Campus Carry: Why More Guns Doesn’t Equal More Safety

On Friday, October 9, at 11:30 a.m., an 18-year-old student was shot and killed outside a dorm on his own campus at Texas Southern University. Just 10 hours earlier, Colin Borough, also a college student, was shot multiple times and killed by another student on his own campus at Northern Arizona University. And eight days before that, on Thursday, October 1, eight college students and a professor were shot and killed by a college student on their own campus at Umpqua Community College in Oregon.

This trend is hardly new.

According to the Kansas City Star, in 2015 alone, there have been 52 school shootings, leading to 28 deaths and at least 53 injuries. Twenty-one of these school shootings have taken place on college and university campuses.

Naturally, when the Texas state legislature met over the summer, they spent time addressing both guns and college campuses. The resulting law, however, was disturbing: beginning on August 1, 2016, on the 50-year anniversary of a mass shooting from UT’s clock tower that left 14 dead, any licensed students and faculty over the age of 21 will legally be allowed to carry concealed guns onto all Texas public colleges and universities and into campus buildings such as dorms and classrooms. This law, known as campus carry, gives private universities the opportunity to opt-out – and most are expected to do so – but requires all public universities to accept and enforce it, only giving them the power to designate a limited amount of gun-free zones.

Traditionally, nearly half of each FWCD graduating class chooses to attend a Texas university, and it is likely that a similar amount of FWCD seniors will chose to do so this year. Only this year, FWCD students will be sharing these campuses with fellow students and teachers who are legally carrying guns.

The theory behind campus carry, according to those who support the law, is to improve the safety of students and teachers by giving them a means for self-defense in the event they are threatened or attacked, especially in the event of a school shooting.

“An armed society is a safe society, so any time you have gun control, there is far more opportunity to become victims,” State Representative Jonathan Stickland, a Republican and avid supporter of the bill, told the New York Times.

However, despite its main supporters claiming that a measure such as this will protect students from violence, Admiral William H. McRaven, the current University of Texas Chancellor and former U.S. Navy Seal commander who has actually been in the line of fire, is one of the most outspoken adversaries of the new campus-carry law.

“I have been shot at before. And so I know what and how people react when they are being shot at,” McRaven told CNN. “So if you aren’t trained in that environment you probably aren’t going to react the way people think you will react naturally. And consequently having another armed individual in the middle of an active shooter profile, in some cases could create more confusion than helping to resolve the problem.”

McRaven is right; it is highly unlikely that a student who chooses to carry a gun on campus will have the training necessary to calmly and effectively prevent a school shooting during the mere seconds over which they normally take place. These students are not gun experts; they’re students who have taken a four-hour class and hit targets in a shooting range. It takes longer to take the SAT on a Saturday morning than it does to legally obtain a license to carry a gun onto a college campus.

There is a very considerable difference, I would imagine, between hitting a stationary target with an instructor by your side, and fighting for your life while a deranged killer is opening fire at you and your peers. And even if a student were to open fire at a shooter in self-defense, how would police officials, who are almost always told to openly shoot in these situations, be expected to easily identify who the real shooter is in a confusing and chaotic situation such as this?

Still, the possibility exists that an exceptionally calm and well-trained college student with a firearm could be in the exact location necessary to prevent a deadly attack without adding any unnecessary confusion to the situation. But that very bleak possibility looks even bleaker when compared to the much greater possibility that a bar fight or fist fight could turn deadly in campuses where alcohol and emotional instability are already prevalent. Campus carry will add numerous new dangers and opportunities for violence while hardly doing anything to address the problem its primary purpose is to address: school-shootings. In fact, it will likely make this problem worse by escalating already deadly conflicts and creating more opportunities for mass-violence to happen in the first place.

Clearly, gun-related violence on American college and university campuses needs to be addressed somehow. But what we have to realize is that the window for preventing a school shooting does not only exist in the split second between the time the shooter pulls out his or her gun and opens fire. Rather than focusing on ways to prevent these attacks at the last possible moment when the shooter is armed and on the verge of firing, our legislature should instead focus on what goes wrong during the weeks and months leading up to that moment – starting with the time the potential killer actually purchases the gun.

Many advocates of campus carry argue that violent criminals will obtain weapons regardless of whether or not law-abiding citizens have access to them. But laws like this aren’t really protecting students from violent criminals; they’re creating violent criminals out of angry and unstable everyday citizens and students by giving them easy access to guns. Most of the shooters responsible for campus shootings are young students without previous records that are only criminals because it is so easy for them to obtain a gun.

Legally allowing students and teachers to carry guns onto campus will only make this problem worse.