This Forum has gone far too long without a controversial thread!

The topic at hand is whether hand guns should be allowed on public universities for use by persons who have a conceal and carry permit for the state which the university is located.

Endyss and I had a long dialogue over this some months ago, each taking one side of the arguement.  I was curious as to how other feel, but before just polling...i thought i would take advantage of first mover and post my thoughts on the topic.

I am strongly opposed to any movement that seeks to pass legistlation allowing handguns on campuses.  I am taking this position even as a stong advocate of the second amendment.  I was born and raised in the southwest part of the country, I grew up with a gun-friendly family, and I am both a gun owner and a gun sportsman.  That said, I think it would be extremely dangerous and ill-considered to allow legally consealed firearms onto campuses and into classrooms.

Advocates of classroom vigilantism will argue that they have a right to self defense, or that if more people were armed that it would somehow deterr violence.  I don't agree.  Most university shooting are carried out by aggressors who either have a deathwish, or who are incapable of recognizing the consequences of thier actions.  These people will not be deterred in the least by knowing other people are carrying.  In some cases, they might even welcome the additional shooters in hopes that it would cause more damage (more on this later).  As for self defense...i would argue that your right to self defense doesn't apply when the means you are using puts innocent people's safety at greater risk.   What I mean by this is that you should not be able to cause collateral damage to other students or faculty by firing your weapon back at the agressor.  I don't know about you, but I wouldn't feel ANY safer sitting in a classroom of 60 people and knowing that 10 of them are armed.  That just means that if an aggressor came into the classroom...I now have to not only worry about bullets coming from one direction/source...but now 11 directions...quite a potential crossfire.   That leads me to my next point. 

In its current form, conceal and carry permits (in most states) only require a few days of classroom/homestudy education, and a few hours at a range.  This is wholly inadequate training as shooter accuracy can vary considerably and basically a new shooter has very little problems getting through the course.  Addtionally there is no Stress assessement or training.  What I mean is....being able to respond and react in a life or death situation.  I know I could probably argue with some of your for eternity about how you believe you know exactly how you would react in a situation when your life was on the line, but the reality is that I DONT FUCKING TRUST YOU.  I don't believe that you would be able to hit a moving target...with 40 people screaming and running across your line of fire, while the target is shooting back at you.  I know because I have played Left 4 dead with all of you, and shit nothing is on the line there.  What I DO believe is that you would hit me, or some other person...and increase the damage being done in general.  Infact I imagine alot of ppl would run away shooting wildly.  Pair that with the tendancy for some individuals to relish the opportunity at a firefight, and gladly throw any paperthin "causes to act" requirements out the window... Bus still people want to believe they are John McLane...

Some might advocate that they would help mitigate losses by stopping the shooting early.  My response is this:  You have no idea what is going to happen when somebody with a gun walks into a room.  He might be there with the intention to actually start shooting, but he also might not.  What I think is that by drawing a gun on the agressor, you will  95% of the time spark the black powder keg as the agressor suddenly feels like he needs to defend himself. 

And Lastly, It simply is another avenue for crazy people to legitimately get into public places with weapons without fear of reprisal until they start blowing people away.  How convenient it will be for a disgruntled student to walk through the halls with his pistol, walk into the classroom, open his jacket and blow his teacher away.  Then, when 2 other students drawn down on him..he can fire into the classroom (which he didnt plan on doing before..but now that there are 2 other ppl shooting at him..well hell...gotta defend yourself right?!)

GO!

I have never owned a gun, but the argument that bearing arms = protection is something I don't understand. 4 bodyguards tackling one person is protection. A taser or a pepperspray is protection. Running away is protection. Taking out your gun and blasting someone away is being a vigilante. Now I'm not saying trained policemen shouldn't use firearms to subdue an offender, but for personal protection? This idea seems impractical in practice. But maybe that's cause I'm Canadian...

I wouldn't go to certain parts of Canada (read: Toronto) without some sort of weapon. Scary stuff there.

You’re correct that I disagree with you (and appear to be in the minority here), but you didn’t address what I would call the core of my argument, either.

