Have the semi-automatic, military-style gun wielding nuts who caused the Newtown and Aurora theater shooting massacres proven the need for greater, targeted gun control in the U.S.? For the misguided, gun-toting freaks of the NRA the answer is a resounding “No!” For them, every lunatic who shoots up toddlers and the innocent, there is an equal and just as ambitious cowboy-hero who would’ve stopped them if it weren’t for the oppressive government and the gun-taking liberals.
The same submissive forces to the NRA have recently called for armed guards at universities and relaxing gun laws on campuses. Though I have no idea if DU is currently proposing or seeking to arm our Campus Safety officers, history and logic proves this will be a bad idea.
Take, for instance, the 2007 shooting at Virginia Tech University, the deadliest individual civilian shooter incident in U.S. history. “Only if someone had a gun, only if there was a good guy. We would’ve stopped it!” Well, there were good guys. In fact, on that Monday morning there were 14 of them. See, Virginia Tech didn’t have a normal campus safety squadron, they had a whole police department—the Virginia Tech Police Department. All 35 trained and certified police officers had sidearms as well as access to a cache of SWAT-like gear. Hell – they had their own SWAT-like team that trained and had guns and gear for emergencies.
Thirty-two people, not including the gunman, died from the violence that morning. The shooter committed suicide before the authorities could stop or arrest him.
Fast forward to October 2012 at the University of South Alabama. Freshman Gilbert Thomas Collar was acting aggressively toward a campus officer; he was naked and erratic, but he was unarmed. The 135-pound Collar started chasing the officer. When Collar was within five feet of reaching the retreating and fleeting officer, he was shot in the chest once by the said officer. Gilbert Thomas Collar, at the age of 18, died. Imagine if the Collar situation happened on our campus. Currently, Campus Safety is not armed with a gun but with pepperspray.
If Collar went to the University of Denver and not the University of South Alabama and had done the same thing, he would – most likely – be alive today. Sure, he would have been pepper-sprayed. And arrested. But his mother, Bonnie Collar, would not be grieving. Her 18-year old son would not have died.
We have to remember our campus safety officers, though I have great respect for them and would treat them in the same way as I treat our police officers, are civilians. They are not trained properly, nor could they be, to combat these types of mass-casualty situations.
This uniquely American idea that “The only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun” doesn’t pan out. In the last 62 mass shootings in the United States – which is, by the way, more than the rest of the developed world combined – not one armed civilian stopped the senseless killings. In fact, 49 states currently have concealed carry laws and in most of the 62 shootings, the gunmen were in or near conceal carry allowed areas. There were simply no “good guys with guns.”
Now we have a choice: We can continue and move to this weirdly savage, American gun-toting cowboy culture or we can choose to do something different; we can take a new approach to the gun problem. What that is in terms of policy, I don’t know. It might end with the ban of all non-hunting guns—and if that’s what we have to do in the most homicidal country in the developed world—well, what’s the alternative? More shootings like Newtown? Aurora? Columbine?
