By Sam Hoober, GunBelts.com
As of Aug. 1, the Texas campus carry law took effect. Students that have a concealed carry license in the Lone Star state are now able to carry a concealed firearm on public college and university campuses. Private schools in Texas are another matter; they can choose to allow concealed carry but are widely declining to do so.
Other states that lack such statutes are beginning to consider them.
The date is merely coincidental, but it happens that Aug. 1, 2016 is also the 50th anniversary of the UT-Austin massacre, when Charles Whitman climbed into the campus clock tower armed with several rifles and a shotgun. Whitman had already murdered his wife and mother, but went on a further murder spree, killing 15 people: 14 by gunshot and one by blunt force trauma. He wounded 31 others.
The UT-Austin massacre of 1966 remains one of the deadliest incidents of its kind on a college campus. However, there was something that was different about this incident than other mass shootings.
Almost all of Whitman’s victims on campus, according to The Guardian, were shot within the first 30 minutes of his shooting spree. At about that point – 30 minutes into the 92-minute spree – a number of people parked their personal vehicles closer to the tower. In those days, you see, you could keep a loaded rifle in your vehicle. People who lived close by retrieved hunting rifles and ammunition from home as well.
In fact, according to the Washington Post, police officers were ferrying ammunition to them from local stores. Intervening citizens were told by police to shoot to kill.
Whitman’s rate of fire drastically slowed after the initial half-hour. He also had to confine fire to a much smaller area to keep from getting killed himself. Those citizens returning fire kept him distracted enough for two Austin police officers to enter the tower and kill him. It was later said that it wouldn’t have been possible without the intervention of armed citizens on the ground.
Even in that incident, the deadliest mass shooting in the United States to date, armed citizens made a difference.
That’s why so many people are in favor of allowing concealed carry on campus. At the moment, college campuses largely are gun free zones though that’s due to state regulations rather than federal law; federal law only prohibits possession of firearms at primary and secondary schools.
However, there is a significant amount of resistance to the idea. The reasons are really just variations on the old theme: blood will run in the streets if we allow people to arm themselves. The students will start shooting teachers over trifles, they’ll get wildly drunk and start shooting, etc. Professor James Alan Fox, a widely-respected criminologist and authority on mass shootings, recently said as much in USA Today, as have many others.
As we all know, that has hardly happened outside of college campuses, where the same objection was raised. If anything, crime rates decreased after the modern wave of concealed carry laws in the 1980s and 1990s, though whether liberalized concealed carry laws had any effect on the drop in violent crime in the 1990s and onward…is another matter. (A multitude of causes have been suggested; multiple influences are most likely, of which citizens concealed carrying may be one.)
The reasons why campus carry should be enacted are the same reasons why anyone legally permitted to possess a firearm should be able to carry. Police cannot entirely be relied upon for protection in all cases and therefore, those willing and able to should be able to arm themselves.
It’s more than just an insurance policy in case of a mass shooter, though as we know, mass shooters can and have been deterred by carrying citizens. Stabbings occur on college campuses, so do sexual assaults. It seems wrong to tell people that they can’t be allowed to protect themselves…and as we also know, government simply saying, “no one can have a weapon” doesn’t keep people safe.
Allowing students to carry won’t result in the bloodbath that so many people have warned it will – concealed carry didn’t anywhere else. The adverse effects are only likely to be suffered by people that actually mean others harm.
Sam Hoober is Contributing Editor for GunBelts.com, a subsidiary of Tedder Industries, where he writes about gun accessories, gun safety, open and concealed carry tips. Click here to visit GunBelts.com. If you need a holster to put on that belt click here to visit Alien Gear Holsters.