To throw the Yale Law students and just about every liberal arts major and hysterical college student from the last several years a bone, I couldn't articulate the Western tradition of free speech particularly well when I was an idiot kid either. It took me until my early thirties to really dive into it; but, I did start jumping at the opportunity to argue against censorship by the end of my high school years.
It seems to be a common theme when students shout down speakers to declare that they're exercising their right to free speech by shouting people down.
The thing is, this declaration only flies if you're a narcissist and you only thought about the issue for two seconds. Sure, they're speaking and you're speaking. Free speech, right?
Wrong.
I think that we all have the correct, gut reaction when we're being shouted down or silenced ourselves or somebody begins to shout down somebody who we want to listen to. We understand that there's something wrong happening. In order to be on the side of the hecklers or to be one of the hecklers, you have to have forgotten or disregarded the Golden Rule.
Still, it's worth articulating why the students are doing something that is morally wrong.
To put it simply, letting somebody talk and then taking the opportunity to refute what that person said is free speech. Talking over somebody so that he or she cannot be heard is not free speech.
Frederick Douglass's most eloquent defense of free speech was in reaction to an abolitionist meeting being cancelled by hecklers. Would any of these students say that the anti-abolitionists who silenced a black man's speech against slavery were just exercising their own free speech? I doubt it.
No matter how you put it, offensiveness is the motor of human progress. All of these students are claiming to be progressive while behaving like brown shirts. That's the reality.