Gun Control vs. Gun Rights: A Letter to My Button-Wearing Friends

By Broadside Opinion Columnist Joshua Lawton

Next time you see a student or professor wearing a “No Guns on My Campus” button handed out by students who have little, if any understanding, of the gun laws of the Commonwealth of Virginia, ask them this, “Do you even know how to load a magazine and insert it into a semi-automatic handgun?” My advice to you is don’t wait for a coherent reply, because either they do not know how to because they have never touched a gun in their lives, or they will try to feed you a scripted line about the dangers of concealed weapons on campus.

The truth is: Has a law ever stopped a thief from stealing a car? Has a law ever stopped a murderer from murdering their first victim? Did Virginia Tech’s rules making it illegal for students to legally carry concealed weapons on campus prevent Cho Seung-Hui from killing 33 students in cold blood? The answer to every question is no.

The truth concerning the illegal use of legally held concealed weapons is that the overwhelming majority of those who have abided by the law their whole lives will not break the law in the future. “Of the 383,400 citizens who have received permits to carry their guns concealed, only 72 people have used their gun to commit a crime,” according to the Florida Department of State.

“This means that a citizen in Florida is almost twice as likely to be attacked by an alligator as to be assaulted by a Florida CCW holder.”

Do gun control laws have a real effect on the increase or decrease of a crime? If you ask several gun control activists who believe that guns are the root to all of society’s woes, they would tell you that “if you give guns to people then they’ll just use them to go out and kill people. Crime rates will sky rocket and then there will never be peace and love throughout the world.”

The reality is that “states which passed Concealed Carry laws reduced their murder rate by 8.5 percent, rape by 5 percent, aggravated assaults by 7 percent and robbery by 3 percent. If those states not having concealed carry laws had adopted such laws in 1992, then approximately 1,570 murders, 4,177 rapes, 60,000 aggravated assault and 12,000 robberies would have been avoided yearly.”

The Reed Study mentioned above is a state by state average. Some button-wearing misinformed students will claim “See! See! Who knows what might happen at George Mason University if we allow the legal carrying of concealed weapons on campus? Guns are evil.” The truth, my button-wearing friends, is that guns are not evil and can actually do a great deal of good for the community. A case in point is in 1982, Kennesaw, a suburb of Atlanta, passed a law requiring all heads of households to keep at least one firearm in the house. After this law was passed, residential burglary rates dropped 89 percent in Kennesa, compared to a modest decline of 10.4 percent in Georgia. Ten years later, Kennesaw’s residential burglary rate was still 72 percent lower than it had been in 1981.

Some of my button-wearing friends will tell you that this is just a coincidence. Unfortunately for my friends, they would be wrong. According to a National Institute for Justice poll taken in the mid-90s, “three-fifths of felons polled agreed that ‘a criminal is not going to mess around with a victim he knows is armed with a gun’ and 74 percent of felons polled agreed that ‘one reason burglars avoid houses when people are at home is that they fear being shot during the crime.’ Fifty-seven percent of felons polled agreed that ‘criminals are more worried about meeting an armed victim than they are about running into the police.’” Remember that these are the people who are going to rob, rape, assault or kill you, telling you what they think about legally carried concealed weapons. I don’t know about you, but I would rather be something that criminals fear rather than view as an easy prey.

Finally, my fellow button-wearing patriots will say, “But we have campus police and security. We’re safe.” The truth is that none of the police forces in America have an obligation to protect you. In the majority view of the Court in the case of Warren v. D.C., “When a municipality or other government entity undertakes to furnish police services, it assumes a duty only to the public at large and not to individual members of the community.” In a country where the average police response time to a crime is over one hour, do you want to rely on any police force to save you if someone starts killing people in the Johnson Center? Even when the cops finally do show up, they have a tendency to shoot at the wrong person.

According to Violence Opposing Viewpoints, “citizens shoot and kill at least twice as many criminals as police do every year – 1,527 to 606. Readers of Newsweek learned that ‘only 2 percent of civilian shootings involved an innocent person mistakenly identified as a criminal. The error rate for police, however, was 11 percent, more than five times as high.’”

After setting down this paper, it is important to remember that in a society where criminals can obtain guns and citizens have a hard time of doing the same, no one is ever truly safe. While the thought of school shootings is disgusting, and the idea of being raped at gunpoint horrifying, you should remember the Old West saying, “God didn’t make all men equal, which is why he invented the Colt. The gun is the true equalizer of men.” In your classroom, sitting at table in the JC, laying on the grass in front of Student Union Building I or in your dorm, you may be minutes away from death. The killer could be right outside or around the corner waiting to barge in and either kill you or kill as many people as possible.

Unfortunately for you, you supported Mason’s unelected Board of Visitors who denied you your right to carry a legally permitted concealed weapon on campus.