Friday, June 29, 2007
Young, rash and armed?
From the RoundTable blog
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Skaggs is an associate professor in the educational research and evaluation program at Virginia Tech.
Many of my colleagues, friends and students at Virginia Tech who are not from this country are bewildered by our insistence on owning firearms and even more so by the numerous letters and essays in this newspaper that propose greater, not less, access to guns.
They are from countries in which guns are almost impossible to obtain and in which shooting deaths are relatively rare. In Canada, for example, stricter gun control cut firearm deaths in half between 1979 and 2002, and now the U.S. rate of gun homicides is eight times that of Canada.
Most of the letters and essays promoting greater gun access legitimately reflect the greater sense of fear we all experienced in the aftermath of April 16. Their basic argument is this: Criminals will always be able to obtain guns, regardless of any gun control legislation. We, as law-abiding citizens, need the guns to be able to protect ourselves from the criminals. By extension, if faculty and students had been carrying guns on April 16, Cho might have been stopped earlier and lives might have been saved. Maybe.
But it is also possible that more innocent people might have been killed. Think of a shoot-out in an enclosed classroom. Think also of police coming into the middle of a gunfight. Would they know where to aim?
We'll never know.
One essay, however, is inexcusable. Robert Marcus ("Virginia should let citizens protect themselves," May 14) wrote that Cho "chose his 'gun-free' campus as the site of his blood orgy, in perfect awareness that there would be no one present who could stop him." Is the president of the state firearm dealers association also a mind reader? This is shameless fear mongering, and I trust my fellow Virginians to recognize it as such.
Frankly, the thought of concealed weapons on our campus is a terrifying prospect, both as a faculty member and as a parent of an undergraduate. Whether owning a gun will protect us from criminals intent on harming us is debatable. But certainly having more guns on campus will lead to many more accidental deaths. For one thing, good people occasionally lose it.
A couple of years ago, I informed a student that I could not add him to my class because it was already overbooked. At that moment, he went absolutely ballistic, for about 30 seconds, after which he was fine. But if he had had a gun in his hand at that moment, I might not be here to write this.
As a parent, I shudder at the thought of my daughter being among thousands of very young people carrying concealed weapons. I remember the parties I attended as an undergraduate. After much drinking, some students became happy, some became weepy, some fell asleep. But some became angry and wanted to start a fight. If those students had guns, who knows what would have happened?
The point is that good people occasionally lose control, and you don't want them to have guns in their hands at that moment.
Gun advocates talk a lot about the value of good training and considerable experience in the responsible use of firearms.
But these are not required in order to purchase a handgun in Virginia. And college campuses are populated by people who are very young and relatively inexperienced in crisis and life-threatening situations.
As Gov. Kaine considers whether to open the state's campuses to firearms, I hope he can see that the prospect of thousands of teenagers carrying guns will make campuses far less safe places to be.
