VA's Campus Gun Laws Punish Adults

Students carry many necessities with them to class each day, toting backpacks filled with everything from textbooks to virtual over-the-counter drug stores stocked with every pain reliever and stay-awake medication known to man. Most students look for ways to reduce the number of items they must carry across campus, but a determined group of college students in Virginia are making national headlines not for what they carry in their backpacks but for what they want to carry under the concealment of clothing: handguns.

The debate over a student’s legal right to carry concealed handguns on college campuses did not begin with the tragic Virginia Tech shooting spree in April, but that event more than any other has provided the impetus students needed to push this issue to the forefront of public awareness. While officials at various levels and parents of Virginia Tech students immediately engaged in the blame game over actions that might have minimized the death toll from Seung-hui Cho’s rampage, students at George Mason University organized Students for Concealed Carry on Campus and have worked to overturn the Virginia law that allows colleges to dictate whether students, faculty, or staff members with valid concealed-carry permits from carrying their firearms on campus.

Emotional levels skyrocket when conversations turn to guns on school campuses, and the debate over this issue in Virginia has been quite spirited. The initial reaction by schools nationwide has been to oppose any measures permitting concealed weapons on campuses, and Virginia’s colleges have, with the backing of Governor Timothy Kaine (D), reaffirmed their desire to retain authority to ban handguns from Virginia campuses. As this debate will likely escalate and venture into Supreme Court case territory, an analysis of the arguments on both sides should prove useful.

State and university administration arguments against allowing concealed handguns on campuses revolve around one central concern: safety. These concerns encompass a host of already dangerous and irresponsible behaviors by college students that administrators foresee as becoming even more potentially lethal with the introduction of concealed handguns to the mix: parties, alcohol, drugs, DUI, student fights or altercations, domestic disputes, grudges over grading issues, accidental discharges, and others.

From a law enforcement perspective, these are all valid concerns, but there is a significant flaw in the logic behind the safety concern, and that is the fact that at most universities and colleges, the majority of students live in off-campus housing, where by state law they are permitted to carry their concealed handguns to all of these types of activities. Very few students actually engage in the type of behaviors listed above while on campus because most campuses have behavioral restrictions and students seek to avoid running afoul of them. Thus, enforcing campus bans on handguns does nothing to prevent students from involving themselves in potentially dangerous behaviors while enrolled as students but performing them off campus.

I found the official position of The International Association of Campus Law Enforcement Administrators, which represents campus public-safety officials, very questionable from a 2nd Amendment viewpoint. The association claimed that:

…the presence of students carrying concealed weapons "has the potential to dramatically increase violence on our college and university campuses."

Allowing concealed weapons brings the potential for accidental gun discharge or misuse of firearms at parties, including those where alcohol or drugs are used, and the possibility for guns to be used to settle students' disputes, the group said.

That argument deserves careful scrutiny. In most states, campus police are POST certified police officers with full police powers in a limited jurisdictional area, within a university’s geographical boundaries. They naturally like to know who within their jurisdiction is known to possess weapons. Yet when those officers go home, off campus, and go out to dinner or to the store, they do not know who else in these establishments might be legally carrying a concealed weapon. If these campus police officers feel that the very presence of students carrying concealed weapons “has the potential to dramatically increase violence on our college and university campuses,” what is the basis of that conclusion or belief?

Do those same officers feel that the presence of concealed weapons among private citizens off campus dramatically increases violence among the general population? If a 21 year-old Virginia man who is not a college student obtains required training and a concealed-carry permit and carries his concealed handgun to the local mall, does this association feel that he “dramatically increases” the potential for violence in that mall? If so, the association may be the only law enforcement organization I am aware of that is uniformly opposed to the 2nd Amendment right to bear arms.

All of the risks that guns on campus would present as cited above by this association would be present in any population that permits concealed weapons, but what the association cannot or will not explain is why it believes college students who must be 21 years-old to obtain such a permit are considered potentially dangerous, while the 21 year-old non-college student can carry his gun onto any college campus simply because he is considered a citizen and not a student. That is the crux of the Virginia law. It does not provide equal treatment between students who meet all the criteria for a concealed weapons permit and those who meet the same criteria but are non-students. In essence, Virginia students are singled out for restrictions on handguns simply because they are enrolled in school, which should be considered a sign of their desire to be responsible rather than a label that marks them as too immature or potentially dangerous to safely carry their concealed handguns.

