DickWanner
Banned
Copyright Nicholas R Wanner 2008
Safest Learning Environment:
A Proposal to Allow Concealed Carry on College Campuses
Prologue
At 7AM on Tuesday, April 17th, 2007, English major Seung-Hui Cho enters West Ambler Johnston Hall dormitory . Fifteen minutes later two students are murdered, 19-year old freshman Emily Hilscher and 22-year old senior Ryan Clark. His weapons of death are two handguns, a .22 caliber Walther P22 and a 9mm Glock model 19. As Virginia Tech Campus Police and Blacksburg Police are responding to the scene of the double homicide, murderer Cho goes back to his own dorm room and changes his blood soaked clothes and destroys computer evidence of the atrocity he is about to commit.
Authorities are still trying to piece together the crime and locate a suspect when, two hours later, Seung-Hui Cho travels to the local Blacksburg Post Office to mail a package to NBC News . The package contains photographs, videos, and a manifesto of his desires to commit a horrific killing spree on a un-heard-of scale. Law enforcement and administrative officials believe that the shooter has left campus and they lock down the dormitory that is the site of the murder as a precaution, but are unsure of how or if they are going to alert students, faculty, staff. They believe that the double-homicide is an isolated incident and that the suspect will not return to the college. At 9:26AM they decided to send out a campus-wide e-mail, notifying of the shooting and asking that any information on the incident be reported to campus police
Unfortunately, shooter Cho had not intended on staying away from the college and 10 minutes prior to the email being sent out had returned to the Virginia Tech Campus. He chains the three exterior doors of Norris Hall from the inside with chains and locks and heads to the second floor to resume killing innocent people. From there he enters classroom 206, killing the professor and then going on to butcher nine of the thirteen students in the room as well as injuring two of the remaining four that are still alive. The killer then heads across the hall to room 207 and slays another professor and four more students in cold blood, executioner style. Two of the students shot in this classroom are lucky enough to not have died from their injuries. Finally, three minutes into the chaotic gunfire and bloodshed, 911 calls are sent out to officials and they begin to respond to the shootings, but they are delayed by the chains that Cho has secured to the doors and it will take authorities a full five minutes to get into the hall that is now a graveyard of innocent people. The shooter Cho then moves onto rooms 211 and 204, massacring more students and professors without mercy, continuing his reign of destruction and death. Two professors and a students attempted to barricade and hold the doors shut to their respective classrooms, but paid a fatal price in the process.
After what seems like an eternity, 12 minutes after the whole unbelievable ordeal began and 9 minutes after authorities have been notified, shooter Cho takes his own life with the tools he used to deal out death, just as police have gained access to the building. In 12 minutes, in what will be known as the worst school shooting in history, one psychotic man has take 33 lives including his own and injured another 17 people directly and 6 people indirectly. The events of this fateful day will not be forgotten or forgiven, as the hows and whys are trying to be understood, along with a way to make sure an event such as this never happens again.
Preface
Putting aside the first murders by Cho in the West Ambler Johnston Hall dormitory, there really could not have been a better response from law enforcement authorities with regards to the Norris Hall shooting. The entire killing of 31 people, including the shooter, occurred in approximately 12 minutes. It took three minutes for the 911-distress call to be placed which leaves nine minutes left. The responding law enforcement officers met an unforeseen obstacle with the doors being chained, but no real life emergency situation is guaranteed to go a specific way. It took officers five minutes to get through the chains and into the building, which means that there were four minutes between the 911 call and the officers arriving on scene. That is four minutes, 240 seconds, to get from 911-operator, to Blacksburg Police Department Operator, to Blacksburg Law Enforcement Officers being dispatched, to Blacksburg Law Enforcement arriving on-site. Statistically you cannot get a better 911-response time than four minutes from call to arrival. The only way to any better would be an officer to happen to witness the event. Virginia Tech Campus Police were on a heightened state of alert from the original double-homicide and Blacksburg Law Enforcement was already one scene, yet they still failed to stop Cho before he killed 32 innocent students and faculty members before turning the gun on himself. Being proactive in self-defense methods is what needs to be taken from the event, but not just in identifying potential shooters or criminals.
A Proposal to Allow Concealed Carry on College Campuses
Once considered a rare tragedy, school shootings have shown a recent trend of increasing in occurrence and size. To date no gun control legislation has appeared to be effective in curtailing these massacre-style shootings, including a federally implemented assault weapon ban that was put into action for ten years. Law enforcement and college authorities have yet to find an effective way to prevent, deter, or stop these horrible occurrences either.
