SFL is pleased to announce the return of our popular Student Spotlights blog series. These posts are intended to honor the best and brightest student activists in our network and share their accomplishments to inspire other leaders to step up their game in advancing liberty.
As the fall semester gets well and truly underway, it’s my pleasure to shine SFL’s first spotlight of the 2015-16 school year on a student who’s been taking his campus by storm: University of Texas-Austin Campus Coordinator, Nick Pham.
One of the youngest members of SFL’s North American student leadership team, Pham got involved early, attending the Dallas Regional Conference as a high school student and quickly becoming one of the best evangelists of liberty in the Lone Star State. Today, he’s involved with both Young Americans for Liberty and Students for a Stateless Society on the UT-Austin campus, a place where the gun control debate has recently exploded.
Early this week, UT-Austin YAL co-hosted an on-campus gun control debate with the College Republicans, University Democrats, and the International Socialist Organization, which was covered by the on-campus paper, the Daily Texan. Here’s a selection from Nick’s opening remarks, which laid out the philosophical underpinnings of the libertarian position:
Libertarianism is dedicated to preserving the right of individual sovereignty. Those things which I believe all of you would condemn as morally inexcusable, like genocide, mass murder, enslavement, and mass expropriation, have all been historically committed or enabled by government. We are appalled. From restricting immigration on the basis of arbitrary borders, to endless incarceration in the prison industrial complex, to the murder of scores of innocent civilians in unwinnable wars, we see that government is too often the enemy of justice.
Libertarianism advocates individual freedom, dignity, and autonomy. It is skeptical of the hubris of politicians and bureaucrats who profess to know what is best for you. It is admitting that I do not know what is best for you, that you are probably the one most fit to govern your own life.
This gets right to the heart of the issue: we can try our best to keep each other safe, but at the end of the day, security is a personal responsibility. When the state tries to ensure safety at all times, it leads only to more violence and violations of rights. As Pham noted in the debate, “It takes a certain kind of privilege to want black people to not be able to shoot back against racist pigs.” He continued: “I think it takes a certain kind of privilege to not think a woman should be able to shoot her rapist in the street. I think it takes a certain kind of privilege to think that LGBT people shouldn’t be able to carry and fight back against those who would exterminate them.”
Fliers from another UT-Austin YAL event.
Fittingly, SFL just launched a gun rights campaign that highlights precisely these issues. The “Not Just A Gun” program makes $100 grants available to students interested in hosting events that elevate the gun control debate and relate it back to the philosophical principles at stake.
Nick Pham did an excellent job of highlighting just those principles this past Monday, even reminding the socialists’ side that Karl Marx once said: “Under no pretext should arms and ammunition be surrendered; any attempt to disarm the workers must be frustrated, by force if necessary.”
Congratulations, Nick, on an effective debate and on being selected for this year’s first Student Spotlight! As the #NotJustAGun campaign continues, SFL-ers around the world should take a cue from Nick and get other political clubs on campus involved in debate and discussion around the right to self-defense. If we don’t set the record straight soon, we’ll continue to see policy driven by fear and bureaucracy rather than respect for human rights.