I understand the position of the International Association of Campus Law Enforcement Administrators. Law enforcement always, from a tactical perspective, wants to know who is carrying weapons in their jurisdiction, because that knowledge could prevent a tragic accidental shooting due to mistaken identity and is considered essential to officer safety. Yet it is not the law-abiding, permit holding, concealed carry-trained citizen or student that is likely to present a threat to police officers. Crime statistics do not support any argument that legally owned firearms increase crime. On the contrary, most crimes are committed using unlicensed and illegally acquired handguns, because using “anonymous” weapons reduces the risk of being caught later.

In the case of the Virginia Tech shootings, it is quite possible that students carrying concealed weapons might have killed Seung-hui Cho and reduced the number of his eventual victims. It is also possible that SWAT teams responding to the scene might have shot those students brandishing firearms. The key issue here, though, is not what might have happened in that one incident. The issue is much larger. The central point of this debate over campus firearms is the legal reasoning involved in allowing non-students to carry concealed weapons on campus, which Virginia state law currently permits, while denying students who hold the same concealed weapons permit from carrying their firearms on those same campuses.

Emotional appeals against permitting legal handguns on campuses seem to be the political weapons of choice for educators and Virginia Democrats. Dismissing the legal arguments raised by Students for Concealed Carry on Campus, Virginia Tech spokesman Larry Hincker clouded the issue with appeals to sentiment rather than logic:

We don't believe that guns have any place in the classroom," Mr. Hincker said. "We've experienced far more of guns in the classroom than any university should have to endure."

What Hincker refuses to address is that guns in the classroom was not what caused the Virginia Tech tragedy. The tragedy was that Seung-hui-Cho’s were the only guns present on that terrible April morning. Twenty-one year old students can vote; they can drive; they can drink legally; they can own handguns and qualify for concealed carry permits. They are, under the laws of all states, adults. Virginia’s legislators have only two legal options available to resolve this debate over the right to carry handguns on college campuses: Either the law needs to be changed to forbid anyone but campus police to possess firearms on campuses, or the law needs to be changed to give adult students the same right to carry firearms on campuses that non-students currently enjoy. Educators and Democratic legislators find both options unpalatable, as one would certainly be challenged constitutionally, and the other would increase the number of guns present on campuses. There is nothing more fearsome to these groups than lawsuits and an armed populace.

As these entities and campus law enforcement administrators have demonstrated through their statements, they do not trust 21 year-old college students to be responsible with their legal right to carry handguns on or off campus, but they do trust 21 year-olds who chose not to attend college to be responsible while carrying their firearms on campus. The disparity is stunning, but is overshadowed by emotional pleas from Virginia Tech administrators, who insist that guns, and not a mentally ill individual, were responsible for the tragedy on that campus. As a result, they hold hostage the right of adult students at all Virginia universities and colleges to be treated the same as non-student adults when it comes to firearms.


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Seung-hui Cho, Virginia Tech, School Shootings, Concealed Carry, Virginia, Students for Concealed Carry on Campus, International Association of Campus Law Enforcement Administrators, 2nd Amendment, Gun Control

Virginia Tech Blame Game

Who is to blame for the shooting massacre of 32 Virginia Tech students yesterday? At last count, the following had been blamed for the tragedy:

President Bush and Vice President Cheney - Although both were hard at work in D.C. battling Congress over funding Operation Iraqi Freedom when the shootings occurred, they were nonetheless blamed for using the incident for political points, and for not supporting nationwide gun control laws.

Charles Steger, President of Virginia Tech – Blamed for not “locking down” an entire sprawling university campus the size of a small city after the initial 2 murders were committed in a VaTech dormitory on one side of campus. Blamed for not cancelling all classes after the dormitory shooting, despite his being advised by law enforcement that it appeared to be a domestic incident between the shooter and an ex-girlfriend. VaTech parents are calling for him to be fired.

Commonwealth of Virginia’s Gun Control Laws – Blamed for being too liberal, making it easier for citizens to keep and bear arms.

Commonwealth of Virginia’s Gun Control Laws – Blamed for being too restrictive, making VaTech a gun free zone where students and faculty could not protect themselves.

VaTech PD, Blacksburg PD, Montgomery County Sheriffs – Blamed for sealing off a small perimeter around the dormitory where the initial 2 killings took place, but not ordering a campus-wide lockdown because they believed the first incident to be a domestic incident.

