Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence : Guns in Colleges and Schools

Help Stop the Gun Lobby's Effort to Push Guns into Colleges and Schools
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The Brady Campaign opposes efforts to force college and school officials to allow students and teachers to carry hidden handguns on campus and in classrooms.

Arming students and teachers is the gun lobby's ludicrous response to the horrible massacres at Virginia Tech and Northern Illinois University. This gun lobby effort takes place primarily at the state level.

Arming students and teachers would not save lives in the rare instances where mass shootings occur on campus. Even trained police officers, on average, hit their intended targets less than 20% of the time.

The gun lobby's "solution" is to force guns into every nook and cranny of American life. We disagree. We must stop gun lobby-backed legislation that would prohibit colleges and universities from barring possession or use of firearms on campus.

All states, except Utah, have rejected tying the hands of campus administrators and security. If these laws were to pass, it would mean that students as young as 18-years-old could carry handguns with high-capacity magazines to class or keep AK-47s in their dorm rooms.

» Click here for reasons to stop guns on campus
» Click here for a list of school shootings since 1997
» Click here for a list of state battles

No Gun Left Behind: The Gun Lobby's Campaign to Push Guns Into Colleges and Schools

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Overview

POSITION: The Brady Campaign opposes efforts by the gun lobby to force college and school officials to allow students and teachers to carry hidden handguns on campus and in classrooms.

PROBLEM: The gun lobby wants to override decisions made by those responsible for campus safety by allowing students to keep handguns and other firearms in college dorm rooms and carry them into classrooms.

THE THREAT: College students engage in a great many high-risk behaviors, including binge drinking and drug abuse, and are also at elevated risks for suicide. Dorms and classrooms provide little room for the safe storage of weapons. Introducing guns into this environment will increase the danger to students every hour of every day.

Arming students would not save lives in the extremely rare instances where mass shootings occur on campus. Even trained police officers, on average, hit their intended targets less than 20% of the time. If several people are armed during a shooting incident, security will not know which person is the aggressor. Moreover, with everyone armed, security will not know when to issue a “lock-down” alarm or be able to disarm a campus threat before the shooting starts. Restricting hidden handguns to persons with concealed carry licenses is not the solution.

Indeed, several mass shooters were qualified for, and would have been issued, concealed carry licenses if they had applied for them.

URGENCY: The gun lobby has introduced legislation in more than a dozen states to prohibit college officials from enforcing rules that prohibit guns in college dorm rooms and classrooms. Only one state – Utah – currently prohibits college administrators and security professionals to set rules regarding firearms on campus.

SOLUTION: State legislators should either prohibit guns on campus, as nearly half of the states do now, or continue to allow college administrators and security professionals to adopt and enforce rules that prohibit guns in college dorm rooms and classrooms. Rather than allowing our campuses to become armed camps, state legislators should fight for stronger gun laws to keep dangerous guns away from dangerous people.

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Frequently Asked Questions

POSITION: The Brady Campaign adamantly opposes efforts by the gun lobby to force college and school officials to allow students and teachers to carry hidden handguns on campus and in classrooms.

Q. Would arming college students make campuses safer for students and faculty?

A. No. Bringing guns into the campus environment will increase the danger to students every hour of every day. College students engage in a great many high-risk behaviors – including binge drinking and drug abuse – at alarming rates. Nearly 50% of full-time college students binge drink or abuse drugs at least once a month (NCASA, p.4).

Students are also at elevated risks for suicide, with 1,100 successful suicides and an additional 24,000 attempts every year (Cintron, 2007). Thus, in addition to significantly increasing the risk of accidental shootings (Brady Center, 2007), and suicides (Miller, “Household Firearm,” p.1029), allowing guns on campus will also likely lead to more gun thefts, which are a key source of guns used in crime (Brady Center pp.8-9).

Q. Won’t arming college students deter the kind of attack that took place at Virginia Tech or Northern Illinois University?

A. No. The perpetrators of mass shootings are nearly always suicidal, and end up taking their own lives at the end of their rampages. Armed students would likely become the first targets of any suicidal attackers, who can prepare for such an attack by maximizing their firepower. For example, a crazed gunman who recently attacked a city council outside St. Louis, Missouri, first shot and killed two armed police officers before continuing his rampage (Ratcliffe, 2008). He even used one of the officer’s guns in furthering his attack.

Campus law enforcement officers know this to be true. A survey of over 400 campus police chiefs found that 86 percent of campus police chiefs disagreed or strongly disagreed that "allowing students to carry concealed weapons on campus would prevent some or all campus killings" (Thompson, p. 250).

