How often are classes stormed by gunmen at universities, do you reckon? I happen to work at a university, and I see the situation the other way around. I see **Airman Doors ** and who knows how many other people toting their guns around on campus every day, in all sorts of situations, in preparation for that mythical psycho-killer attack that never comes. So I’d much rather the University Police be free to arrest anyone on campus carrying a weapon, on sight, no questions asked. If somebody feels the overwhelming urge to protect others on campus from psycho killers, they can join the Police and pull down a paycheck for it. Otherwise, they can leave their gun hobby at home.
I am seeing a lot of “killed in the crossfire” and similar posts. As Airman Doors has stated about one in 14 persons has a CCW permit. That would mean what, two people in each class on average? Likely even less than that because most would be under 21. So you may have one person trained, practiced and skilled in the operation of a handgun. I don’t know that one person could have changed the outcome, but I would be willing to take that chance.
SSG Schwartz
I think it is a well-written article.
As someone who has a generic opposition to the restricting of folks’ freedoms on the basis of how they might abuse them, I find myself in agreement with those who support the right to bear arms.
I am not opposed to certain types of gun control, but they should be geared towards training and demonstrated competency as a prerequisite to getting a license. I don’t see a valid reason for denying someone the right to own and carry a weapon if they’ve passed a reasonable licensing test showing that they know how to manage the weapon in question and are familiar with all the applicable laws and common-sense rules of behavior that go with it.
I am not opposed to different licensing requirements for different weapons.
On the flip side of it all, I’m not unable to comprehend the concerns of those who don’t agree. Their concern is for what might happen, and from their perspective the risks are large and outweigh the benefits to the would-be gun owners or carriers. It’s all some variation on that theme, as far as I can tell. Case in point might well be me. I’ve got a psych history. Personally I think there’s no legitimate reason for denying me the right to own a 22 rilfe or a 30-06. Or, if I got training in the use and proper care and applicable laws (all of which I current lack), a handgun. I don’t see why having once been diagnosed “paranoid schizophrenic” should have any bearing on it. There’s no reason for anyone to assume that I, personally, am violent or would do anything with a firearm that would cause people grief. The behavior of other schizzies in the past, anectodal or statistical, is really beside the point.
Or, if it is not, then neither is anectodal or statistical indications of what a plain-vanilla person might do if in possession of a firearm. It’s quite the can of worms, this attempt to curtail freedom the basis of what a person might do.
Ultimately, in my own case it’s kind of moot: I live in a city apartment and I simply have no need for any of the weapons for which I have adequate training and familiarity.
Fantasy? Personally, I prefer to deal with reality. The REALITY is that Cho killed 32 people. He wounded 25 others. I see you’ve laid out a cornfield full of strawmen, so I’ll address them:
Personally? It wouldn’t matter how my child was killed WRT the effect it would have on me. It would be devastating. However, if my child was killed by Airman Doors as he was returning Cho’s fire and by that action he (Doors) stopped the massacre at 3, or 5 or 7 or 21 or even 31 people, then the net result would be positive
Well, I don’t hold a CCP, so leave me out of it, but my answer above stands. You’re edging into lunatic land, however, and I’ll address that in a minute.
Sure, that could happen, gunfights are confusing and disjointed by definition, but I’m really trying hard to see your scenario, and frankly it stinks. Here’s how I parse what you’re saying, tell me how I’m wrong IN REAL LIFE AND NOT IN YOUR GUN FEARING DREAMS. Cho enters the classroom and starts shooting. My son and Doors draw their weapons and return fire, killing Cho. What then? Does Doors decide that as long as he has one notch on his gun, two will look better so he kills my son? Does my son decide that this is the perfect opportunity to off that girl who turned him down for a date, so Doors has to kill him to save the others? Accidental deaths can occur anytime guns come into play, but your scenario is mindbogglingly stupid.
Aaaaand here’s where you fly completely off the tracks. You seem to believe that anyone who carries a gun is just waiting for an excuse to shoot at everyone they see, at any time. You also seem to think that those of us defending our rights to carry (and hopefully never use) a gun responsibly are also advocating that everyone should be armed. You seem to understand very little about citizens wanting to exercize their rights except that guns are bad, m’kay? Who said anything about 15 students blasting away? In the sample size of the Vt shooting, if guns were allowed in the hands of legal, licensed CCP holders on campus, the likelihood is that maybe one, possibly two people would be carrying guns legally. Those people would be in a position to take action and hopefully defend themselves and other innocent students. They may not be successful. Cho might kill them. Assuming he does, how are we any worse off? That’s what I want to know: HOW ARE WE ANY WORSE OFF? Cho killed everyone anyway. If a licensed CCP holder had stopped him before he killed some of those people, HOW ARE WE WORSE OFF??? Please, answer that.
