Sunday, September 24, 2006
Keep guns, licensed or not, off campus
From the RoundTable blog
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Nancy A. Gibbs
Gibbs lives in Blacksburg.
In Great Britain, most law officers are not permitted to carry handguns for the very reason that a scuffle with a prisoner may result in the officer losing control and perhaps being killed. This is allegedly what happened when William Morva stole a deputy's gun and shot and killed Derrick McFarland, an unarmed security officer at Montgomery Regional Hospital who tried to come to the deputy's aid.
Morva escaped from the hospital, and is accused of later killing Cpl. Eric Sutphin with the deputy's handgun. A day later, a similar shooting took place in Georgia where a police officer lost control of his gun and was shot and killed by a shackled prisoner.
It is clear that if, as in Great Britain, the officers had not been carrying handguns when handling their shackled prisoners, these unfortunate and tragic events may not have happened, and the officers might very likely be alive and well with their families today.
After the shootings, the Virginia Tech campus was shut down like an armed camp, with a large number of police officers guarding campus armed with handguns, shotguns and rifles on the lookout for Morva.
When directed to leave his class in Squires Student Center, Bradford B. Wiles, a graduate student at Virginia Tech, realized upon exiting the building without his handgun that he had no means of self-protection. He writes that, despite the large number of armed police officers, he felt helpless and vulnerable without his handgun ("Unarmed and vulnerable," Aug. 31 Commentary page). He goes on to say that "he never wanted to have his safety fully in the hands of anyone else, including the police."
Virginia Tech prohibits students from carrying handguns on campus under pain of expulsion. Wiles wants the policy changed so that he and other licensed handgun owners can safely walk around campus and attend class with concealed handguns. Rather than expecting the Virginia Tech police to be responsible for his safety and that of the student body in general, Wiles with his concealed handgun would take care of his own safety and perhaps that of others.
Of the thoughts that were racing through his head on the morning of Sutphin's murder, he says, the most overwhelming was his sense of helplessness given that he was unarmed and vulnerable without his handgun.
I have a granddaughter who enrolled as a freshman at Virginia Tech. The thought of the university changing its policy so that some paranoid student can carry a concealed handgun on campus frankly scares the hell out me, not only for my granddaughter's well-being and personal safety but for the well-being and safety of all of the other students on campus.
Wiles concludes his jeremiad by asserting that he is qualified and capable of carrying a concealed handgun and that we should work with him and make it possible for the university to give him his "most basic right of self-defense."
Nonsense! The last thing that Virginia Tech needs is a student body licensed to carry concealed handguns on campus and to class. It would surely be an invitation for senseless and tragic accidents, woundings and killings, something that the university has avoided these many years under a policy that prohibits students from carrying concealed handguns, licensed or not, on campus.
