Banksy put forward the idea in his book “Wall and Piece” that whatever you can see is yours. You read that right, any advertisement, sign along the interstate, billboard, or anything of the sort that is in the view of the public is owned by the public.

This idea stems from the belief that people don’t get to invade your mind and shove things into your cortexes that you don’t want there. Banksy’s idea holds that you return such invasiveness in kind — returning the disrespect of inconsideration with the same.

This thought process loomed up in my mind this morning as I approached the library on campus and saw some evangelicals standing on either side of the path. Some had huge banners hoisted over their heads, while others stood holding wooden crucifixes in front of them. According to the laws I can’t do anything about this, nor do I think I should be able to do anything about this. If people want to stand in public places and hold signs and symbols, that is their right.

The evangelicals called out to me and my peers as we passed by, telling us to beg for salvation and forgiveness. Banksy’s ideas of how something is yours once people try to force it on you hasn’t been articulated to include audio yet, but the laws have.

I could not legally stand by these intruders and scream at the top of my lungs to drown them out, to keep them from harassing those that would pass by them on the path. That is illegal, as I would be obstructing another’s right to free speech.

The only thing I could was to verbally retort, and tell them how I felt, defacing their audio with my own. That is exactly what I did, I told them to stop harassing me.

Their reply was to continue to harass me about their religious beliefs and to try to further shove them into my head, raping my thoughts.

So I held firm, and told them exactly what I thought of their little performance in the middle of campus; I let them know how much disdain I had for their inconsideration of others in much fewer words than I have used here.

What if I had not been me? What if I had been a person of a shy nature and a slight build? Would I have still said something, or would I have been intimidated?

As I have mentioned before, these people were not students, they were outsiders. They stuck together, and at least one of them was a large man wielding an even larger wooden cross. Being who I am, none of those things intimidated me. But being someone else, maybe someone more vulnerable and less aggressive, perhaps I would have allowed the rape of my mind to go on unprotested out of fear.

The intruders were large, numerous and bold. They were organized, moved in packs, had leaders and obviously an agenda to push.

With the right to carry concealed weapons being banned on campus by state law, all a person has to rely on for self-assurance is their attitudes and physicality. In that way the omission of our Second Amendment right allows for the censor of our First Amendment rights.

Any confidence that someone of a smaller stature or more vulnerable nature might be lent by the Second Amendment is plucked out of their mind before it has a chance to give birth to actions. In this way their minds are raped and thought process changed by outsiders, as an agenda is unabashedly bent upon them.

Robert A. Heinlein once wrote, “The price of freedom is the willingness to do sudden battle, anywhere, at any time and with utter recklessness.”

Today the evangelicals showed up and did battle. No one will know how many minds were intruded against their own volition; being physical intimidated into silence they lost the battle by default.

The First Amendment is necessary, but so is the confidence that the Second Amendment gives people to loose their tongue and shoot a fiery brand in retort. Why the Second is marginalized and demonized is beyond me, but the consequences are not. I think Banksy would agree with me.