How is “more guns” a solution to school shootings?
In the wake of the recent shootings at Northern Illinois University, Newsweek has the gall to ask the question “More guns on campus?” I covered this issue in the wake of the Virginia Tech shootings in a column for University of Maryland’s student newspaper The Diamondback, and I feel like it’s time to revisit that issue once again. If anything, Northern Illinois University had four guns too many on campus, though what we can do to keep firearms out of the hands of mentally deranged people is up in the air.
To understand where I’m coming from on this issue, you’ll need to know some relevant details from my life. My father’s father grew up in the country and was in the military. My father spent good portions of his youth in the countryside and was also in the military. Understandably, both of them spent a lot of time around firearms, though my grandfather is old enough now that he hasn’t shot one in awhile. My father, on the other hand, still owns guns and very occasionally goes target shooting. He thinks knowing how to use guns is important, so when I was a teenager, he bought me a rifle and taught me how to use it. Now, as a teen-aged boy, that is about the coolest thing ever, so of course I needed no convincing whatsoever to get into it. I still own the rifle, I still go target shooting occasionally, and my aim is still good enough to produce a hand-sized cluster at 100 yards, unscoped.
So know that I do understand how much fun it is to go target shooting. As a gun owner myself, I would never support a blanket ban against all gun ownership. A few of my friends from college hunt, and I’ve eaten some of the venison they’ve bagged (it was tasty!), so I appreciate the value of hunting as well. And it’s not as if there’s any shortage of deer around here. But — and this is the big but — I do not understand how anyone can consider everyone walking around armed to be an ideal vision of society. In an ideal society, you wouldn’t need your gun with you unless you were out target shooting or hunting. The rest of the time, it would stay at home. Guns are dangerous weapons. They can easily kill people. No one disputes this. Why anyone (the “More guns on campus” crowd) thinks the answer to shootings is for more people to be walking around with dangerous weapons, I cannot fathom.
College campuses are a uniquely bad place for guns. Disputes, especially those fueled by alcohol, are commonplace. Last month, in one night back on the University of Maryland campus, I saw three fights break out. Those fights ended with nothing more than bloody noses because the only weapons the participants had available was their fists. It could have been a lot worse if one was packing heat and decided to bring it out. Across the nation, tens of thousand of stupid alcohol and testosterone fueled altercations break out on college campuses each weekend. The vast majority of them are utterly insignificant in the grand scheme of things, ending with nothing more than bruised egos or faces. Within a week, the participants will continue living their lives as if nothing had happened. But what if a lot more of these dumb college kids are armed? That thought is terrifying.
In the overall picture of deaths due to firearms, shooting sprees are nothing more than a statistically insignificant blip. They stand out against the background roar of gun deaths because of their unusual character, but in aggregate number of deaths, they’re nothing. They’re less than 1%. So proposing a solution that could possibly make that 1% go down but increase the rest of the 99% is nonsensical. The more people walking around with guns, the more gun deaths you will have. It’s a simple truth. People, especially young men, are always going to be getting into fights anyway; it’s just that an increased availability of guns makes those fights much more deadly. And the increase in deaths from those very frequent but mostly mundane fights will vastly overshadow any decrease in deaths from the rare but unusual mass shootings.
I recognize that I don’t have a fully consistent viewpoint on gun control. I’m still trying to puzzle out the details. At the same time that I don’t want everyone walking around armed, I also don’t want to ban anyone who uses them for legal purposes from owning them. Like it or hate it, guns a strong part of American culture in a way that they aren’t in most other countries. We won our independence using guns, and we’ve kept the threat of an oppressive government at bay because the well-armed citizens can always step in and put an end to things. We’re incredibly invasion-resistant (not that we’ve been invaded since 1812) because so many of us own weapons and know how to shoot. If you think what we’re facing in Baghdad is bad, imagine how much trouble we would give any potential occupying power. Heck, the right to bear arms is even enshrined in the Bill of Rights of the Constitution.
So I somehow want to prevent sales of firearms to mentally deranged shooting-spree-type individuals and discourage idiots from carrying them around all the time, thus turning everyday altercations deadly. But I wouldn’t want to affect other gun purchasers in the least. I don’t have the answers to this difficult problem, only my own thoughts that I’m still trying to piece together.
February 19th, 2008 at 00:21
I’m not convinced more guns on campus would even do much to positively affect that “statistically insignificant blip.” I can’t imagine that in a mass shooting, everyone carrying a gun will know precisely who carrying a gun is the instigator.
February 22nd, 2008 at 12:33
I’m one that supports the concept of allowing guns on campus, but you’re right, with drunken fights and everything, our death toll could rise dramatically. The problem is, leaving those students unprotected makes them targets and results in the dozens of deaths from shooting rampages caused by people who break the laws that are in place. There are laws in place that ban guns on college campuses, but that hasn’t stopped the Vtech or NIU shooter. Perhaps if there were say, an extremely strict license that would allow you to have guns on campus; not carry them around concealed, mind you, but just have one on campus, say in your car or in your dorm room. And by strict, I mean you get a speeding ticket and you lose your license kind of strict. Leaves the guns in the hands of the generally law-abiding citizens, without letting them proliferate to the point where every drunken frat boy is carrying a piece.