Guns on Pitt’s campus: Concealed defense?

In the event of a shooting, students in nine states can legally have more than just the books in their bags to protect themselves.

But in the remaining 41 states, students who have concealed carry permits are either lucky enough to live in a state that lets schools decide, or unfortunate enough to live in a state that automatically makes them an easy target.

In Pennsylvania, universities and colleges make the call. Of the 18 state colleges in Pennsylvania, only six permit students who are 21 and over to carry concealed guns on campus.

Pitt is not one of those schools.

As a gun owner and fervent Second Amendment proponent, I see universities’ prohibiting of concealed weapons as more than just the curtailment of our liberties as Americans. It’s an infringement upon our rights as humans to protect ourselves and those around us when danger arises and we are left to our own defenses.

When we reflect on the many school shootings last year, more often than not, active shooters hold students and faculty at their mercy, with no way to protect themselves. But it doesn’t have to be this way.

“There have been many instances — from the high school shooting by Luke Woodham in Mississippi to the New Life Church shooting in Colorado Springs, Colorado, to the Oregon Mall shooting — where a killer was stopped after a civilian was lawfully carrying a firearm,” Kim Stolfer, the writer of the Castle doctrine for the state of Pennsylvania and president of Firearms Owners Against Crime, told The Pitt News.

The Castle doctrine is a piece of legislation that designates a person’s home as a place in which that person has certain protections and immunities, including the ability to use deadly force to defend themselves against an intruder.

“Many of these good incidents [of concealed carriers stopping shootings] were ignored by the media while glorifying mass shootings and encouraging copycat incidents,” Stolfer said.

Stolfer’s points match research on gun use.

The Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank in Washington, D.C., did a study in 2012 that cites about 5,000 news reports from November 2011 involving defensive gun usage, including instances of burglary or home intrusion, among other occurrences.

The study concluded that most defensive gun uses never make the news, and also showed that concealed carry policies on college campuses led to a reduction in crime.

The Cato Institute used two Colorado schools as test cases — after the state enacted its concealed carry law in 2003, Colorado State University allowed its students to also carry concealed weapons, but University of Colorado did not. There was a reported 60 percent decrease in crime at Colorado State since 2004, while the University of Colorado experienced a 35 percent increase during that same time period.

Allowing those with concealed carry permits to bring guns onto college campuses isn’t going to turn our lecture halls or dorms into the Wild West.

The Texas Department of Public Safety released a study May 1999 that demonstrated the safety of permit holders in Texas, and the study suggests permit holders aren’t accidentally firing their weapons and maiming those around them like many people fear they would..

Permit holders accounted for .246 percent of all aggravated assault crimes that involved a deadly weapon, which is four out of 1,629 convictions. It also showed that there were 3,303 convictions for people unlawfully carrying a weapon, and only 1 percent of these people were permit holders.

In 1999, Texas permit holders had a 0 percent rate of murder convictions.

Responsible gun owners know that during a school shooting, time is of the essence.

“Law-abiding citizens are put in a position to react to a deadly threat and without the tools to level the playing field against an aggressor, it is unlikely that the victim can prevail and will be at the mercy of the perpetrator,” Stolfer said.

According to the Department of Justice’s Bureau of Statistics Criminal Victimization in the United States 2008 Statistical Tables that the Department of Justice released in 2010, police can often take up to an hour to arrive at the scene of a crime.

The report reflects that for violent crimes, the police only respond within five minutes about 28 percent of the time, within six to 10 minutes around 30 percent of the time and within 11 minutes to one hour 30 percent of the time.

Those response times probably seem brief enough. But how long did it take Adam Lanza, the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooter, to kill 26 people?

Eleven minutes.

“The key element here is that by the time law enforcement responds to a life-or-death situation, it is usually too late to intervene,” Stolfer said.

Economists John Lott, founder of the Crime Prevention Research Center, and William Landes, a professor at University of Chicago Law School, found in a 1999 study that mass shootings commonly happen in places where guns are banned and shooters know everyone will be unarmed, such as malls and schools.

Thirteen years after his study, Lott noted on Fox News, two months after the Aurora theater shooting, that his theory still proved true.

The Aurora Theater shooter James Eagan Holmes had a choice of seven movie theaters that were showing the “Batman” movie in 2012. All theaters were within a 20-minute drive from his home, but the Cinemark Theater Holmes chose was the only one that banned concealed handguns.

The logic is understandable — outlawing guns on campuses could subsequently result in fewer gun deaths and shootings.

“However well-intended these policies may be,” Stolfer said, “the net result is that students and faculty have been and are placed at the mercy of the criminal element while on college campuses due to the no-guns policy.”

Americans who have concealed carry permits have undergone training and licensing in order to prove they are able to handle their firearm safely, and in the case of an emergency, can practice their constitutionally endowed right to self-protection.

Banning guns at universities does little more than make students even more susceptible to the mass acts of violence we’ve seen repeated at several colleges and universities. All it takes is one student with a concealed carry permit to end what could have potentially turned into a reign of terror.

The Second Amendment applies to students too, and shouldn’t end where campus borders begin.

Marlo Safi is the Assistant Opinions Editor for The Pitt News. She primarily writes about public policy and politics.

Write to her at mes26@pitt.edu