We've come to the end of a week of protests by the Students for Concealed Carry on Campus. I would like to take this moment to point out that there are exceptions to all rights, including the right to speech and the expression of religion. Libel and slander are certainly not protected by the amendments to the Constitution, and you can't kill a person with those. There are exceptions to each of our rights as far as they are concerned with making sure that society as a whole is safe and reasonable for others from those rights.
A well-regulated Militia
being necessary to the security of a free State the right of the people to keep and bear Arms shall not be infringed. It is arguable that the term the people refers to the Militia as a whole and not to each and every individual. Even if you don't agree, the Constitution as a whole was written in a period when there was no army, navy, police or sense of national security. Other portions of the Constitution also mention free peoples (for not all people were free when it was written) and dealing with the Indian Tribes. The amendment should be addressed within the context of this age, not the one it was written in.
For those who still believe that the Second Amendment is a free pass, let's look at the statistics. According to the FBI Uniform Crime Reports and Centers for Disease Control, out of 29,569 Americans who died by gunfire in 2004, only 229 were shot in justifiable homicides by private citizens with firearms. In this case the FBI defines justifiable as being shot while in the commission of a felony. 229 is a ridiculously small number, if you consider that 504 Conceal and Carry Weapons (CCW) licenses were suspended in the state of Ohio between 2004 and 2007 for law violations (Ohio's Concealed Handgun Law: 2008 Report to the governor and General Assembly). This number reflects only concealed weapons in Ohio and does not address the number of licenses suspended or revoked for law violations in other states. And the numbers point to a population willing to violate the law while carrying a hidden gun, not a population that needs to worry about shooting someone in a lecture hall.
Many studies are done within relation to how quickly crime rates fall (as they seem to be falling universally across the country). Furthermore, a 1999 study by the Brady Center to Prevent Gun Violence shows that crime rates in states that had strict CCW laws fell by an average of 30 percent during the study period. The violent crime rate for the states that had weak CCW laws during this same time saw their violent crime rates drop by only 15 percent (www.bradycenter.org). CCW licenses do not correlate with safer streets, so they likely don't correlate with safer dorms.
The Brady Center for the Prevention of Gun Violence had one final statistic that I thought I would share. G? in 2003
one-fifth of law enforcement officers who were killed by gunfire in the line of duty (10 officers) were killed by an adversary using the officer's own service weapon. Police officers are trained individuals who spend weeks learning proper firearm procedure in a combat situation. Currently the only training requirement for CCW holders in Ohio is a 12-hour training course on gun safety. If a police officer can be shot to death with his own weapon, what should we expect from CCW holders? We can't expect these individuals to be competent in a combat scenario on campus, one that is likely to escalate in the presence of a gun, because they spent a weekend shooting targets.
Virginia Tech and Northern Illinois were remarkably tragic, and I hope we never see one like them again. Still, they are rare events on college campuses that make an argument toward working harder to keep guns off campus. There is no way to know if the introduction of one or two more guns would have led to a better resolution. A shootout in a lecture hall is hardly a best-case scenario. The members of Students for Concealed Carry on Campus have my utmost respect for expressing themselves; however, I and others on our campus do not agree that there is a strong need for concealed weapons. John Calhoun is a junior political science and sociology major.
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