The iPods of the future

Next year, instead of receiving 158 gram, 20 GB, 4.1 x 2.4 x .57 inch iPods preloaded with Duke-related content, freshmen should receive 1400 gram, 9 x 19 mm TEC-DC9 assault pistols preloaded with 50 rounds. With four gunpoint robberies in our community already this semester, drastic solutions must be devised to protect future classes. Situated near downtown Durham, a city crawling with 3,000 gang members, which is home to 1,663 acts of violent crime during 2003 alone, we face unique security challenges and must respond with a bold solution. Now that President George W. Bush has allowed the 1994 girlie-man ban on assault weapons to expire, the University ought to seize this historic opportunity and strike first in our war against domestic terror by arming its students with the best modified sub-machine guns available.

In a brilliant book titled More Guns, Less Crime, former University of Chicago professor—and senior researcher at Yale Law School—John R. Lott, Jr., uses an economic axiom and elegant data to show that carrying concealed guns reduces crime. He cleverly claims that if the price of something goes up, then people will consume it less. Next, he hypothesizes that—when people carry handguns—criminals will have to pay a higher price to attack them and, as a result, will do so less. To make his point, he employs a massive analysis of crime statistics spanning a broad geographical and temporal range, ultimately demonstrating that implementing concealed-carry handgun laws has great potential to curb criminal activity.

Just imagine: for $536,250—roughly the same cost as the iPod initiative—the University could actually make a difference in increasing the safety of its students. Moreover, giving each new student a TEC-DC9 would not be inconsistent with the overarching goals of the iPod project. According to a Duke press release, the iPods were presented to freshmen “as part of an initiative to encourage creative uses of technology in education and campus life,” and given the great varieties of grips, silencers and miscellaneous barrel attachments TECs easily have as many accessories as iPods and can be fired inventively from a variety of positions and settings. While it may be hard to determine how the TEC-DC9 will have any educational applications, that criticism may be leveled with devastating effect at the iPod program as well.

An objection to the proposed Duke TEC-DC9 initiative maintains that it would take too long to teach students how to operate the weapons, but this worry is baseless. With the TEC, unlike the iPod, inexperience is no impediment to successful operation, since it is actually engineered for indiscriminate discharge. Just load, press against your body, squeeze the trigger and sweep your hips back and forth. The rapid fire rate will be sufficient to kill anything in the way, even if five assailants happen to be standing in a line, since the bullets the TEC fires have military full metal jackets capable of passing through humans, parked cars and walls. So if your target is a sleeping infant two blocks away in a house, you just may get the little bastard.

But the benefits of the TEC-DC9 initiative are not restricted to thwarting off-campus attackers; Duke freshmen will also be able to use these exceptional tools to improve life on the homecampus. After a semester of pretense and posturing before rush, girls will finally be able to be genuine by blasting each other into runny hamburger and bone fragments on the BC walkway—though afterwards we’ll have to hire a special detail to collect, wash and sew up holes in the bloodstained clothing and to bury the dead. Lonely freshman males can use their new weapons to self-immolate after four months of celibacy or to avenge the predation of freshman females by upperclassmen. And young engineers will have the tool they need to wisely end it all before spending three years in Teer.

But we ought to think on a larger scale as well. For a country with as many social problems as the United States, it is a real pity that we are only able to kill 29,000 people each year with guns. With all the evildoers, single mothers and terrorists about, that number ought to be much higher. But thanks to the president and Republicans in congress who had the courage to stand up and stop the radical 68 percent of the public and 57 percent of gun owners who, in a poll conducted by the National Annenburg Survey of the University of Pennsylvania, supported the assault weapons ban, we ought to be able to kill off some of the more undesirable elements of our society in the near future. By equipping students with legal TEC-DC9 assault weapons, Duke University can do much in contributing to this worthy cause whose advancement fosters a safer campus—and world—for us all.

Matt Gillum is a Trinity senior.