Several states have now proposed laws that would allow students to carry concealed weapons on their college campus. Advocates of these bills argue that the recent tragic shootings at colleges in Virginia and Illinois might have been prevented or mitigated if students and faculty--not just the gunman--had firearms at the ready.
But, such legislation is not only unnecessary, it is ill-conceived and would most likely lead to more tragedy than it prevents and certainly won't make campuses safer. In fact, while recent violent crimes on campus are troubling, colleges are actually extraordinarily safe places, with the majority of experts espousing that the relative lack of guns is precisely what makes them havens from violent crimes.
According to the U.S. Department of Education, the average homicide rate on college campuses nationally for the past six years is approximately one homicide for every one million students. In comparison, this would be like New York City having eight homicides per year instead of the 466 murders committed there in 2009.
One grave concern of the proposed laws is the potential mix of guns with alcohol and drugs. In a recent survey by the American College Health Association, four in 10 college students said they endured stress often and approximately two in 10 stated they felt stressed all or most of the time. Far too many students turn to alcohol or drugs - or both - to combat these feelings. Already, the ACHA reports 35 percent to 40 percent of students participate in binge drinking in any typical two-week period. Given that figure, it's not surprising that 700,000 assaults annually among college students are attributed to alcohol use. Moreover, according to last year's National Center on Addiction and Substance Abuse study, 85 percent of all campus arrests involve alcohol--one of the strongest and most consistent risk factors for violent crime. Put guns in the hands of drunken college students and the odds are great that many of those assaults will become tragic, life-ending encounters.
Violence towards others is not the only reason to be concerned about introducing guns on campus. There are currently 100 suicides for each homicide that occurs on a campus. In a large-scale ACHA survey published this March, nearly 18 percent of college students said they had experienced depression within the last school year. An earlier study by this same group noted that 59 percent of students feel hopeless at times and 45 percent feel depressed to the point that it is difficult to function. And each year about 10 percent of college students seriously think about suicide, with the most common method of ending life being by firearms. Since we know that the most effective way to prevent suicides in this age group is to limit the means by which the suicide may occur, common sense dictates that legalizing concealed weapons in dormitories and classrooms is only likely to make things worse.
The evidence is, therefore, overwhelming: making guns more freely available on college campuses will significantly increase the risk of serious and, in fact, deadly crime, especially for those large numbers of students who might be intoxicated or depressed at some point, while only marginally, if at all, decrease the risk of what is already the very rare event of a shooting rampage. Guns just have no place on a college campus--except in the hands of law enforcement.
Dr. Victor Schwartz is University Dean of Students at Yeshiva University and associate professor of clinical psychiatry at YU's Albert Einstein College of Medicine. Dr. Jerald Kay is professor and chair of the Department of Psychiatry at Wright State University's Boonshoft School of Medicine. Dr. Paul Appelbaum is the Elizabeth K. Dollard Professor of Psychiatry, Medicine, and Law and director of the Division of Law, Ethics, and Psychiatry at the Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons.
Contrary to what some people might have us believe, prevention and preparedness are not mutually exclusive. In a perfect system, the two approaches to safety compliment each other. Preventive measures, such as teaching students and faculty to watch for the warning signs of mental illness, providing counseling to disturbed students, and making sure that individuals with histories of mental illness can't easily purchase firearms can work hand in hand with preparative measures, such as developing campus alert systems, providing additional training to campus police, and allowing the same trained, licensed, carefully screened adults (age 21 and above) who legally carry concealed handguns when not on college campuses to do so on college campuses.
And for what it's worth, both the Virginia state government and the federal government have addressed the issue of making sure mental health adjudications are included in NICS background checks.
And then it could have been a full-scale shoot-out like the Old West days!
But even those days were followed by period when the sheriff and/or the bartender collected all the guns and returning them when the owners left town. I think we should focus on the latter aspect.
We don't need a return to the Wild West days!
*http://www.cracked.com/article_18487_6-ridiculous-history-myths-you-probably-think-are-true_p1.html
It is unlikely that an exchange of gunfire between an armed assailant and an armed citizen would last more than a couple of seconds before one or both parties were disabled. How could a couple of seconds of exchanged gunfire possibly be worse than a ten-minute, execution-style massacre?
while on the streets 1 person dies here or there, on college campuses deaths come in bunches of 20-30 at any one time.
Univ. Texas
Columbine
Va. Tech
The fact is that when it does happen, students have no chance to protect themselves. They are being forced to play the numbers game instead of actually being kept safe.
Last year on my campus, 4 women were raped by one man after walking back to their dorms after late-night classes. Who are we to tell them that they can't defend themselves?
Take a look at the Appalachian School of Law shooting in 2002. I guarantee you no one has heard of it on this board, but it could have been a lot worse if the students hadn't fought back.
