Thursday, April 24, 2008
blog stage eight
Allowing people who have obtained a license to carry on campus would put any gunman in a bad position. The worst place for a gunman to be is in a room full of people with guns. One who is in a heated argument and is at a place where anyone could be carrying a weapon would have to think the situation through very carefully before doing anything irrational. The realization that anyone may have a firearm would cool the argument quickly. Since the State of Utah has permitted students to carry a concealed hand gun I do not predict that there will be a school shooting there anytime soon. If a gunman were to act out there, people who are able to take action against him/her would do so. If the security guards are permitted to carry a firearm on campus why can’t I carry? Saying that a gun is a bridge to animosity and violence is like saying a pen misspells words. People are in control of their actions and they will handle a particular situation as they see fit. Their decision in a heated argument, weather it is right or wrong, would most likely be the same decision if it was thought about for a few days. Also recently students on campus at the University of Texas at Austin were carjacked at gunpoint. The defenseless students could do nothing but fear for their lives. If they had been carrying or if someone nearby had a firearm, they might have stopped the criminal(s).
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Response: "blog stage eight"
I agree with you Eric that “A room full of people with guns is a bad place for a gunman,” but also a bad place for all the people in the room. Proliferating guns across American university campuses is not going to deter someone who has reached a point where they are willing to go on a shooting spree because they are already unstable and don’t care. People like to tout “if everyone thought everyone else had a gun the world would be a safer place” but that is a simplistic view of the human mind. All human’s possess the urge to kill, but for most we are only capable of acting upon these urges in times of extreme rage. Both, the recent university shootings and headline grabbing school shootings were calculated and cold bloodedly carried out by gunman who mentally unstable. These people did not care if they died and would have carried out these attacks even if they thought they were walking into a room full armed classmates. It’s the same mentality that a suicide bomber uses when attacking a military checkpoint – they know they are going to die, and they know the checkpoint is armed to the teeth, they just don’t care.
The obvious answer to your question of “security guards carrying hand guns why can’t I” is because they have received “training” and you haven’t. In reality, these people probably aren’t anymore qualified to carry a gun then you, but for American’s to respect a position of authority we need to see a gun so that’s why they have one. I personally feel guns have no place in learning institutions, but that’s beside the point. The military requires its combat arms occupations to under go thousands of hours of training to be competent to handle firearms and to be able to use their inherent killing instincts. Law enforcement under go similar training. I doubt that an average college student has the time or inclination to undergo the amount a training necessary to make them able to react to a situation quickly enough to stop it let alone be a competent shooter, one who won’t blow the back of the head off the student in front of them. These situations happen in seconds and most people would be dead before they even knew what hit them.
Another good reason for keeping guns out of college student’s hands is that most are unstable, immature, and irresponsible. The military doesn’t even allow its members to conceal carry on bases and these people work day in and day out at the art of killing. I would not be surprised to see accidental shootings, gun related suicides, and alcohol related shootings sky rocket at Utah universities. Consider the average university student life. You are in a mentally stressful environment where alcohol abuse is common place and adult supervision (18 year olds are not adults I was one, I’ve worked with them, and I’ve lived with them and most do not have the same maturity level as some one 5 years older) is relatively non- existent. Throw a gun in the mix and that sounds like a situation I would not want to live in.
Arming students does nothing to solve the issue of why students want to shoot up their classmates in the first place. Canada has more guns per person then the US but yet they have far less gun related crimes and school shooting incidents, just something to think about. It would be wonderful to be able to walk around dishing out vigilante justice like in the movies, but in the real world the situation isn’t like that. We could require everyone in America to carry a gun but it still won’t stop crime or shootings.
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