Imagine sitting in an English Literature class. While taking attendance, you look to your left and see that Jeffrey now has a firearm strapped to his waist. Would this make you feel safe knowing that Jeffrey could be the one to help stop an assailant that may come on campus? Or maybe make you uneasy that he was allowed to bring such a dangerous weapon to school and be able to cause that same harm? In recent years, the debate of whether or not open carry should be allowed on college campuses have been brought to the attention of local and state governments. In his article “Ready, Fire, Aim: The College Campus Gun Fight,” Robert Birnbaum discusses the opposing sides of the college campus open carry argument, data and statistics that can be used to form their opinions, and current gun laws.
In the first section of the article, Birnbaum discusses the arguments for what he calls “MoreGuns” and “BanGuns” sides. MoreGuns people offer the premise that guns on campus will allow students to protect themselves in case of an attack personally or the campus as a whole. BanGuns err on the side of caution and say that allowing guns on campus would allow people with bad intentions to enter the campus and cause harm. Birnbaum also describes current laws and past court cases that brought them to be. For instance, Birnbaum mentions the “Virginia Tech Massacre” and how a “single mentally disturbed student” (Birnbaum 8) brought a firearm to campus and shot 49 people (killing 32 and wounding 17). This was considered a turning point for the guns-on-campus rulings. Currently, there are prohibitions against gun ownership by felons, the mentally ill, aliens, minors, and others.
Meaning, “gun-licensing laws and reasonable restrictions on possession that are uniformly applied are permissible, but total hand-gun bans or other requirements that make it impossible for citizens to use arms for self-protection violate the Second Amendment and therefore are unconstitutional” (Birnbaum 9). With this information, local and state governments have been named responsible for ruling if firearms are allowed on campuses. The National Conference of State Legislatures provides an overview of the steps that are being taken towards concealed carry on college campuses. According to the overview, in 2013, at least 19 states introduced legislation to allow concealed carry on campus in some regard and in the 2014 legislative session, at least 14 states introduced similar legislation. In the same year, five states introduced opposing legislation in order to prohibit concealed carry weapons but not a single one went into effect.
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Currently, there are 16 states that ban carrying a concealed weapon on a college campus: California, Florida, Illinois, Louisiana, Massachusetts, Michigan, Missouri, Nebraska, Nevada, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, North Carolina, North Dakota, South Carolina, and Wyoming. In 23 states the decision to ban or allow concealed carry weapons on campuses is made by each college or university individually: Alabama, Alaska, Arizona, Connecticut, Delaware, Hawaii, Indiana, Iowa, Kentucky, Maine, Maryland, Minnesota, Montana, New Hampshire, Ohio, Oklahoma, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, South Dakota, Vermont, Virginia, Washington, and West Virginia. “Because of recent state legislation and court rulings, 10 states now have provisions allowing the carrying of concealed weapons on public postsecondary campuses… Tennessee allows faculty members with licenses to carry weapons on campus, but the law does not extend to students or the general public” (Guns). Utah is the only state to name colleges as public entities and does not have the authority to ban concealed carry and allows open carry on all ten campuses.
According to Crystal R. Lombardo in her article 8 Significant Pros and Cons of Concealed Carry, “As of 2013, all 50 states permit adults to carry a concealed handgun in public, in accordance to the Concealed Carry permit laws.” Four different permits are categorized going from the “no-issue” law (absolutely no one can carry a gun) to “unrestricted carry” (anyone can carry without a permit). The third one, however, is called a “shall-issue” law that will grant permits as long as the civilian meets the requirements, has no prior felony charges, and has had no recent commitments to a mental facility. “Among the four permits, the “shall-issue law” has the most impact. In a 1998 publication, More Guns Less Crime, by John Lott PhD, an economist and political commentator who analyzed FBI crime data, he correlated the decrease in violent crimes with the state regulation. He even argued that thousands of rape, murder, robberies and aggravated assaults that happened between 1977 and 1992 would have been prevented in states that did not permit concealed handguns if they allowed the opposite” (Lombardo).
One of the benefits of allowing open carry on college campuses would be that the students would be able to defend themselves in the case of an attack on themselves or another student. A young woman walking to her vehicle from an evening class without a form of protection would leave her vulnerable to any sort of confrontation from an assailant. If she were to carry a firearm, the woman would feel safer and be safer because the firearm would be able to protect her from various types of danger. In “Campus Carry: The Movement to Allow Guns of College Grounds, Explained”, Maura Ewing quotes Wayne LaPierre, the leader of the Students for Campus Carry organization, to say “The hard facts are, we can’t predict where evil may strike—the next campus, the next church, the next shopping mall or airport. And if God forbid a monster should walk onto this campus, that evil will be met with the one indisputable fact of liberty: that the surest way to stop a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun.” The proponents feel as though the announcement of a place being a “gun-free” zone is more likely to feel like an invitation for someone meaning to cause harm rather than keeping its students safe.
This is because an assailant may choose to go to one of these zones specifically because they know that the students are not allowed to carry firearms and therefore, cannot protect themselves properly. Conversely, the other half believes that “gun-free” zones do not have much of a direct impact on the number of mass shootings in public shootings. Alicia Samuels states that even though more civilians carry guns and more mass shootings are becoming, legally armed citizens are rarely willing and able to stop or even interrupt a mass shooting. “A review by Louis Klarevas, associate lecturer at the University of Massachusetts, Boston, and one of the report’s co-authors, examined the 111 high-fatality mass shootings—defined as events in which six or more people are killed—that occurred in the U.S. since 1966 and found that only 13 had taken place in a truly gun-free zone” (Samuels). In case of the young woman walking from an evening class, BanGuns movements would contradict the above statement because the woman may mistake an innocent person or student as someone that will try to hurt her and fire at them by accident, taking an innocent life in the process.
The MoreGuns movement may support feminists in the way of saying that allowing a woman to carry a firearm would help protect the woman or man against a sexual assault. According to “Men Raped: Supporting the Male Survivor of Sexual Assault on the College Campus,” one in four college women and one in six college men will be a victim of sexual assault. MoreGuns may argue that allowing students to carry on campus will help combat sexual assault and violence because the victim will be able to protect themselves by scaring the assailant off simply by showing them that they are armed and protected. On the side of BanGuns, in volume 32 of The Research in Higher Education Journal titled “Arming the Academy” authors Leslie A Biastro, Karen H. Larwin, and Marla E. Carano conclude that the trend in the investigation that they produced in three different states that allow guns on campus, suggest that changes to allowing guns on campus has not been accompanied by a reduction in the frequency of sexual assault crimes.
In fact, the trends indicate that there has been a significant increase in these crimes once the laws are changed. Many people would agree that open carry should only be allowed on campuses to faculty members that have gone through rigorous background checks, mental stability tests, and classes in order to better understand the consequences and power of a firearm. The colleges that allow this to come into effect however, should require the faculty to inform its students that they are carrying, have special identification, and must inform the school and local law enforcement of their decision. This would most likely appease both the MoreGuns and BanGuns sides because the students would still be able to be protected in the case of an active shooter, but it would also help prevent an unknown person walking on campus with a firearm in order to cause harm to others.
