On April 7, just two days after the Gabrielle Giffords shooting, a bill went through the Arizona House of Representatives that banned colleges and universities in the state from prohibiting students from carrying guns on campus. Under the new law, if Gov. Jan Brewer (R-Ariz.) chooses to sign it into effect, anyone older than 18 years of age will be allowed to carry a visible firearm on campus. Those students over 21 years of age will not even need a permit to bear arms.
In light of the Giffords shooting, Arizona should be more mindful of widening access to firearms anywhere, especially on college campuses, which tend to be highly populated. Although the bill is designed to increase safety by allowing students to protect themselves on campus, in reality such a bill does nothing but to widen access to firearms and in doing so, makes it easier for those firearms to fall into the wrong hands. Additionally, the fact that students would be allowed to carry unconcealed weapons around campus would render it relatively normal to do so, and because of this, potential killers would look much less conspicuous and would be more able to freely move about the campus. After incidents such as the Virginia Tech shooting, campuses should take more precautionary measures to catch the potential shooters before they even have a chance to fire a shot, and the implementation of Arizona’s bill would make it considerably more difficult to do so.
Moreover, the current bill only allows firearms in the public “right-of-way,” which could be interpreted to mean only major streets that happen to run through campus or, more broadly, all university property that does not include buildings. One obvious shortcoming of this clause is that students would be allowed to carry weapons while walking around campus, but would have no place in which to store them once they reached their classroom or dormitory. This makes it so impractical for a student to carry a gun that it’s almost as if the bill is inviting outsiders to traipse around college campuses with a gun in tow.
College campuses should be a safe haven, not a place of fear. Understandably, there are incidents that occur which could be prevented with a firearm, but the dangers that are invited into that equation far outweigh those marginal benefits. All college campuses have security measures in place and bringing guns into the matter, especially in light of recent events in the news, cannot be a good idea.
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