Dr. John Lott has another new piece in The Hill newspaper on academics concerns about guns on college campuses. The piece starts this way:
Gun control advocates frequently advise against people using guns for self-defense. But Michael Bloomberg and various anti-gun politicians often use armed guards as protection.
Talk is cheap. But when a professor resigns because of his university’s concealed carry policies, that’s a story that can get national attention.
In May, associate history professor Jacob Dorman resigned from the University of Kansas. He accepted another tenured position at a different public university in a noncampus-carry state.
In his resignation letter, Dorman predicted that Kansas will be “driving off faculty members” when it enacts campus carry on July 1.
Dorman is not alone in his prediction. Many at Texas public universities expressed similar dismay after the passage of a similar law in 2015. According to the University of Texas at Austin’s “Campus Carry Policy Working Group,” people thought it would “impede the University’s ability to recruit and retain students, faculty, and staff.”
The professors expressed concern that a permit holder might get angry over a grade and start shooting. But that has never happened.
Twelve states mandate the right to permitted concealed carry on public college campuses and an additional 22 states leave it up to the university. Not once has a permit holder in any of these states committed a crime on one of these campuses with a gun.
In his resignation letter, Dorman worries that “campus shootings have become all too frequent,” but these attacks haven’t been occurring on campuses that allow permitted concealed handguns. And he claims “arming students has done nothing to quell active shooter situations because students do not have the training to effectively combat shooters,” but, according to law enforcement and prosecutors, concealed handgun permit holders with the same amount of training have stopped dozens of mass public shootings. . . .
The rest of the piece is available here.
Max Dane
[email protected]
Refuting the objections to campus carry is so easy, yet so seldom done, at least in a meaningful way. Using the parts of Professor Dorman’s quoted as an example:
1. How many other faculty or staff resigned because of this policy?
2. There are now probably more than 50 institutes of higher learning which permit guns on campus. How many other resignations from these universities have there been?
3. How many crimes have been committed by students legally carrying firearms on campuses?
4. How many firearms have been carried illegally on campuses?
5. How many crimes have been committed with firearms illegally carried on campuses?
5 a. How many of these crimes with firearms carried illegally have occurred on campuses which permit legally carry firearms?
Having been a resident of Florida for almost 2 decades before their concealed carry law was passed in 1987 I saw Miami go from ‘Murder City’ in the 70s to a city that is seldom mentioned when discussing cities with severe crime problems. With over 1 million Concealed Carry Permit holders, the number of permits revoked may have reached triple digits by now (in 30 years), and most of those were for carrying a firearm in a restricted area or ‘openly displaying’ a firearm when it is inadvertently revealed. The question never asked of gun control proponents: would you rather have people legally carrying firearms, or do you prefer that the people carrying firearms be criminals?