Editorial: Guns on campus?

Safety first. Though a college’s crime statistics might seem moot during the initial… Safety first. Though a college’s crime statistics might seem moot during the initial application process — campuses experience lower-than-average crime rates and prospective applicants tend to look for other attributes — feeling safe on campus is a must. Academic success simply requires that students focus their attention on textbooks and lectures, not worrying their minds into mush every night they walk home.

For most people, knowing that campus police officers would respond to a call within minutes or that their cell phones would receive warning texts if campus security detects worthy threats is enough to calm troubled nerves. But others believe the holes in such an external safety net are just too big — especially in the heat of a crisis.

After the April 2007 Virginia Tech shooting, in which a student armed with two handguns rampaged through classrooms full of unarmed students and killed 32 of them before turning a gun on himself, a student at the University of North Texas founded Students for Concealed Carry on Campus.

SCCC urges colleges to support legal concealed carry of firearms on campus, and its advocacy efforts might have contributed to the Texas State University student government’s endorsement of concealed carry just yesterday. The student leaders at Texas State are the first to back a controversial amendment currently pending in the Texas legislature that would allow those over 21 years old and with the proper concealed carry permits to bring firearms onto campus without fear of penalty from their respective institutions.

The issue of concealed carry is especially charged as threats, injuries and deaths involving firearms impact people asymmetrically and thereby promote widely divergent perspectives.

At Pitt, the administration’s position is clear. Although current laws of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania would theoretically permit concealed carry at institutions like Pitt, Student Code of Conduct defines possession of a firearm as “an offense related to welfare, health or safety.” Therefore, while 71 U.S. college campuses — out of thousands — allow students or affiliates to legally carry guns, according to KXAN-TV, Pitt explicitly doesn’t.

At The Pitt News, it’s more difficult to solidly come down one way or the other. Whereas guns on campus might provide certain people with extra freedom and another sense of safety, concealed carry could easily deny the same rights to other students who choose not to arm themselves.

We understand the need to feel prepared — as opposed to helpless — in the event of an imminent security threat, but it’s surely possible that average students wielding guns during such a crisis could jeopardize an organized lockdown effort by uniformed security personnel. Though SCCC’s claim that none of the 71 campuses that have endorsed concealed carry have experienced gun violence might be true, sitting in lecture knowing that fellow classmates could very well be packing heat could substantially degrade the overall learning environment.

As we continue our never-ending search for the best way to provide a violence-free campus community, for institutions of higher education to simply endorse concealed carry would not offer a complete solution, or even come close for that matter. But since more than 35 college campuses began allowing concealed carry at the beginning of this semester, it’s certainly time to talk about it.