment rights.

In fact, you aren’t exercising any 2nd-Amendment right at all. You may be doing what the state you live in lets you do, but there are all kinds of state and local laws covering all kinds of things which let you do this or that, but nobody has ever seen fit to figure out whether such laws are covered by any Constitutional guarantee at all. But when a group of conservative attorneys decided to test the definition of the 2nd Amendment by using the fact that the District of Columbia wouldn’t let a security guard named Dick Heller keep a handgun in his apartment, the SCOTUS said he could because the 2nd Amendment, as a majority of the Court defined the text, granted him and everyone else Constitutional protection for this specific type of behavior and nothing else.

One of the areas in which Gun-nut Nation has been particularly busy trying to expand the definition of the 2nd Amendment to go beyond what it means is carrying guns on college campuses. And the reason for this, hare-brained nonsense to the contrary about how college campuses are rife with crime, is because the gun industry has noticed that the up-and-coming consumer generation – Millennials – don’t seem particularly enamored of guns. Droids? Yes. Kayaks? Yes. Guns? No. But if you can get the kids to understand the value of a gun for self-defense, then maybe the gun industry will survive beyond the time that Gun Nuts of my generation disappear.

The anti-gun protest at UT didn’t do anything to reverse the new campus-carry law, but it did generate gobs of publicity because the event organizers cleverly decided to distribute sex toys like dildos as a way of pointing out the stupidity of walking around a college campus with a gun. And the response to this event took the form of a video which shows a young woman who comes home from participating in the protest, suddenly finds herself confronted by a home invader, whereupon she points the dildo at him in order to defend herself, whereupon the guy pulls out a pistol and shoots her in the head.

The video has been criticized by Students for Concealed Carry as being offensive, but let me break the news gently to that bunch. If you’re going to promote something as stupid and dangerous as guns on college campuses, then you should hardly be surprised when your argument is taken to the extreme. After all, aren’t you saying that every law-abiding’ citizen should have the 2nd-Amendment ‘right’ to shoot someone else in the head?