In a state of nature – i.e. without any government at all – we all have infinite right to do whatever we want.  Government is a codification of societal values, coming in with force to tell us where society has agreed to limit those rights.  We don’t want people killing or stealing from one another, so we make a government that says, “No, you can’t do that.” Even so, we draw distinctions between plain murder and killing in self defense, or “stealing” something back because the person has a legal right to own the property (as long as you’re not breaking other laws to do so, OJ), so our definition of limitations on rights is peppered all over with shades of gray.  The point is, as far as this topic goes, the question shouldn’t be whether to now allow concealed weapons on college campuses, it’s what are the justifications for and against allowing it, and whether government should be denying the right in the first place.

Most of the arguments against allowing concealed weapons on college campuses I’ve seen here focus on how unpredictable those allowed to carry might be or how it wouldn’t do anything to make you feel safer.  But aren’t those arguments more against the notion of concealed weapons at all, rather than just college campuses?  There are plenty of places you can already carry a concealed weapon, including crowded public streets or in line at Wal-Mart waiting to get in for Black Friday. Arguments about unskilled shooters and lack of increased safety would seem to apply to these situations at least as much as a school classroom, yet the argument here isn’t about extending the ban, but why to keep it where it’s at.

My rebuttal to Giller’s OP has two points, equal protection and original purpose.  As far as equal protection, I’ve already made my point that current concealed weapons laws allow licensed people the concealed carry right in a huge variety of situations with a few limited exceptions.  You can rant about the inadequancy of the training or potential instability of the concealed carrier, but how are these problems made more acute by the mere fact of a classroom setting?  Students might not like their grades?  What about folks fighting for the last Xbox 360 on opening day, are they not just as potentially unstable?  You could even make the argument that college students have at least ascended to an educational level above the average and might be less likely to fly off the handle, but my point is that college campuses don’t deserve any different treatment than other populated places where concealed weapons are entirely legal.  If we want to turn this into a discussion of the efficacy of concealed weapons laws at all, where those arguments might be better suited, then by all means.  But as long as the focus is why to allow or not to allow them in a specific area, I think there needs to be more required to single those places out than arguments that equally apply to dozens of other situations as well.

I should also note that in all cases where concealed weapons aren’t allowed, there are already laws in place that would deal with people that abuse the CCW right.  There’s no such thing as a “negligent self defense” exception where, in attempting to defend yourself you accidentally hit someone else.  You’re not, as Giller put it, “causing collateral damage” by merely being allowed to carry a concealed weapon.  It happens when you take it out and shoot someone!  Even in the clearest cut case of self defense for which CCW laws were created – someone mugging you alone in a dark alleyway – if you pull out your gun and fire wildly, hitting a pedestrian on the opposite side of the street, you’re still guilty of manslaughter.

Secondly, the purpose of a concealed weapons license is to legally protect oneself from life threatening danger.  In short, it doesn’t matter whether you would feel safer that I have a gun; if I am safer because I have a gun, then the CCW law has served its purpose.   The fact that a law abiding gun owner’s presence at the scene of events like at Virginia Tech might have prevented some of what happened is a sad truth, but not in itself a reason to allow individual CCW. As is made repeatedly clear in the “wholly inadequate” concealed weapons courses, a CCW license is not a license for vigilantism.  If you see someone being held up down the street, you should call the police and not get involved, just like anyone else.  Your right to reveal and use your concealed weapon only becomes legal when you would be otherwise legally authorized to defend yourself with deadly force.  I realize the crux of your argument is that several people with concealed weapons would actually make you less safe because of all the extra lead in the situation, but as far as why concealed weapons are allowed at all, it’s specifically to protect yourself, not to enable purveyors of frontier justice.  Again, for all objections that “purpose be damned, increasing the volatility of a situation is not a good thing,” please see my first point above.

Finally, yes, I realize there are indeed unique features of a classroom setting that are not entirely or often replicated elsewhere.  You needn’t enumerate them as though the mere distinction provides evidence that a ban is appropriate.  Under that theory, I can make a compelling case that no one should be allowed to have a concealed weapon within 50m of an Apple Store on the day of any new product launch, but the more patchwork out laws become in terms of “you can carry here”, “you can’t carry here”, the more we just dodge the real question about whether people should be doing it at all.

((And btw, I see this argument that we should ban law abiding CCW licenseholders from carrying on campuses because the only damage we want to see is from the wackjob shooter who enters without fear of resistance and any alternative would simply mean more bullets, is fallacious.  For the purpose of these situations, more bullets don't simply equal more bullets.  Gun laws are laws against self defense, pure and simple, and creating these mandatory gun-free zones are in reality just making for free-crime zones.))