Sunday, July 01, 2007
More guns would equal more deaths
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Brian J. Siebel
Siebel, of Falls Church, is a senior attorney at the Brady Center and author of "No Gun Left Behind: The Gun Lobby's Campaign to Push Guns Into Colleges and Schools."
As a Virginia parent of two children who someday may attend public colleges in the commonwealth, I am alarmed that individuals like Donald A. Stadler ("More guns would be safer," June 21), and organizations like the National Rifle Association support changing Virginia law to allow students and faculty to carry guns on college campuses.
It may be easy, and seem heroic, to suggest that if only one of the students or teachers inside Norris Hall had had a gun that fateful morning of April 16, when Seung-Hui Cho went on his killing rampage, lives would have been saved. This view is misguided, however, for a reason spelled out in Stadler's own essay.
He notes that New York police officers, firing 276 shots, hit their targets only 23 times. Well, if trained police officers hit their targets only 8 percent of the time, isn't it a fantasy to suggest that untrained college students engaged in a crossfire are likely to be any more accurate? If more than 90 percent of the bullets fired back miss their target, what do they end up hitting instead?
But the real problem with the "heroic" view is that it ignores all the other times guns on campus would likely be misused if they became prevalent. The college-age years (18-24) are the peak periods for drug and alcohol abuse, suicide attempts and violent gun crime.
Moreover, two studies published in the Journal of American College Health have established that college students who own guns are more likely than the average student to engage in binge drinking, use cocaine or crack, be arrested for a DUI and be injured in alcohol-related fights. A binge-drinking, drug-using student is dangerous enough; do we really want to give him or her a gun?
Despite the horrific tragedy at Virginia Tech, college campuses are far safer than the communities that surround them. Ninety-three percent of the violence against students occurs off campus. One reason? Colleges control guns much more tightly than society at large.
We need to make society safer by preventing mentally deranged individuals like Cho from gaining access to guns, not make college campuses more dangerous by arming everyone.
Cho was a prohibited gun buyer, but fell through cracks in the Brady background check system. Gov. Tim Kaine has closed this loophole by executive order, and now Congress is moving a bill that would help put more mental illness records in the background check system nationwide.
That bill needs to pass. But we also need to close the remaining loophole in Virginia law that would allow the next madman to buy his guns at gun shows with no background check at all being run. Keeping guns out of the wrong hands is the best way to save lives.
