How can someone with the credentials to be a professor say something so dumb?

Gabriella Morrongiello of Campus Reform reports.

Texas professor: Americans are ‘unable to handle gun ownership’

Americans are “unable to handle” their constitutional right to keep and bear arms, according to one Texas professor.

In a recent column for the Dallas Morning News, John Traphagan—a professor of religious studies and anthropology at the University of Texas at Austin—lambasted Americans for wanting to boost gun ownership and expand concealed and open carry laws. According to Traphagan, the 2012 shooting in Aurora, Colo. and recent biker gang shoot-out in Waco, Texas illustrate an epidemic of “ongoing violence” which he says Americans have become anesthetized to.

“There is simply no need for a civilized society to tolerate the type of gun-related violence that Americans seem to accept as normal,” Traphagan wrote. “Other modern industrial countries have realized… that it is unnecessary for people in a free society to have easy access to guns.”

According to Bloomberg Business, the number of individuals killed in mass shootings in the U.S. over the last three decades equals fewer “than a tenth of 1 percent” of the number of people murdered in America during that same time frame, as estimated by the Federal Bureau of Investigation.

Still, Traphagan maintains that Americans, as a whole, “do not seem to be able to handle gun ownership in a way that permits maintenance of civil society.”

“[T]he evidence is clear — a heavily armed population in the U.S. is not secure because our culture does not seem to lend itself well to allowing the proliferation of guns,” Traphagan wrote.