More guns won’t make campuses safer
The irony is not lost on us that the campus shooting at Umpqua Community College in Oregon occurred just as the University of Texas and other public Texas institutions are trying to write their own campus carry rules as mandated by the Texas Legislature.
The details of the Oregon shooting are still coming to light — and in some ways those details don’t really matter. These all-too-frequent events follow a predictable pattern. A troubled, likely mentally ill male with an affinity for firearms shoots up a school, movie theater or workplace with guns that are usually obtained legally. Usually the suspect shoots himself in the end or is killed by law enforcement, leaving behind a paper or digital trail of contorted views about religion, race or politics. Communities grieve, policymakers express sadness and outrage, flags are lowered and, in the end, nothing changes. Lather. Rinse. Repeat.
Since the Sandy Hook Elementary School shootings just three years ago, there have been 142 school shootings and nearly 1,000 mass shootings, according to The Guardian’s database. The Guardian keeps count because no agency in the United States is allowed to keep these statistics. With numbers like those, it is clear that if the deaths of 20 schoolchildren and six adults in 2012 didn’t move our current set of lawmakers to action, nothing will.
We share President Barack Obama’s frustration, evident when he pointed out that there is “a gun for roughly every man, woman and child in America. So how can you with a straight face make the argument that more guns will make us safer?”
Indeed, the idea promulgated during the last legislative session that more guns on college campuses will make us safer boggles the imagination. UT Sys- tem Chancellor William McRaven, a retired admiral, minced few words by saying in January that passage of campus carry would make our colleges “less safe.”
Last week’s images of faculty members and students protesting plans to allow concealed handguns in campus buildings are reminders that in addition to being charged with the education and well-being of students, our universities and community colleges are also major employers. Those employees, more than 24,000 at UT-Austin alone, should have the expectation that their institutions will take reasonable precautions to keep them safe.
As a practical matter, studying and working on a college campus of any size necessitates moving from building to building — libraries, classrooms, laboratories, administrative offices, dormitories, recreational facilities and medical facilities. Parking is nearly always limited, so the end result of this law means that conscientious concealed handgun carriers will still not be armed and those who wish to harass or harm will have even more ready access to lethal force.
Choosing to ignore the statistics and expanding the list of places where handguns can be carried without taking action to stem the acquisition of guns is the definition of insanity. Walking the same path inevitably will deliver you to the same destination — delivering platitudes to a hurting community that now must bury its loved ones and rebuild.
Our Texas universities have been placed in the position of implementing a policy they did not ask for and do not want. The University of Texas has the notorious distinction of being the first in a decadeslong string of mass shootings on campuses. In fact, the campus carry law will go into effect on Aug. 1, 2016 — the 50th anniversary of the day Charles Whitman climbed to the top of the UT Tower and killed 16 and wounded dozens more.
Historical precedent aside, universities have unique reasons to be concerned. Depending on the nature of the campus, there are high numbers of young adults making the stressful tran- sition to independent living and families interacting with medical professionals in life and death situations. Both groups have a higher-than-average concentration of mental health concerns and needs.
Recent studies and reports from universities suggest that there are higher rates of mental illness in college populations than in the past, with as many as one in four students having suicidal thoughts and one in three students reporting prolonged period of depression. The mental health of American college students increasingly has been called a crisis. And in medical settings, violence is also on the rise, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
Both situations increase the likelihood of unpredictable behavior and place an unfair burden on law enforcement to sort out the difference between a merely troubled handgun carrier and a truly dangerous handgun carrier.
And yet, these are the environments that our lawmakers have deemed necessary to introduce more guns, while they sit in their offices at the Capitol protected by metal detectors, state troopers and emergency call buttons.
The failure of lawmakers to pass reasonable gun control laws defies common sense and explanation. Obama was correct when he asked, albeit indirectly, if the National Rifle Association truly speaks for “America’s gun owners who are using those guns properly, safely, to hunt for sport, for protecting their families, to think about whether your views are being properly represented.”
If our current crop of lawmakers can’t find it within their own human decency to vote on common-sense gun legislation — such as limiting firearm access for the mentally ill — then perhaps it is time to elect lawmakers who will.