Tuesday, April 19, 2005
Editorial: Tech's campus gun ban merits an 'S' - for sensible
Firearms fundamentalists are wrong to target university public safety restrictions.
From the RoundTable blog
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Members indicated they would turn to the General Assembly or courts to force colleges and universities to drop campus gun restrictions that exceed state law. The reason? At Virginia Tech, the Second Amendment purists learned, a student with a concealed-carry permit faces disciplinary action for taking a gun to class. Tech bans all firearms, regardless of permits, except for those carried by police.
The Defense League might be on solid legal ground regarding a university's power to override state law. Virginia gun restrictions, however, are few outside elementary and secondary school grounds.
In terms of public safety and common sense, the league stands in quicksand.
On its side is the often-tried but only rarely true argument that an armed population can defend the community in incidents such as the fatal Appalachian Law School shootings in 2002. In a crisis, untrained shooters may be as likely to take innocent lives as save them.
On the other side is the preponderance of knowledge about risk factors in dorms and fraternity houses, dining halls, classrooms and labs: young adults whose maturity, emotional stability and ability to handle newfound freedom are often uneven; drinking and drug use; a higher suicide rate; sometimes extreme tensions between students and faculty (as in the Appalachian Law School incident) as a result of academic pressures and failures.
Surely firearms should be kept far away from events such as the wild annual Quadfest party at Radford University, which resulted in more than 400 arrests over the weekend, most of them alcohol-related. Or from stadiums and tail-gate parties, where alcohol often fuels ugly fan behavior.
In almost any campus setting, the dangers associated with guns overwhelm any benefit. The Virginia Association of Chiefs of Police and Fraternal Order of Police of Virginia apparently agree. Both support universities' right to ban firearms.
The General Assembly should, too, if the Defense League follows through on its threat.