VaTech PD, Blacksburg PD, Montgomery County Sheriffs – Blamed for not immediately rushing, with guns blazing, into the classroom building where gunfire could be heard on the opposite side of campus from where the domestic shooting occurred earlier that morning.

VaTech PD, Blacksburg PD, Montgomery County Sheriffs – Blamed for not capturing the shooter alive so that he could explain his motives and help society prevent similar tragedies in the future.

Notice that someone is conspicuously absent from the blame list: the shooter. Much like the urge to blame America for terrorism in the wake of 9/11, broadcasters yesterday could not resist the urge to spend most of their air time speculating about how society needs to be kinder to outcasts (like the allegedly picked on Columbine killers) to prevent such massacres.

A Washington Post article addressed the issue of why, after the initial dormitory shootings, warnings were not issued:

Although the gunman in the dorm was at large, no warning was issued to the tens of thousands of students and staff at Virginia Tech until 9:26 a.m., more than two hours later.

"We concluded it was domestic in nature," Flinchum [VaTech PD Chief] said. "We had reason to believe the shooter had left campus and may have left the state." He declined to elaborate. But several law enforcement sources said investigators thought the shooter might have intended to kill a girl and her boyfriend Monday in what one of them described as a "lover's dispute." It was unclear whether the girl killed at the dorm was the intended target, they said.

The sources said police initially focused on the female student's boyfriend, a student at nearby Radford University, as a suspect. Police questioned the boyfriend, later termed "a person of interest," and were questioning him when they learned of the subsequent shootings at Norris Hall. A family friend of the boyfriend's said the boyfriend was stopped by police alongside Route 460 in Blacksburg, handcuffed and interrogated on the side of the road and later released.

However, VaTech students, affected by the emotional incident, were outraged over what they perceived as a failure by the university to warn them of a pending disaster no one knew was going to occur. Students interviewed by CNN expressed their initial observations:

Police said they were still investigating the shooting at the dorm when they got word of gunfire at the classroom building.

Some students bitterly questioned why the gunman was able to strike a second time.

"What happened today this was ridiculous," student Jason Piatt told CNN. "While they send out that e-mail, 20 more people got killed."

Students and Laura Wedin, a student programs manager at Virginia Tech, said the first notification they got of the shootings came in an e-mail at 9:26 a.m., more than two hours after the first shooting.

The e-mail had few details. It said: "A shooting incident occurred at West Amber Johnston earlier this morning. Police are on the scene and are investigating." The message warned students to be cautious and contact police about anything suspicious.

Student Maurice Hiller said he went to a 9 a.m. class two buildings away from the engineering building, and no warnings were coming over the outdoor public address system on campus at the time.

Everett Good, junior, said of the lack of warning: "I'm trying to figure that out. Someone's head is definitely going to roll over that."

"We were kept in the dark a lot about exactly what was going on," said Andrew Capers Thompson, a 22-year-old graduate student from Walhalla, S.C.

Clearly law enforcement and university officials had investigative leads pointing to an off campus suspect, and given the nature of domestic disputes, the decision not to lock down an entire university based on what they knew was appropriate. There was no investigative information that could have predicted that the dormitory shooter possessed multiple firearms, was a VaTech student, and had laid plans to massacre students on the opposite side of campus, carrying chains to lock students in, intending to execute them with no apparent emotion. Such behavior would have been incompatible with a domestic incident, which usually diffuses once action has been taken against the girlfriend/spouse.

The campus lockdown that occurred at VaTech on the first day of classes last fall was ordered because intelligence then indicated the escaped felon was at large on campus and had shot a sheriff’s deputy. That was not the case yesterday, as the initial domestic shooting at the dormitory pointed to an off-campus suspect. Comparisons of the handling of these two very different situations are not productive and lead to unfair conclusions about the decisions made yesterday.

The university administration and police department deserve the prayers and support of the community rather than finger pointing. When they responded to the first 911 call about the classroom shootings, they rushed to the scene, secured as many students as possible and then risked their lives entering the building to confront the gunman. After witnessing the shooter commit suicide, the responding officers swept the area, still without knowledge of the motive for the attack or whether there were multiple suspects. They rescued the barricaded students, provided first responder medical assessments and care, carried the wounded to safety, and witnessed a horrible scene of carnage while feeling helpless. There is no feeling more disturbing to someone who has worked in law enforcement than the helplessness when you cannot protect someone from harm. Yet for these brave officers there appears to be only insult added to injury with each criticism.

