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POSITION: The Brady Campaign adamantly opposes efforts by the gun lobby to force college officials to allow students and teachers to carry hidden handguns on campus and in classrooms.
Q.Would arming college students make campuses safer for students and faculty?
A. No. Bringing guns into the campus environment will increase the danger to students every hour of every day. College students engage in a great many high-risk behaviors — including binge drinking and drug abuse — at alarming rates. Nearly 50% of full-time college students binge drink or abuse drugs at least once a month (NCASA, p.4).
Students are also at elevated risks for suicide, with 1,100 successful suicides and an additional 24,000 attempts every year (Cintron, 2007). Thus, in addition to significantly increasing the risk of accidental shootings (Brady Center, 2007), and suicides (Miller, “Household Firearm,” p.1029), allowing guns on campus will also likely lead to more gun thefts, which are a key source of guns used in crime (Brady Center pp.8-9).
Q. Won't arming college students deter the kind of attack that took place at Virginia Tech or Northern Illinois University?
A. No. The perpetrators of mass shootings are nearly always suicidal, and end up taking their own lives at the end of their rampages. Armed students would likely become the first targets of any suicidal attackers, who can prepare for such an attack by maximizing their firepower. For example, a crazed gunman who recently attacked a city council outside St. Louis, Missouri, first shot and killed two armed police officers before continuing his rampage (Ratcliffe, 2008). He even used one of the officer's guns in furthering his attack.
Q. Won't lives be saved if students can shoot back?
A. No. Security professionals believe that arming students to shoot back would actually make matters worse in the extremely rare instances where mass shootings occur on campus. Even trained police officers, on average, hit their intended targets less than 20% of the time (Morrison, pp.331-332). Thus, common sense indicates that more, not fewer, people are likely to be killed if untrained students engage a shooter in crossfire.
Moreover, if several people are armed during a shooting incident, security will not know which person is the aggressor. Also, with everyone armed, security will not be able to issue "lock-down" advisories or disarm a campus threat if a gunman is seen before the shooting starts.
Q. Can't we trust college gun owners to be safe and responsible?
A. No. In fact, two studies done by Harvard researchers have shown that college student gun owners are less law-abiding than the average student. They are more likely than the average student to:
- Engage in binge drinking (two-thirds engage in this behavior)
- Use cocaine or crack,
- Be arrested for a DUI,
- Vandalize property, and
- Get in trouble with police (Miller, Hemenway, and Wechsler pp.62-64; Miller et. al, "Guns at College," 1999).
Concealed carry licensees have committed homicides, violent felonies, and other horrific crimes (Brady Center, pp.22-26). Several mass shooters, including the Virginia Tech killer, would have been issued concealed carry licenses had they sought them (Brady Center, p.6). It makes no sense to make it easier for mass shooters to bring guns on campus.
Q. Who is pushing the idea of arming college students?
A. The gun lobby (Brady Center pp.vi-v and n1) and a tiny minority of college students (News Clips). The vast majority of Americans — 94% according to one survey — oppose this dangerous idea (Hemenway, Azrael and Miller, pp.282-283), as do nearly all college administrators and campus security professionals. Only one state — Utah — prohibits college administrators from maintaining no-weapons policies on campus (Brady Center pp.8-11). By comparison, about two-dozen states prohibit concealed carry licensees from carrying guns on college campuses.
Q. How can we make college campuses safer?
A. Despite the horrific shootings at Virginia Tech and Northern Illinois, college campuses are far safer than the communities that surround them. 93% of the violence against college students occurs off campus, where guns are widely available (Baum and Klaus, p.5). To prevent future mass shootings, we must strengthen our gun laws to make it as hard as possible for dangerous people to get dangerous weapons.
Sources
Brady Center to Prevent Gun Violence, No Gun Left Behind: The Gun Lobby's Campaign to Push Guns Into Colleges and Schools 9 (2007) (citing examples of accidental shootings, studies showing that guns in the home are far more likely to be used in an unintentional shooting than in self-defense, and how people frequently fail to recognize that a gun is loaded).
Baum, Katrina and Patsy Klaus, U.S. Dep’t of Justice, “Violent Victimization of College Students, 1995-2002,” U.S. Department of Justice (2005):5.
Cintron, Miriam, “College Campuses Grapple with Escalating Suicide Rates,” Nearwestgazette.com (on file with Brady Center).
Hemenway, David, Deborah Azrael and Matthew Miller, “National Attitudes Concerning Gun Carrying in the United States,” Injury Prevention 7 (2001):282-283.
Miller, et al., “Guns at College,” Journal of American College Health 48(7), (1999).
Miller, Matthew, David Hemenway, and Henry Wechsler, “Guns and Gun Threats at College,” Journal of American College Health 51(57), (September 2002):62-64.
Miller, Matthew, et al., “Household Firearm Ownership and Rates of Suicide Across the 50 United States,” Journal of Trauma (April 2007):1029 (explaining that if a gun is used in a suicide attempt, more than 90% of the time it is fatal, compared to a 3% fatality rate for suicide attempts by drug overdose).
Morrison, Gregory B., “Deadly Force Programs Among Larger U.S. Police Departments,” Police Quarterly 9 (2006):331-332.
Ratcliffe, Heather, “6 dead in shooting rampage at Kirkwood City Council,” St. Louis Today, March 27, 2008.
The National Center on Addiction and Substance Abuse (NCASA), Wasting the Best and the Brightest: Substance Abuse at America’s Colleges and Universities, (March 2007):4.
Thompson, Amy, James H. Price, Adam Mrdjenovich, Jagdish Khubchandani, “Reducing Firearm-Related Violence on College Campuses—Police Chiefs' Perceptions and Practices,” Journal of American College Health, 58(3)2009:247-254
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Keep Guns Off College Campuses!
