Gun-free zones: the latest in suicide pacts

What did the Virginia Tech, Columbine, Beach, Jonesboro, Paducah, Connetquot High, Killeen, Orange Park, SuccessTech, and West Nickel Mines school shootings all have in common? They all occurred in gun-free zones. Think about it. If you were a psychopathic killer bent on mass murder, would there a better place than an area in which you are guaranteed to face no armed resistance? Gun-control advocate rhetoric aside, has anyone ever heard of a multiple victim shooting at an NRA meeting or a gun club?

Fortunately, not every potential victim is complicit in the suicide pact of our current irrational gun control laws. Case in point: Appalachain School of Law, where, in January, 2003, Peter Odighizuwa opened fire on campus, killing three students. The tragedy would have been worse had it not been for the quick thinking and courage of three students: Mikael Gross, Tracy Bridges and Ted Besen. As soon as they heard Odighizuwa open fire, Gross and Bridges ran to their cars, got their guns, and then went back into the school to stop the shooter. Approaching him from opposite directions, Gross pointed his firearm at Odighizua while Besen struck him and the three heroes successfully disarmed the gunman before he could inflict any additional casualties. Unfortunately, you probably never heard this story because, out of the 208 news threads about the Appalachain School of Law Shooting, only four mentioned that the students who stopped the gunman had guns themselves.

While many students have allowed themselves to slouch into the delusion that “it couldn’t happen here,” we have only to look back two years to remember a shooting right here on our campus. While fortunately no one was injured, it is not hard to imagine that the situation could have been much worse. Should the Appalachian Law School incident not inspire us to rethink our firearm prohibition on campus before, God forbid, another, maybe more deadly shooting occurs? According to the office of student life’s website, the “possession, use and/or distribution of firearms, ammunition, explosives, or weapons are prohibited.” The regulations go on to specify that prohibited items include: “firearms (defined as any projectile-firing device), guns (all types), ammunition, fireworks of all kinds, incendiary devices, explosives, flare guns, air rifles (including paint ball rifles), guns using BBs or pellets or darts, any slingshot device, all knives (including martial arts devices and ceremonial swords) except those that are designed and used for food preparation.” While these prohibitions may make us feel safer on campus, we must ask ourselves: should the new warning siren go off announcing a gunman on the loose, are we better off as sitting ducks guarded only by the ink of hollow words of sermonizing leftist rhetoric, or surrounded by an armed student body trained and ready to act?

There are currently 250,000,000 guns in the United States according to “Insurance, Life Expectancy, and the Cost of Firearm Deaths in the U.S.” by Wharton Business School, and no act of legislation is going to make them all disappear. Moreover, it is important to consider the costs of new regulation, registration, and enforcement of handguns, given the fact that murderers, bank robbers and drug dealers are unlikely to register the means of their criminal livelihoods. Thus, considering that criminals will not be deterred by tougher restrictions on gun ownership, only a fool could believe that a monster that would kill thirty-two innocent people in cold blood would be deterred by the prospect of filling out a few forms in triplicate; as the saying goes, “when guns are outlawed, only outlaws have guns.” 

In a study of all multiple-homicide shootings from 1977 to 1999, economists John Lott and Bill Landes concluded that concealed-carry laws were the only measure that had a positive effect in reducing death tolls. According to their findings, all 31 states that allowed citizens to carry concealed handguns after obtaining a permit witnessed a decline in murder rate, experienced a 60 percent reduction in multiple-shootings, and reduced deaths and injuries from multiple-shooting attacks in their state by nearly 80 percent. The Center for Disease Control and Prevention has corroborated their findings, estimating that armed citizens prevent up to 500,000 crimes annually. For instance, after the town of Kennesaw, GA, passed a law requiring all households to keep a firearm in the house, burglaries plummeted by almost 90 percent.  The facts tells the story: more guns, less crime.

Gun control legislation doesn’t stop murderers; it enables them by making them secure in their knowledge that their victims have no means to protect themselves. There are thousands of state and local gun laws on the books, but they are no more effective than the prohibition of alcohol was in the 1920s. Our only hope of reducing violent crime in this country is not to ban guns, but to punish criminals. We need stronger penalties for criminals who use guns, including mandatory minimim sentencing that place violent criminals behind bars for longer periods of time without any possibility of parole.

Instead of prohibition, we need to require that before anyone is permitted to buy a gun they take a course on how to use it, handle it, and keep it safely in their homes. In fact, like concealed-carry laws, gun education has proven to be effective in reducing gun violence. In the 1970s, in Highland Park, Michigan, city police initiated a program to teach merchants how to use handguns. The program was given wide publicity and in over the course of four months the robbery rate fell from an average of 1.5 every day to none.

In an eerily prophetic statement made last year in reference to the Virginia Tech massacre, Virginia Tech graduate student Jonathan McGlumphy said: “Is it not obvious that all students, faculty, and staff would have been safer if (concealed handgun permit) holders were not banned from carrying their weapons on campus?” The events of Monday, April 15, 2007, are all the more tragic when we realize they may well have been exacerbated by the very gun-control policies we’ve pursued to protect us.