Austin Petersen Talks Guns and Liberty at St. Lawrence

Austin Petersen, runner-up for the Libertarian Party’s presidential nomination in 2016, visited St. Lawrence Monday night to discuss free speech, libertarian values, and other hot-button issues. Last July, Petersen announced that he will be running in Missouri as a Republican for the U.S. Senate in the 2018 midterm elections.

The Young Americans for Liberty, the libertarian student organization on campus, brought Austin Petersen to SLU. The organization is committed to principles of limited government and hopes to continue bringing more speakers like Petersen to campus in the future.

The intent behind bringing Austin Petersen to SLU was “to explain what libertarianism was to the SLU student body,” said Ian Brennan ’18, president of the organization. The other intent was to balance the other speakers that SLU has brought to campus in the recent past. “I feel like a lot of them [past speakers] have been predominately left-wing,” said Brennan.

Petersen began his talk by speaking about what he perceives as threats to freedom of speech, mainly coming from the left. Petersen cited the censorship of Republican viewpoints at UC Berkeley and Middlebury, where student protests turned violent and resulted in injuries. He argued that since the left has lost debates on both policy and economics, censorship is now used as a political tool.

A key aspect of the Libertarian philosophy is limiting the role of the government. Petersen claimed that the government does not contain logic or reason, but is a force that is only good at “killing lots and lots of people.” If government is to exist, it “should be limited solely to protect the individual liberty,” according to Petersen.

For the remaining time, audience members asked Petersen his stance on various issues.

Petersen revealed that his favorite president was Grover Cleveland due to his limited foreign policy, promotion of free banking, and facilitation of growth during an era known as the Gilded Age.

Petersen was pressed on his belief that the government should not force private establishments to serve certain individuals. “A trans person should not be coming into my house or business and telling me that I have to create a separate bathroom for them, because now they’re the tyrant,” said Petersen. In alignment with Petersen’s views, President Trump recently repealed an Obama administration initiative that allowed transgender students to choose the bathroom that aligns with their gender identity.

Petersen also argued that the owners of private property should be allowed to ban certain individuals because it would take too much government violence to set the record straight. Instead he argued that the free market should fix the problem. “In order for us to solve the problems of society, it’s going to have to come from our families, our friends, our neighbors, and our churches,” Petersen claimed. “The government is a poor tool for anything.”

Throughout the question and answer segment, Petersen repeated his support for the Second Amendment. His support for the amendment doesn’t stem from his love of hunting, but from guns being “the last bulwark against tyranny.” In the near future, citizens may need to take up arms against the government, reasoned Petersen. He cited the Vietcong, Al-Qaeda, and mercenaries as examples of successful pushbacks against the American military.

Outside the venue, St. Lawrence Democrats displayed a poster stating, “Mr. Petersen, do you value AR-15s over students’ lives?” President of SLU Democrats, Dameian Bossarte ‘19, said the club’s intent was to “question why Petersen finds it appropriate to raffle off AR-15s at campaign events while the nation deals with continuous tragedies perpetrated by people with firearms.” So far in 2018, 100 people have died while 179 have been injured due to mass shootings, according to Mass Shooting Tracker.

After his speech, Petersen posted a picture next to the SLU Democrat poster, which gained a lot of attention on Instagram. Brennan was fine with the poster, but saw it as a false dichotomy. “AR-15 ownership does not automatically mean people die, its because a murderer got a hold of it,” stated Brennan.

Bossarte questioned why Petersen prioritized the right to own a semi-automatic rifle over the safety of students. “His raffles [of guns] contribute to the fetishization that makes them the rifle of choice for attention seeking mass-killers,” he said. On March 6, Facebook banned Petersen for 30 days because he raffled off an AR-15 on the Facebook marketplace; this is the second time this has happened in less than a year.

Bossarte claimed that any objections were “peacefully asserted,” and that SLU Democrats allowed Petersen to speak throughout his visit. While SLU Dems decided to protest the event with their sign, others didn’t feel that protesting was necessary. “I didn’t understand the people who wanted to protest,” said Bernardo Moreno ’18. “He isn’t Hitler. I don’t agree with everything he said, but I didn’t disagree with everything he said.”