The reality to me is that it wouldn’t make any difference how my son was killed. The reality for the parents of the X number of students who would have been killed but weren’t because of the presence of an armed person who might be able to stop the rampage is very different indeed. Are you that selfish, that you can only see what happens to you personally and fuck the rest of the world? Man, I pity you.
Airman Doors, I liked your article overall, and I couldn’t agree more with the premise.
Reading this thread, I notice a lot of the usual attacks on the gun-carrying mentality, claims that gun owners “need a gun to feel like a man,” or carry only because they have wet dreams about handing out sucking chest wounds to a horde of psychotic gunmen, fantasize about being the hero, et cetera. Please. :rolleyes: If you really want to argue rationally against the idea of concealed carry on campuses, I think you can do a little better than that. We can engage in personal attacks and dramatic ad hominem exaggerations of our ideological opponents’ motivations all day (I have some very nice ones about bed-wetting, for example ;)), but it won’t get us anywhere.
For the record, I am a gun owner and a college student. Preemptively, I will say that my guns are not a compensation for the size of my penis (it needs none. Hah!), and I do not feel like any more of a man when I carry one. I obey my university’s policy against students carrying weapons on campus, even though I disagree with it very strongly, because I would rather not place in jeopardy all the effort I have already invested in my education. (Only one more year to go for my engineering degree. Woo-hoo!) I’ve been considering writing my own op-ed piece for my student newspaper, though, and thanks to your inspiration, Airman, I may just get around to that now!
These kinds of scenarios strike me as overplayed hysteria on the part of anti-carry advocates.
1. This is obviously the preferable scenario. Guy barges into a classroom with a gun and starts shooting people, and is quickly neutralized by an armed student. Hopefully, it would never come up in the first place, but having someone with the ability to act is far preferable to waiting for the police to show up.
2. It’s true that when bullets fly, there’s a risk that bystanders could be hurt. On the other hand, you’ve already got one guy who’s flinging bullets intentionally in the direction of innocent people, and he’s going to continue doing it unless somebody tries, somehow, to stop him. If I were unarmed in that situation, I know I’d much rather take my chances with another armed individual who’s trying to save my life, rather than let the madman do as he pleases.
3. If this happens, you know you’ve got a bunch of grade-A morons behind the triggers. You should never plunge gun-first into a tense scenario that you do not completely comprehend. If you have not seen enough of the situation to be able to positively identify the threat (i.e., the person who is shooting at innocent people) your gun should not be out. I see no reason to believe that this is likely to occur, and even if it were, it would just be a risk for those who willingly decided to carry. Seems to me that it’s their decision.
4. There were no police snipers able to take down Seung-Hui Cho at Virgina Tech, nor at any other school shooting, to my knowledge, so this seems like a far-fetched scenario. And anyway, my gun is only going to be drawn when there is a direct threat to my life or to someone else’s life in my immediate vicinity. Do you really think I’m going to let the hypothetical danger of an irresponsible police sniper cause me to ignore the very real danger that is right in front of me?
Finally, all of these things are potential concerns off-campus as well. Yet responsible adults are allowed to carry weapons on crowded city streets, and seldom do you ever hear of carrying citizens gunning each other down by mistake, or spraying wildly into a crowd because some guy pulled a knife. If these sorts of events were commonplace, I could see instituting or increasing training requirements for carry permits, but as it stands things seem fine to me.
My preferred solution would be to mandate proper storage practices - e.g., to store a gun in your room, you must keep it in an approved gun safe, and other restrictions along those lines.
How is this any different from trying to enforce the blanket “no weapons” policies? If somebody is willing to risk being kicked out of a residence hall by ignoring the rules about safe storage, why would they follow the rule against keeping a gun in the first place?
As for the concern of suicide, I agree with pkbites - the possibilty that somebody might off themselves is no justification for curtailing my rights. I’m liberal in a lot of ways, but not this one: frankly, I think the government has no business trying to protect me from myself. Besides, it seems to me that care and counseling are a much better solution than simply ignoring depressed students and trying to keep them away from anything dangerous.
This is not even a legal possibility now in most places. In my state, for example, carrying firearms is not prohibited by law on university campuses - it is merely each university’s code of conduct that prohibits students and faculty from carrying. If a student is found carrying, the worst that can happen to them is school disciplinary action, up to expulsion. Police officers cannot arrest a student for violating the school code of conduct.
I just wanted to add this, but I already passed the edit window:
I think Weirddave responded to this very well, but I’d also like to say that if one or more armed students were able to respond to the threat immediately, the situation would likely be over long before the police arrived. At Virginia Tech, the cops didn’t even get inside the building until Cho had already killed everybody he was going to kill.
Really? I’m genuinely surprised to learn that university police can’t arrest students for carrying firearms in “most places.” That must be a terribly awkward situation for police in your state, if they are unable to do anything more than threaten the psycho-killer with expulsion as he totes his weapons across campus.
