Even though campus-carry just died in Florida, it’s alive in other states and happens to be allowed in nine states, although in several of those states a campus can still opt out. But the bottom line is that Gun-nut Nation’s dream of getting rid of gun-free zones on college campuses is full steam ahead. And the reason for this gross stupidity is not because college campuses are so dangerous; actually they are very safe spots. In fact, the problem isn’t usually on-campus crime but crime committed in neighborhoods adjacent to college campuses because many colleges were founded in urban centers that used to be secure locations but have become less safe as the quality of life in older neighborhoods has declined.
On the other hand, college-age men and women happen to be susceptible to behavior which if it occurred within easy access to a gun might have very serious results. Depression is a problem for people of college age; ditto binge drinking, particularly on residential campuses, particularly on weekends when little supervision is around. Even though suicide rates for men and women ages 18 – 24 are higher for people in that age cohort who are not in school, the college experience can be stressful, particularly for students who are far from home. So why add a gun to the mix?
Because the truth is that the college experience is often the experience that forms the basic social values that people then follow for the rest of their lives. And if you drive around college campuses you’ll notice that there’s almost always an outdoor sports store in the neighborhood, but those stores don’t usually sell guns. They stock kayaks, running shoes, hiking and trekking gear, all the stuff which young, active people like to use in the years before they start to develop that wider waistline and end up sitting on their duffs.
Letting guns on campus is an invitation to promote the sale and ownership of guns to people who otherwise may never even think about arming themselves or using a gun for self-defense. There’s a reason why the percentage of American households containing guns continues to go down, and it happens to be going down at the same time that the percentage of Americans enrolled in college is going up. Get it?
A number of groups have sprung up to resist campus carry over the last few years, and one of the most provocative is a Texas-based bunch who call themselves Cocks Not Glocks and showed up on the UT campus last year to hand out dildos to express their anger over the campus-carry law signed by that idiot Greg Abbott in 2016. In case you are wondering, UT happens to be the same campus where Chuckie Whitman went to the top of the Texas Tower on August 1, 1966, killed 14 and wounded another 31 before he was shot by the cops, not by some undergraduate wandering around with his gun.
The Cocks Not Glocks group has now returned with a video, #StudentBodyArmor, which is something everybody has to see. And I mean everybody. View it on Twitter or Facebook, but make sure you see it and make sure you share it with everyone else. And when you watch the video, make sure to catch the scene where someone models a hoodie with body-armor lining to protect against head shots! It’s the best political satire I have ever seen.
I want this video to go as far as it can go. So I’m going to suggest to the CocksNotGlocks folks that they set up a page on GoFundMe or some other internet money raising site. My Franklin is ready to go and the money could be used to get your video onto commercial venues, maybe even some movie theaters here and there. It really deserves to be seen.
Apr 19, 2017 @ 16:03:31
Regarding the UT incident, to be fair: “…It so happens that many students on the UT campus were armed in 1966, and many of them fired at Whitman, who was ultimately killed by a police officer. Whether civilian gunfire was helpful that day remains a matter of debate.”
https://timeline.com/during-the-nation-s-first-mass-school-shooting-armed-students-fired-back-43bc18a3ddc3
But generally, campuses are not free fire zones and I suspect this might be about marketing. As far as safety, I recall that the one paper I read about students and guns (Miller et al, JOURNAL OF AMERICAN COLLEGE HEALTH, VOL. 51, NO. 2) said “…Students are more likely to have a firearm at college and to be threatened with a gun while at college if they are male, live off campus, binge drink, engage in risky and aggressive behavior after drinking, and attend institutions in regions of the United States where household firearm prevalence is high. Having a firearm for protection is also strongly associated with being threatened with a gun while at college. Students who reported having firearms at college disproportionately reported that they engaged in behaviors that put themselves and others at risk for injury.”
Lots of caveats.
But as I said to Cassandra Crifasi, let’s keep the apples and oranges apart. CHL holders would be different than college students as a class so not all guns on campus are equal. Of course suicide is a different issue.
I spent from my 18th to my 47th year on campuses. Never felt like I needed my hand cannons.