The argument, often made since April 16, is simple: Fight gunfire with gunfire.

Had Virginia Tech allowed its students and staff to have guns on campus, the argument goes, maybe an armed hero would have stopped Seung-Hui Cho's shooting rampage before more than 50 people were killed or injured three weeks ago.

But under most theories, the hero would have needed a permit to carry a concealed handgun.

None of the 51 people identified to date as being killed or injured in the shooting rampage had such a permit in Virginia, according to a search by The Roanoke Times of online court records.

"Even had the Virginia Tech policy been different, no one would have been there to save the day," said Brian Siebel, a senior attorney for the Brady Center to Prevent Gun Violence.

While the glare from a national media spotlight is fading at Virginia Tech, the long-term repercussions from the nation's worst mass shooting are just beginning to take shape. One of the emerging debates is whether to allow college students to carry handguns and rifles along with books and backpacks.

In a report released last week, the Brady Center highlighted what it called the gun lobby's campaign to push guns into colleges and schools.

"Before a single funeral was held for any of the victims of the Virginia Tech tragedy, and before anyone even knew who the victims were or the perpetrator was, the gun lobby called for college campuses to be turned into armed camps," the report stated, referencing statements from a number of organizations that criticized Tech's no-guns rule.

Allowing guns on campuses might have escalated the body count at Tech, the report concludes, and could lead to a host of unintended consequences: more gunplay at the hands of drunken students, deadlier results in the 24,000 suicide attempts annually by college students, and gun theft from unsecured dorm rooms.

But for those on the other side of the issue, what happened at Tech only reinforces their view that gun-free zones draw criminals to places where the victims can't shoot back.

Chris Brown, a student at the University of North Texas and founder of Students for Concealed Carry on Campus, said last week that his newly formed group will support laws to rescind gun bans like the one at Tech.

Brown admitted it's difficult to say whether an armed student might have stopped Cho.

"Whether it would save lives, who knows?" Brown said. "But they should give us a chance to save lives. Forcing us to be defenseless in our college classrooms and on our campuses is a travesty."

Only one state -- Utah -- has a law that expressly allows the carrying of concealed handguns at public colleges. Virginia and most other states allow individual universities to set their own policies.

A survey conducted by the Alliance for Justice in 2003 found that all 150 major colleges and universities surveyed restricted firearms in some form. Eighty-two schools banned guns outright, 25 required them to be stored in a central facility, and another 27 restricted possession to certain groups such as ROTC units and shooting teams, the survey found.

In Virginia, recent efforts to change campus policies have been unsuccessful.

The issue came up last year, after a Tech student was disciplined for violating a policy that prohibits students, employees or visitors from bringing guns onto campus,

A bill was introduced in last year's General Assembly that would have prohibited state schools from limiting the rights of students with concealed handgun permits. It never made it out of a committee.

But considering the events of April 16, "I think it's something that's probably going to resurface," said David Adams, president of the Virginia Shooting Sports Association, the state National Rifle Association affiliate.

Like Brown, Adams was reluctant to say definitively that Cho's murderous rampage would have been cut short had he crossed paths with a student or a professor with a gun.

"The only thing we do know is the ban made sure the possibility of that being the case was not going to occur," Adams said. People with concealed handgun permits are law-abiding citizens likely to follow rules such as Tech's gun ban, he said, while criminals such as Cho are just as likely to ignore them.

"There apparently was not a gun law in place that could have stopped him," Adams said.

"The policy in effect made sure Cho had a safe zone to go out and commit the crimes that he had planned."

Brown, who was so affected by the shootings at Tech that he formed Students for Concealed Carry on Campus one day later, said he has received widespread support since launching his Web site.

Concealedcampus.org features on its home page a photograph of police officers carrying a young man from Norris Hall under the caption: "One student with a concealed weapon could have prevented this."

In the past three weeks, Brown said, 60 students at schools across the country have expressed an interest in starting chapters on their campuses, and 3,500 people have joined his Facebook group.

Although 51 of Cho's victims did not have concealed handgun permits issued in Virginia, both Brown and Adams wondered about the other people in West Ambler Johnston and Norris halls, the two campus buildings where 32 people were killed before Cho committed suicide. A complete list of the buildings' occupants on the day of the shootings was not available.

About 135,000 Virginians, or 2 percent of the population, have concealed handgun permits. Because the minimum age to get a permit is 21, the percentage is likely lower on college campuses.

Tech officials said last week that the shootings had not led them to rethink the ban.

"We believe that only law enforcement ought to have weapons in our facilities," spokesman Larry Hincker said. Hincker said he could not recall another shooting on campus in his 19 years at Tech.

Asked about other cases in which a law-abiding gunman stopped an armed criminal, Brown cited a shooting at the Appalachian School of Law in far Southwest Virginia as "the biggest one that has been talked about."

Some observers say two students with guns prevented additional mayhem by a mentally disturbed student who killed three people and wounded another three on the school's Grundy campus in 2002.

But that view was contested by another student who tackled gunman Peter Odighizuwa after he had emptied his gun.

"Their guns had no effect on Peter," Ted Besen, now an attorney in Wilmington, N.C., told The Associated Press. "I already had Peter on the ground before they got out their guns."

There have been other reported cases of good gunmen deterring the bad ones, including a high school principal in Mississippi who cut short a school shooting and an off-duty police officer in Salt Lake City who intervened in a shopping mall shooting.

But more often than not, advocates for gun control say, a citizen caught in the midst of a chaotic shooting would have a hard time returning fire in a way that would not make things worse.

Even trained police officers hit their targets in such situations only 20 percent of the time, according to the Brady Center's report.

"That's not something that is taken into consideration by the people who talk about having James Bond in the classroom," said Zach Ragbourn, a spokesman for the center.

"For every best-case scenario you can come up with, there are a thousand worst-case scenarios."

Newsroom researcher Belinda Harris contributed to this report.