At my university, any student found carrying a firearm is guilty of a felony and is arrested immediately.
I don’t think he did. I don’t think he or others are being very realistic at all. I think there’s a lot of black and white thinking. The first is that only good people who are good shots and fast on their feet will carry a weapon, and bad guys are different people who will be eminently obviously distinguishable from good guys. The good guys will be able to readily and completely size up the situation and identify the number of assailants and who they are immediately.
Pure fantasy.
Yes, it is a reality, Weirddave, that incidents occasionally occur in which up to 32 people have been killed by one or two individuals. It is also the reality that each year, something around 15,000 other people are killed by firearms (excluding suicides) in drips and drabs.
I think it would be great for those occasions that someone has decided to take a firearm and shoot up a school if they took three in the forehead the moment they pulled out their weapon. I don’t think it is so hot to have many more firearms being toted around every other day until that happens. I think that 15,000 would go up substantially, which doesn’t seem a great trade off to the 32.
The betting odds don’t look that good.
Do you wear body armor on campus?
Soldiers don’t store their weapons in their barracks rooms. The weapons are locked down in an arms room.
Students with much less training and no discipline or accountability whatsoever should have weapons in their dorm rooms? I think that is a recipe for disaster.
For Florida, my Hunter’s Safety Certificate was sufficient. I took it when I was nine. 
Nitpick: age of majority is 18 almost everywhere in the US (21 is just drinking age.) Seeing as the majority of Americans turn 18 in their final year of high school, virtually every college student on any given campus will be an adult.
But yeah, when multiple students must live together without getting to choose their roommates, guns are like cigarettes; you pretty much have to ban them for the sake of those who don’t want the added responsibilities and risks.
I had a dumb moment when I wrote that. D’oh!
There are important differences between an apartment renter and a dorm resident. Dorm residents do not get to choose their roomates or even necessarily which dorm they will be residing. Apartment tenants do. Also, the average dorm room is the size of a crackerjack box, which means storage space is quite limited. Where would a student be able to store a gun so that it is not in close proximity to books, clothes, computers, and other frequently accessed items?
Also, how many apartments ban the use of hot plates and similar “hazards”? How many apartment buildings have communal lounging areas and kitchens and different casts of characters streaming in and out of the individual units at all hours of the day? Dormitory living is simply different than living out in the “real world”. There’s an assumption of safety and protection in college life that one doesn’t have elsewhere. If students don’t want to be coddled in that way, they can rent an off-campus apartment.
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Yea, you’d think that. Except in every single state that has instituted relaxed concealed carry laws, there hasn’t been an increase in these kind of deaths, so no matter how much you wring your hands and wail and moan “Won’t somebody please think of the people!”, the facts show your argument to be full of shit. Got one based upon facts and not fear?
Now, see, those are the sort of useful facts that **Airman Doors ** should be citing in his Op/Ed piece, instead of all the handwringing “won’t somebody please think of the psycho-killer!” and “Why must we treat adults like children (that is, treat them like adults in civilized nations other than America)?” You should offer him a link to those statistics so that he can prepare to answer responses to his emotional appeal.
In your fantasy, was your son wearing body armor on campus?
Airman Doors, I’m not sure I agree with you, but it’s a very well-written piece. I always appreciate hearing well-reasoned arguments for positions I don’t share.
In addition to monstro’s excellent points, allowing guns in dorms would be a liability and risk-managment nightmare for a college. Currently, the Dean of Students at Rider College is being charged with aggravated hazing because a fraternity member died after drinking too much. This dean is being charged even though he was not present at the party, never served students alcohol and required all of the fraternities to go through alcohol education and anti-hazing workshops. Can you imagine the legal firestorm that would result if a student were injured or killed by a gun kept in the dorms?
I agree that the possible pressence of legally armed studens wouldn’t have deterred him. Like I said earlier, sometimes the detterence factor kicks in after the bad guy has acted (i.e. stopping the threat by shooting back). Virginia is an open carry state. What if Cho knew for an absolute fact there were armed students there. I’m wondering if that would have dettered him.
I went to college, you know. And I was carrying [legally] at the time too. The only times I didn’t have my revolver on me was when I was drinking or sleeping (meaning I had it stored more than I carried it 
). When I was living in a dorm I was able to store it without anyone being able to screw with it. And they knew I had it too.
May I ask where that is?
Emphasis added by me. Most apartment dwellings are not communal: co-housing is relatively rare.
Furthermore, I suspect that high-turnover co-housing is almost nonexistent outside of the University. A dormitory may be one militia that deserves to be well-regulated.
I thought the last paragraph was appropriate Airman: it addresses your audience’s underlying concern that the author is a crazed gun-nut, and appeals to tolerance, a prime value among those of college age. Bad for a general audience, good for a college newspaper.
Trained in the proficiency of arms? Okay.