The panel that oversees Kansas state universities has decreed that campuses under its control shall be weapons-free. I wonder: Will students, faculty and staff feel safer?
The recent move by the state Board of Regents came a year after the Virginia Tech massacre — a mass public shooting that left 32 dead in a place that was already weapons-free, in theory. Like so many of these incidents, Virginia Tech showed why gun bans in places as open as campuses are toothless as safety measures.
The thought of students or faculty walking around campus with weapons is not an attractive one, I’ll acknowledge. In some visceral sense, it feels wrong at first blush, and it’s a sad comment on the state of our society that officials must grapple with the risk of some psychotic releasing pent-up anger in a hail of gunfire.
Yet it is delusional to pretend that gun-free zones on paper can create gun-free zones in reality, unless you’re talking about closed environments such as government buildings or airport concourses.
Personally I’d feel safer on a campus where I knew some of the students or the staff — those who complied with the licensing requirements of concealed carry laws, if applicable — were likely to be armed. Not all campuses are gun-free zones: Colorado State University, as well as all of Utah’s universities, allow concealed-carry in compliance with state laws.
The Trolley Square Mall in Salt Lake City, the scene of another shooting spree last year, was also a posted gun-free zone. Five people were killed, but the death toll would have been higher but for an off-duty police officer who, ignoring the mall rules, retained his weapon. After hearing shots, he fired back at the shooter until police arrived.
That was only one of several incidents in recent years in which armed citizens acted to prevent or curtail shooting sprees.
The nonsensical nature of the campus gun-free zone has not been lost on a growing number of students. After the Virginia Tech shooting, a group called Students for Concealed Carry on Campus was formed at Facebook.com, the social networking site.
These students sought the right to defend themselves, and last year they organized quiet protests on several campuses across the nation. Last week, they conducted another round of protests, in which students wear empty gun holsters on campus.
This kind of spontaneous response is surprising to some who follow the issue.
“Gun-rights activism typically originates among rural people who are hunters and the like,” said David Kopel of the Golden, Colo.-based Independence Institute. “To have young adults leading on this is something new.”
What the Kansas Regents did earlier this month was endorse a broad policy requiring weapons-free campuses and criminal background checks for newly hired staff. Officials said a consultant would be engaged to figure out how to implement the policies.
According to The Star’s account of the meeting, much of the discussion dealt with where to post signs prohibiting concealed weapons.
I asked Regents’ spokesman Kip Peterson how putting up signs would stop a wacko bent on mass murder. Peterson said he couldn’t comment until the specific policies and regulations were put into effect.
I wish them luck, but this exercise looks like another replay of the familiar fantasy underlying gun control: the assumption that gun bans alone can curtail violent crime.
In 2003, a study by the Fraser Institute of Canada concluded that restrictive gun laws in England, Wales and Canada were an expensive failure. A news release announcing the findings stated: “Disarming the public has not reduced criminal violence in any country examined in this study.”
About the same time, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control reviewed 51 studies, including some partly funded by the CDC, and found “insufficient evidence” that gun laws helped prevent violent crime.
The chairwoman of the Kansas Regents, Christine Downey-Schmidt, says ensuring safety is a critical board responsibility, and “continued diligence” is a vital priority.
Well, sure. But at some point, you’d think the Regents would explain how a policy that makes people defenseless can improve their safety.
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