Q. Won’t lives be saved if students can shoot back?

A. No. Security professionals believe that arming students to shoot back would actually make matters worse in the extremely rare instances where mass shootings occur on campus. Even trained police officers, on average, hit their intended targets less than 20% of the time (Morrison, pp.331-332). Thus, common sense indicates that more, not fewer, people are likely to be killed if untrained students engage a shooter in crossfire.

Moreover, if several people are armed during a shooting incident, security will not know which person is the aggressor. Also, with everyone armed, security will not be able to issue “lock-down” advisories or disarm a campus threat before the shooting starts.

Q. Can’t we trust college gun owners to be safe and responsible?

A. No. In fact, two studies done by Harvard researchers have shown that college student gun owners are less law-abiding than the average student. They are more likely than the average student to:

Engage in binge drinking (two-thirds engage in this behavior)
Use cocaine or crack,
Be arrested for a DUI,
Vandalize property, and
Get in trouble with police (Miller, Hemenway, and Wechsler pp.62-64; Miller et. al, “Guns at College,” 1999).

Concealed carry licensees have committed homicides, violent felonies, and other horrific crimes (Brady Center, pp.22-26). Several mass shooters, including the Virginia Tech killer, would have been issued concealed carry licenses had they sought them (Brady Center, p.6). It makes no sense to make it easier for mass shooters to bring guns on campus.

Q. Who is pushing the idea of arming college students?

A. The gun lobby (Brady Center pp.vi-v and n1) and a tiny minority of college students (http://www.bradycampaign.org/media/clips.php?issueID=50). The vast majority of Americans – 94% according to one survey – oppose this dangerous idea (Hemenway, Azrael and Miller, pp.282-283), as do nearly all college administrators and campus security professionals. Only one state – Utah – prohibits college administrators from maintaining no-weapons policies on campus (Brady Center pp.8-11). By comparison, about two-dozen states prohibit concealed carry licensees from carrying guns on college campuses.

Q. How can we make college campuses safer?

A. Despite the horrific shootings at Virginia Tech and Northern Illinois, college campuses are far safer than the communities that surround them. 93% of the violence against college students occurs off campus, where guns are widely available (Baum and Klaus, p.5). To prevent future mass shootings, we must strengthen our gun laws to make it as hard as possible for dangerous people to get dangerous weapons.

Sources

Brady Center to Prevent Gun Violence, No Gun Left Behind: The Gun Lobby’s Campaign to Push Guns Into Colleges and Schools 9 (2007) (citing examples of accidental shootings, studies showing that guns in the home are far more likely to be used in an unintentional shooting than in self-defense, and how people frequently fail to recognize that a gun is loaded).

Baum, Katrina and Patsy Klaus, U.S. Dep’t of Justice, “Violent Victimization of College Students, 1995-2002,” U.S. Department of Justice (2005):5.

Cintron, Miriam, “College Campuses Grapple with Escalating Suicide Rates,” Nearwestgazette.com (on file with Brady Center).

Hemenway, David, Deborah Azrael and Matthew Miller, “National Attitudes Concerning Gun Carrying in the United States,” Injury Prevention 7 (2001):282-283.

Miller, et al., “Guns at College,” Journal of American College Health 48(7), (1999).

Miller, Matthew, David Hemenway, and Henry Wechsler, “Guns and Gun Threats at College,” Journal of American College Health 51(57), (September 2002):62-64.

Miller, Matthew, et al., “Household Firearm Ownership and Rates of Suicide Across the 50 United States,” Journal of Trauma (April 2007):1029 (explaining that if a gun is used in a suicide attempt, more than 90% of the time it is fatal, compared to a 3% fatality rate for suicide attempts by drug overdose).

Morrison, Gregory B., “Deadly Force Programs Among Larger U.S. Police Departments,” Police Quarterly 9 (2006):331-332.

Ratcliffe, Heather, “6 dead in shooting rampage at Kirkwood City Council,” St. Louis Today, March 27, 2008.

The National Center on Addiction and Substance Abuse (NCASA), Wasting the Best and the Brightest: Substance Abuse at America’s Colleges and Universities, (March 2007):4.

Thompson, Amy, James H. Price, Adam Mrdjenovich, Jagdish Khubchandani, “Reducing Firearm-Related Violence on College Campuses—Police Chiefs' Perceptions and Practices,” Journal of American College Health, 58(3)2009:247-254

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Studies and Reports

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