Conservative utopia: In the wake of the Virginia Tech gun massacre, the conservative movement has exposed its utter lack of grounding in practical reality. Last week, both former House Majority Leader Tom DeLay and former Speaker Newt Gingrich suggested that the solution to gun violence on campus is to arm every student, professor and (let’s assume) administration staff member.

Have these guys ever seen an episode of the “Real World” on MTV? Imagine the unintended consequences of, say, 20,000 18- to 21-year-olds on the average state college campus carrying fire arms:

• Guns and alcohol are deadly mix, so every late-night party would have the potential of turning into a bloodbath, especially in the wee hours when young inexperienced drinkers are so blottoed that they have lost the ability to reason.
• Maybe it’s news to conservatives, but drugs are widely available on campuses, too. Like alcohol, drugs and guns can be a lethal mix.
• During college years, romantic relationships are at their most fluid. In a world in which every super-posessive young man or woman has a firearm in a drawer, cheaters had better watch their backs.
• Hyper-achieving students often lose their grounding in reality as they try for good grades. Arming them would put noncompliant professors in their crosshairs.
• Other students vent their frustration on themselves. Having guns readily available would increase the number of campus suicides.
• Let’s not even start imagining how armed students might react if their college team loses the big game.

DeLay has apparently forgotten what college life is like. He was kicked out of Baylor University after two years for drinking and vandalism. If armed students at rival Texa A&M had caught him defacing a building on their campus, the Hammer would have been cut down in his prime. Instead, Baylor expelled him and he went on to achieve glory as the poster boy for Republican corruption.

Before he ran for Congress, Gingrich was a professor at a state university in the hinterlands of west Georgia. He ought to know better than to suggest arming campus denizens. Professor Gingrich was infamous for diddling his colleagues’ wives. Would he have wanted his fellow professors to be armed back then?