There are people, including members of a national organization, who are proposing that individual citizens who are not in law enforcement, who have valid concealed carry gun licenses issued to them by their respective states, should be able to carry their firearm on college campuses and universities for the purpose of self-protection. This organization, Students for Concealed Carry on Campus , now has over 30,000. They wish to achieve their goal by making lawmakers, college students, faculty, and staff (as well as parents of students) aware of the issue. By allowing these licensed individuals to carry their firearms on campus, SCCC and other campus carry supporters hope to make colleges safer. They hope that this destructive trend of mass school shootings might be brought to an end by eliminating the victim zones that are created by no-gun prohibitions and policies.
Concealed carry on campuses can be proven as a safe and effective means of stemming college violence using published reports and statistics. Both past and current trends can show how campuses will change based on what is occurring at places where concealed carry is currently allowed off-campus. Myths and arguments against concealed carry on campuses can be shown as untrue and misleading. Statistics used to promote gun control and put gun owners in a bad light can also be shown as misleading. There are one hundred and eighty-five reasons and one hundred and eighty-five families to think of when considering a proposal such as this. These reasons should not be easily forgotten and should weigh heavily in any decision made.
What may be considered the most important issue with concerns over allowing students, faculty, staff, and visitors to carry concealed firearms on college campuses is: are they really necessary? There is a need for removing the laws prohibiting those who have the proper firearm permit, license, or permission from carrying concealed on college property and grounds. School shootings occur more frequently than one might assume and one life lost due to such a tragedy is one life too many. Campus and local police do not have the manpower or resources to ensure the direct safety of everyone who comes onto a campus, nor should they be expected to. Another point to consider is that mass shootings are not the only crimes committed on college campuses and are not the only safety concern for those who frequent campus property.
While not the only reason for wanting to allow concealed firearms on campus, school shootings, including recent large-scale college shootings, have brought the issue to the forefront of the agendas of many state legislatures. 16 states have had proposals to allow some degree of campus carry and one state is still deliberating the bill (Louisiana) . Since 1966 there have been 61 horrible mass-killings at schools , 10 of which occurred on college campuses. The massacre at Virginia Tech in Blacksburg, Virginia saw 33 people dead including the shooter and another 20 wounded . The campus police believed the original shooting of a two students inside a campus dormitory, two hours before the shooter continued his rampage, was an isolated incident and that the gunman did not pose a threat to the rest of the campus, so they did not raise any alarm. Their assumptions were wrong and another 30 students and faculty members were killed by the end of this madman’s rampage. Since then colleges have implemented policies that include warning e-mails and text messages and locking doors and alarms with flashing lights. Flashing lights and alarms do not stop bullets, though, and do little to help when the alarms and warning systems cannot be raised before the shooter is done killing innocent people. The fourth deadliest college shooting in the United States at the Northern Illinois University in DeKalb, Illinois saw six people dead including the shooter and another 18 wounded before the first calls were sent out to campus police and 911 emergency services. There is little action that can be taken by law enforcement and campus administration to stop a shooter when he has completed his massacre before they are aware that it has happened. However, in the shootings at both the University of Texas at Austin and the Appalachian School of Law in Grundy, Virginia , the gunman was stopped from further inflicting death and injury by students with their personally owned firearms. While concealed carry of firearms on campus does not guarantee no more lives will be lost to campus shooters once they start their rampage, it has been shown to be an effective means to reduce the number of deaths in such incidents for effective damage control .
Even at the extreme measure of placing an officer in each classroom, cafeteria, parking lot, and door hall, this would at best only reduce the risk of crimes being committed against students and visitors. There has also been a landmark Supreme Court ruling that the police do not have any obligation to protect individual citizens and many officers are killed in the line of duty each year while trying to apprehend known dangerous criminals. Therefore even this suggestion of such an excessive police state would not and could not guarantee the safety of everyone on a college campus. At colleges where campus police are unarmed, the response time for a violent criminal or massacre shooter increases, as students must now wait for the local police authorities to be dispatched and arrive to intervene. On an open campus like FSC and many others, it is nearly impossible to regulate who comes on campus. Faculty and students remaining alert to note and report unwanted visitors and potential suspects accomplishes little in preventing someone from committing a violent crime and then leaving before they can be stopped or apprehended. To say that allowing concealed firearms on campus provides potential criminals a means to commit crimes is specious at best as they already come onto “gun-free” campuses prepared to commit violent crimes.
School shootings are not the only crimes that occur on campuses that can be prevented with concealed firearms. Crimes from muggings and robberies to attacks and rape occur on and around campuses and because of the current prohibitions on concealed carry both men and women are denied an effective means of defending themselves. In most states someone with a concealed carry license can carry a concealed firearm to nearly everywhere they are legally allowed to go with the intent of protecting themselves from violent criminals and crime. This includes the grocery store, mall, and movie theatre where the population is not that much more diverse than a college campus. There is little difference between the diverse population of a college campus and that of a crowed mall, yet one legally allows for concealed firearms to be carried and the other denies it by way of state and federal law.
