Giving Joe College a gun
This week's column.
Armed and studious?
Some Americans dream of a day when firearms could be as commonplace on campus as backpacks, textbooks and Saturday night keggers.
Consider Philip Van Cleave, who pictures a world in which college students are able to carry concealed firearms on campus.
Van Cleave, president of the Virginia Citizens Defense League, believes deadly shootings such as the ones two years ago at Virginia Tech could have been prevented if only everyone on campus had packed heat. Or nearly everyone.
Armed students, Van Cleave said, could have taken out Seung-Hui Cho, the 23-year-old Virginia Tech senior who killed 32 people before turning the gun on himself.
“If just one student 21 or older had a permit and had been armed that day,” Van Cleave said wistfully to Leslie Stahl of “60 Minutes” on April 12.
“Arming all those young people …? ,” Stahl asked, incredulously.
“Wonder who’s fighting in Iraq for us right now,” Van Cleave fired back.
Van Cleave’s notion turns out to be a lot more than wishful thinking. A bill in Texas would allow concealed weapons on college campuses. Supporters say the bill would help prevent deadly shootings such as those at Virginia Tech and Northern Illinois University, where five were killed and 18 were wounded on Valentine’s Day 2008.
The bill’s primary sponsor, Joe Driver, a Republican from Garland, Texas, sees the legislation as enhancing safety rather than threatening it.
But he doesn’t want just anybody lockin’ and loadin’ on the Quad. Only students 21 and older would be allowed to carry.
That typically would mean juniors, seniors, graduate students and faculty. (Don’t you feel safer already?)
Now, I have taught college students at one place or another for the better part of 24 years. Some have served in Iraq and Afghanistan. And I love ’em all dearly.
But I have trouble enough with them packing cell phones.
I thought about the disproportionate levels of binge drinking and depression among college students, and the task forces formed in recent years to cope with campus suicides.
I also pictured the same students who not too long ago were burning pieces of furniture and leaping through fires at my alma mater, UNC-Chapel Hill, in celebration of a basketball victory. (OK, I was happy, too, but felt no compulsion to run out and put a match to something.)
Do we really want to factor guns into these equations?
It is, of course, true that young people as young as 18 are trained to fire all manner of deadly weapons in the military.
But that follows intense training and strict supervision in a highly disciplined environment. A college campus is not a highly disciplined environment.
Closer to home, we have had our issues in Greensboro and throughout North Carolina with crime on and near our colleges and universities. Among all of the solutions broached, thankfully not one involves arming students and faculty.
North Carolina’s gun laws are perfectly clear on this issue: “Although a person may have a permit to carry a concealed weapon, permittees are not authorized to carry the permitted weapon anywhere they desire.” Those prohibited areas include school grounds, areas where alcohol is sold and consumed, state property, legislative buildings, public gatherings, any law enforcement agency or correctional facility, state and federal buildings and financial institutions, among others.
Of course, in his heart of hearts, Philip Van Cleave opposes gun laws altogether. He believes any citizen should have the right to carry guns virtually anywhere, at any time, with no background checks, mandatory training or any other interference from government. “If I do something wrong with a gun, put me in jail,” he told The Washington Post in 2004. “If I don’t, leave me alone.”
As for the Texas bill, campus police chiefs and administrators say the idea of permitting firepower on campus is a threat to student safety, not a solution.
The Texas higher education system, campus security officials and 40 colleges and universities officially oppose the bill.
But it may not be enough. More than 70 Texas House members have saddled up to co-sponsor the bill, only six votes short of the 76 needed to pass it.
What a scary, dumb thing they would have accomplished if it does pass.
You don’t ensure greater safety against gun violence by providing more guns.
If Texas forges ahead with this combustible and wholly irresponsible notion, maybe Gov. Rick Perry is right.
They really ought to secede from the Union.
Comments (1)
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This is a classic example of how big events influence our policy preferences. The mass shooting at Virginia Tech was horrific, and so the popular solution becomes arming all students. It might even work, if mass shootings were all we cared about. (Of course for all we know, cross-fire by numerous vigilante shooters amid the chaos of 4/16/07 would have claimed as many lives as the lone shooter actually did.) But even if it did work, arming all students is bound to increase overall gun violence on campus, i.e. there'd be single and double shootings throughout the year. This seems to matter less as long as the mass shooting sears our memory.
Of course the best such example is 9/11. The murder of nearly 3,000 people that day led us to wage war, restructure the federal government, make air travel forever inconvenient, all at tremendous cost. And yet 12,000 people are murdered by people with guns each year, which means that since 9/11, something like 90,000 have died in gun violence. We could reduce that number if we tried, but it seems to matter less.
Posted on April 27, 2009 12:43 PM