The Virginia Tech webmaster, tasked with updating the university’s web site throughout the ordeal and with a police scanner at his desk, shared the following assessment of emergency response with friends on the blog Wired:

This was a multiple-agency response and there is little interoperability -- but the police still got the job done. Virginia Tech Police Department was and is lead agency in the whole event, with Blacksburg PD right there with them. The Montgomery County Sheriff's Department is also involved and the Virginia State Police. Give all the various dispatchers credit for a great job, as they were the linchpins that kept all the communications straight between all the agencies. There was a massive response from all the local rescue squads, let by the student-run Virginia Tech Rescue Squad. A triage area was set up adjacent to Norris Hall and ambulances shuttled in and out of the area to transport victims to Montgomery Regional Hospital, the Carillion New River Valley Medical Center, and to hospitals in the Roanoke Valley. Carillion's helicopters and the State Police helicopters were unable to be used for transport due to the high winds we are experiencing.

The campus (and surrounding public schools) were locked down, since no one really knew what the situation was, how many shooters there might be, and where any more might be. The incident ended after 11 a.m. and people on that side of campus were released to go home. Other parts of the campus were released at 12:30. SWAT teams from various police agencies in the region are doing a sweep of campus and the crime scenes are being processed.

Without imposing martial law and a complete police state, college campuses cannot be protected from a shooting rampage like this one. Steps can be taken to reduce the possibility, but prevention is not possible. Gun control has never kept guns out of the hands of criminals. The university reportedly did not have a campus-wide surveillance camera system, and perhaps the Commonwealth of Virginia will include funding to install one in the next university budget. However, the absence of cameras cannot be blamed on the university president, and the initial decision not to lock down the campus was made in good faith based on available information.

To blame is human, to sympathize divine.

Honey, Hide the Celery! Boys Genetically Driven to Weaponize Ordinary Items Due to Toy Gun Control

On Saturday I viewed much of the Fox News mockumentary, "Reel Politics: If Hollywood Ran America." It was disappointing, largely because it did not portray what America would be like with Hollywood celebrities holding important political offices in Washington, it instead merely named which celebrities Fox News felt would be appointed by Hollywood to fill various cabinet posts. There was some humor in the selections, such as Jane Fonda as Secretary of Defense (sorry to my milblogger readers!), but I had hoped the comedy program would delve into the actual policies the Hollywood liberals would implement and the disastrous results of those policies.

While still considering the frightening scenario of Tim Robbins or Alec Baldwin running our government, I happened upon a seemingly unrelated, but delightful, article at WashingtonPost.com by Jonathan Turley, a professor at George Washington University. Professor Turley's article takes an unintended swipe at an issue near and dear to the Hollywood liberal heart: Gun control. However, this is no ordinary, predictable gun control article, since the guns people are demanding be banned range from plastic to an index finger and thumb held in gun shape: Toys or imaginary guns. Applying the situations described in Hurley's article to the question of what America's gun control laws could regress into if Hollywood liberal activists held positions such as Attorney General or Chief Justice of the Supreme Court provides an unsettling vision of the future.

Turley's wonderful article, titled "My Boys Like Shootouts. What's Wrong With That?", describes his encounters with parents who do not allow their own children to play with toy guns of any kind and seek to enforce this zero tolerance toy gun policy on other children and parents as well, threatening not to allow children to play together and either not attending parties of friends who play with toy guns or not inviting any plastic gun-toting tots to their own parties. Of course, this sounds ludicrous and perhaps an exaggerated reaction by only a few parents out there, but as Turley relates through his own stories and some amazing examples from across America, the toy gun control lobby is growing in numbers and influence in many neighborhoods, perhaps even your own.

Turley begins by relating when he first noticed that what he considered normal role playing adventures for his three young boys was generating unexpected reactions from other parents in Alexandria, Virginia:

I first noticed the "shunning" at the most unlikely of events. Each year on Labor Day, my Alexandria community has a "Wheel Day" parade in which hundreds of kids convert their bikes, scooters and wagons into different fantasy vehicles. Last year, we turned our red wagon into a replica Conestoga wagon with real sewn canvas over wooden ribs, wooden water barrels, quarter horse -- and, yes, plastic rifles. It was a big hit and the kids won first prize for their age group. The celebration, however, was short lived. As soon as one mother spotted the toy rifles inside the wagon, she pulled her screaming children out of the event, announcing that she would not "expose them" to guns. After some grumbling, my friends and I eventually dismissed the matter as some earth mother gone berserk.

