Our kids deserve the best.  On many college campuses, they are not allowed to carry guns to protect themselves.  If that's the best, I think our state legislators should share in the best.  Whether students can carry guns on campuses is often decided by campus officials, but state law is the ultimate decider.  That's why I think state legislatures should be declared "gun-free zones," and their security guards and metal detectors should be withdrawn.

If a nut or a radical Muslim comes and starts shooting legislators, one by one, taking his time because he knows no one is armed, then legislators may call the police, just like students on campuses can during a massacre.  If it's good enough for the students, it's certainly good enough for state legislators.  Referendums should be passed requiring legislators to be stripped of their security protection unless and until they pass a law allowing students to carry guns on campuses.

Of course, this can be effected in others ways.  In states that have referenda and initiatives (currently 26), one could simply directly support an initiative that would require guns to be legal on campuses.  But my proposal would help educate pro-gun control legislators on the upsides of self-protection, especially when they have no private police force to guard them.  I might exclude Colorado, Idaho, Kansas, Mississippi, Oregon, Utah, and Wisconsin from this effort, since they already permit students to be armed on campus.  Yes, Oregon.  The shootings that occured were at a community college, which apparently does not operate under the same guidelines as state universities in Oregon.  If the latest shooting in Oregon had happened at a state school, there would have been no massacre.  At a minimum, the Oregon law needs to be broadened.

Another way this could be accomplished is on the federal level, forbidding student loans to go to schools that prohibit guns on campuses.  Of course, constitutional conservatives may say this is the wrong way to go about this, since this is clearly a state issue, but since we have become, in Mark Levin's words, unmoored from the Constitution,why not take advantage of every avenue we can?

The problem is not just gun-free zones in colleges, of course, but concealed carry restrictions in general.  A well-armed citizenry is the best defense, which is why I am so keen on state legislatures getting some firsthand experience working in gun-free zones.  Unfortunately, most of the states that permit referenda are in the South, in the Midwest, and on the Pacific coast; the Northeast liberal governments can rest secured in their patrolled enclaves while they disarm their own citizenry.

This article was written by Ed Straker, senior writer of NewsMachete.com, the conservative news site.