I'm not saying that we should hand guns out, but if you have a CCW then I see no reason why you can't exercise that privilege. If you can't defend yourself or feel safe on open campuses at night, then why even risk it.
Chances are most people won't get into a car accident today, but that doesn't mean you drive around without a seat belt and say "hey the odds are in my favor!"
At the University of Texas—a major university with over 50,000 students, in a state where one person out of 70 is licensed to carry a concealed handgun—a quick comparison of campus housing statistics and concealed handgun licensing statistics reveals that there would likely be no more than ten to twenty concealed handgun license holders living in on-campus housing (all on-campus housing, not just dorms) at any given time. That being the case, how many of those 10-20 students would you expect to kill themselves in a given year?
If you're concerned that a firearm stored in a dorm might be vulnerable to theft, push for safe-storage requirements or restrictions on carrying firearms in dorms. The vulnerability of dorms to theft does not necessitate a campus-wide ban on concealed carry.
And "home" is where the person lives, not where their parents live. To say a person can't commit suicide outside their "home" because they are away at college?!? Woah!
You are really over-reaching in WAY so many ways!
A few folks have commented on the aparent discrepancy between the estimates of alcohol feuled assaults on campuses (about 700,000/year) and the much lower rate of homicide and other crimes resulting in fatalities (about 15-20 homicides/year on college campuses). But this is precisely the point-most of the assaults are people taking a swing at each other while drunk-usually no serious injury or damage. Imagine how many of these events would turn into lethal interactions if all the partiers were "packing" and felt a need to protect themselves. The more troubling assualts are alcohol induced "date rapes" which occur too often and are usually male on female assaults. Assuming that men (who are likely the aggressors in these events) will typically be the ones carrying guns, we have now raised the risk from sexual assualt to sexual assault at gunpoint and shooting should the victim (also often inebriated) resist or scream. Is this really what we all want?
The same trained, licensed, carefully screened adults (age 21 and above) who aren't getting drunk and shooting people outside of campus are the same trained, licensed, carefully screened adults (age 21 and above) who wouldn't be getting drunk and shooting people on campus.
Concealed carry hasn't led to an increase in assaults or rapes at any of the other places where it's allowed--places like movie theaters, shopping malls, restaurants, grocery stores, office buildings, banks, churches, etc. And it hasn't led to an increase in assaults or rapes on the 33 U.S. college campuses where concealed carry is currently allowed (and has been for years). Why should we assume the results would be any different on any other college campus?
Feeling safe and being safe are not the same!
"Given that figure, it's not surprising that 700,000 assaults annually among college students are attributed to alcohol use."
Propaganda knows no bounds I guess.. So they are safe, except for the rampant assaults which will bloom into a massive carnage the first time someone chants the numbers 32, 357, 45..
The mere hint of not allowing anyone and everyone to be armed to the teeth anywhere and everywhere they want causes the usual foaming-at-the-mouth suspects to appear in full force, screaming with their usual statistics...
If you can accept that students are likely in non-compliance with restrictions on firearms in the same way that they are in non-compliance with alcohol restrictions, the entire premise of your argument (that campuses are safe due to lack of guns and this safety would evaporate if guns were permitted on campuses) falls apart. You also do not confront the fact that while students and faculty are typically prohibited from carrying firearms on public campuses, many states allow non-students and non-faculty to carry guns on those same campuses.
Are intoxicated students killing each other or themselves at alarming rates now with those other deadly implements they are allowed to keep on campus? If not, why would allowing individuals to keep firearms on campus suddenly cause violence to increase?
Aside from derision, what do you mean by this?
They make a correlative case. But if one looks at a statistical analysis, it becomes clear that the presence of firearms is not much of a factor, the big difference is the people and the environment.
Such has been the same rallying cry used by opponents of concealed carry for 20 years. Yet their predictions of wild west shootouts amoung concealed carry permitees, innocents caught in the middle, cops rolling up on situations and not knowing who to shoot, and blood running in the streets from the practice of concealed carry, has not occured.
http://www.jsonline.com/news/crime/93744194.html
Carry 24/7 or guess right.
It's also hard to beat up a black guy when he can carry, hence post-Civil War laws keeping "certain types" disarmed.
The same for New York's Sullivan Acts (no good Irish are too drunk to be trusted bearing arms).
Of course, now we're much more enlightened, and the "undesirable types" who don't deserve the right to protect themselves include lowly peons of all colors; if they're not government, disarm 'em (politicians and celebrities excepted--they're More Equal than the rest of us).
The authors cite no evidence that allowing CCW on campus would increase crime or violence, because there isn't any. Already some colleges do allow CCW, and no one has presented any evidence those colleges are any less safe then the ones that do not.