By Selwyn Duke
Many students on today’s college campuses are trigger-warning happy. No, this doesn’t generally have anything to do with guns, although it on occasion may. But it just as likely may concern racism, sexism, classism, able-bodyism, heterosexism, the Constitution, Pokemon Go, white men, or just about anything else.
What are trigger warnings? As columnist Jonah Goldberg explained in a humorous 2014 piece, “They started on left-wing and feminist websites. Like a ‘spoiler alert’ in a movie review or a more specific version of the movie rating system, trigger warnings are intended to alert very sensitive people that some content might set off, or trigger, their post-traumatic stress disorder or simply deeply offend some people. According to most accounts, this was a conscientious accommodation of people who'd been raped or otherwise horribly abused.”
For instance, in deference to child-sexual-abuse victims, a subject might be introduced with “Trigger Warning: pedophilia.” But it didn’t end there. Not only did the practice migrate to college campuses, it also metastasized.
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