Concealed Carry & Home Defense

CCW Weekend: UCLA Shooting Illustrates The Need For Campus Carry

Kara Leung/UCLA/Handout via REUTERS

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By Beth Baumann,  Alien Gear Holsters

Earlier this week, a murder suicide took place at UCLA, leaving the country, once again, in shock.

Immediately people posted on social media, “How can something like this happen on a college campus?”

Actress Debra Messing, took to social media to explain how she was affected. She took a selfie with an orange shirt from Moms Demand Action Against Gun Violence

The social media masses began questioning our current gun laws, wanting to know what we can do to keep something like this from happening in the future.

The answer is simple.

Stop leaving law-abiding citizens unarmed. Creating “gun-free zones” and “safe places,” in theory, is supposed to keep tragedies like this from happening, but it doesn’t.

UCLA. Northern Arizona University. Umpqua Community College. All of these shootings happened in declared “gun-free” zones, and what happened? People were hurt and or killed on their college campus. As is the case with the most recent shooting on UCLA, early reports indicate that the alleged shooter, had a “kill list” and is possibly linked to another shooting death in Minnesota.

Understanding The Logic

What gun control advocates would have you believe is that school and college shootings are happening because guns are more easily accessible, which is absolutely false. Records of school shootings, though many perhaps did not involve the same scale of carnage of many modern day school shootings, go back to the 19th century. The Bath School Disaster of 1927 remains the deadliest mass murder at a school in United States history, though it was carried out with explosives rather than guns.

To date, one of the worst mass shootings at an American college took place in 1967 at the University of Texas at Austin, when Charles Whitman killed 14 people and wounded 32 more from the clock tower after murdering his wife and mother – which happened decades before anyone used the phrase “gun free zone.”

Whitman, just like the Bath School Disaster’s perpetrator Andrew Kehoe, was suffering from mental illness. He even acknowledged that in the letters he wrote after killing his mother. Long before anyone contemplated creating “gun free zones,” the mentally unstable were targeting learning environments. Schools were attractive because large groups of people were gathered one area and weren’t expecting to have an attack carried out on them.

The majority of the time, shooters who carry out these massive attacks have suffered from mental health problems. They are determined to get their hands on a weapon, whether it be a knife or a gun, and will go through whatever steps necessary to obtain their weapon of choice.

Because many of these people are “quiet,” their mental health goes unnoticed.

Arming The Vulnerable

Making college campuses “gun-free zones” is creating a “mass-shooting zone” instead.

Keeping students from carrying on campus and forcing them to find other means of self-defense is creating a population of potential victims. Instead of doing this, college campuses should be encouraging students to go through the process of firearm safety training, which, in most states, is a requirement for a CCW permit.

Going through the required training courses with a licensed instructor ensures a person knows how to properly handle a loaded firearm. Knowing how to handle a loaded firearm means an innocent bystander is less likely to freak out over the site of a gun and can remain calm in serious scenarios, such as a mass shooting.

Disarming law-abiding citizens, including college students, makes them a target, both literally and figuratively. Those with CCW permits won’t carry on a college campus because it breaks the law, making them prime targets for people wanting to carry out a mass shooting. People intent on taking life are going to do so no matter what. They have already decided that the law doesn’t apply to them.

Beth Baumann is outreach specialist for Alien Gear Holsters, a concealed carry holsters company. She is also a contributor to PolitiChicks and TheBlaze.

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