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Do my duties as an educator include carrying a gun? Maybe.
(by David Linzee - June 10, 2009)
Ah, summertime in the groves of academe. The pace slows, and we sit back and reflect on how to do our jobs better next year. The question I’m pondering now is: do my duties as an educator include carrying a gun?
Many Missouri lawmakers appear to think so. In the session that ended May 15, a bill that would allow licensed gun owners to carry concealed weapons on public college campuses passed the House by 106-41. It died in the Senate, but we can expect it back. Pro-gun forces in the U.S. Congress have just won the extension of concealed carry to the national parks, including the Gateway Arch grounds. Harris-Stowe State University and the University of Missouri-St. Louis, where I work, could be next.
University of Missouri President Gary Forsee has said that he supports the gun ban on campus. I’m relieved. The darn things are so expensive — by the time I finish paying for gun, training and license, I can kiss my vacation goodbye — and so inconvenient — I’d have to keep my sports jacket on all day long to conceal my weapon.
The pro-gun people would say I should set aside these petty objections, because I or any armed citizen has the potential to avert a tragedy of the kind that happened at Virginia Tech with one timely shot. They maintain that concealed weapons are on campus already — in the hands of criminals and sociopaths. But responsible citizens with carry permits have to leave their guns at home. In fact, crooks and crazies regard campuses (and other no-gun zones) as soft spots, full of defenseless targets.
At the university, we’re supposed to be open-minded, so I have to admit that I can’t disprove what they say. Anybody can enter our campus without going through a metal detector. We don’t even have those red circle-and-bar gun ban signs. In fact, I can’t prove that gun-ban zones are anything more than symbolic. Last time the St. Louis Post-Dispatch checked with the St. Louis County Police, the department had never handled a single complaint of someone carrying a gun into a no-gun zone.
Is it possible that this campus is a (discreetly) armed camp, that most of the people I pass in the corridors are packing heat and that I should accept that a pistol is as necessary for me as a pencil?
Not so fast. At the university, we’re supposed to respect research, so I went looking for some facts. They’re hard to come by in the gun debate. You find plenty of impassioned argument about Constitutional rights, tendentious hypotheticals and urban legends. But concealed carry has been the law of most of the land for some years and by now we should have the facts and figures: does concealed carry lower violent crime rates or raise them?
My search engines turned up only a couple of rather old articles. Maybe researchers and reporters got discouraged because their conclusions were so anticlimactic. A 2005 statistical analysis by a team of criminologists found that concealed carry laws had no effect on crime. A 2007 Post-Dispatch story reported that the effect of the Missouri law was “nil.”
How can this be? With so many people allowed to carry guns (and permit applications have skyrocketed since the election of Barack Obama), you’d expect to see on the TV news stories of armed citizens shooting murderers and rapists (or each other) every week. But you don’t.
A possible explanation was offered by a police officer in the Post story. He said most of the people he knows who have licenses rarely or never carry their guns. That’s also true of the only licensed person I know.
You can see how it would go. With permit in wallet and gun in holster, you go about your business. For weeks or months, you encounter no situation that would be improved by your pulling a gun. Finally, you leave the heavy gun and itchy holster at home.
Having the right to bear arms is exciting, but actually bearing them is a drag. It means putting yourself to inconvenience and discomfort as a precaution against an extremely unlikely hazard. It’s like wearing a seatbelt or bike helmet — the sort of precaution associated with namby-pamby liberals rather than robust conservatives.
Now there’s an intriguing possibility. The people who are enthusiastic about their right to carry are unlikely to bother to do so, while the people more likely to do so abhor having the right to carry. Net result: not as many armed citizens out there as the pro-gun forces would have us believe.
That’s fine with me. I don’t see concealed carry enhancing campus safety. In my experience (as a victim, unfortunately) criminals know how to use the advantage of surprise. A gun won’t do you any good, unless you’re as alert as a cop on the beat — all the time. And in a multi-tasking society where talking on the phone while driving is the norm, few can remain constantly vigilant for dangers that hardly ever materialize.
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