But then it happened again.

My 4-year-old son, Aidan, brought his orange Buzz Lightyear plastic ray gun to "the pit," as our neighborhood playground is known. As he began pursuing an evildoer -- his 6-year-old brother, Jack -- around the playground, a mother froze with an expression of utter revulsion. Glaring alternately from Aidan to me, she waited for a few minutes before grabbing her son and proclaiming loudly that he could not play there "if that boy is going to be allowed to play with guns."

Turley found it ironic that he found himself on the defensive side in a gun control battle, given his political views:

My wife and I are hardly poster parents for the National Rifle Association. We are social liberals who fret over every detail and danger of child rearing. We do not let our kids watch violent TV shows and do not tolerate rough play. Like most of our friends, we tried early on to avoid any gender stereotypes in our selection of games and toys. However, our effort to avoid guns and swords and other similar toys became a Sisyphean battle. Once, in a fit of exasperation, my wife gathered up all of the swords that the boys had acquired as gifts and threw them into the trash. When she returned to the house, she found that the boys had commandeered the celery from the refrigerator to finish their epic battle. Forced to choose between balanced diets and balanced play, my wife returned the swords with strict guidelines about where and when pirate fights, ninja attacks and Jedi rescues could occur.

Intrigued by the passionate resistance to toy guns, Turley decided to explore the psychology behind toy selections for children, and what impact toys, specifically guns and other weapon-like toys have on young boys in their formative play years:

. . . I found a library of academic studies. . . . The thrust was that gender differences do exist in the toys and games that boys and girls tend to choose. The anecdotal evidence in my neighborhood (with more than 60 young kids in a four-block radius) was even clearer: Parents of boys reported endless variations on the celery swords. There seems to be something "hard-wired" with the XY chromosome that leads boys to glance at a small moss-covered branch and immediately see an air-cooled, camouflaged, fully automatic 50-caliber Browning rifle with attachable bayonet.

Many parents can relate to Holley and Warren Lutz, who thought that after their daughter Seeley, they could raise her little brother, Carver, in a weapon-free house. Holley realized her error when she gave 10-month-old Carver a Barbie doll and truck one day. The little boy examined both and then proceeded to run Barbie over repeatedly with the truck. By 2, he was bending his sister's Barbies into L-shapes and using them as guns.

As a father of three young boys, Turley took seriously the question of whether playing with toy weapons could potentially awaken "some deep and dark violent gene" potentially found in all boys. Turley's research, however, led him and his wife to conclude that nature dictated their boys' choice of toys and the imaginary adventures they acted out while playing with toy guns and swords. Despite his rationale, founded as it was in research, psychology, and genetic science, neighbors and parents of his children's friends were not convinced.

Turley observed that despite the violent scenarios his children could have acted out with their toy weapons, something remarkable occurred that suggests something profound about toys, parenting, and hero imitation:

when their best friend recently invited them to his Army-themed birthday party, it didn't bother us a bit (though some parents did refuse to let their children attend). In fact, I was struck by how, more than combat fighting, the boys tended to act out scenes involving rescuing comrades or defending the wounded. What I saw was not boys experimenting with carnage and slaughter, but modeling notions of courage and sacrifice. They were trying to experience the emotions at the extremes of human conduct: facing and overcoming fear to remain faithful to their fellow soldiers.

While violent video games perhaps provide too much stimulus to the imagination, creating actual scenarios of lethal force for points rather than patriotism, toy guns and swords alone do not influence children to become violent. In the case of Turley's boys, and billions of young boys over centuries, toy weapons more often were used to imitate noble figures or occupations in a society, such as policemen and military heroes. If we attempt to protect boys from toy weapons in a misguided effort to shield them from good and bad uses of violence, how will they grow up to protect themselves and their nation? If we rob them of their imaginations and dreams of courage and rescue, what type of soldiers will our armed forces consist of in the future? How many will want to place themselves in harm's way in law enforcement or intelligence agencies? All of these require knowledge and use of weapons to be used for morally justified societal needs, such as protection of the innocent and preservation of a nation.

If Hollywood ran America and established the naive gun control policies they espouse, America would be filled with gender-neutral toys that send mixed messages to confused children who will have no outlet for their youthful, playful aggressions. Turley provided a small but alarming sampling of actual incidents nationwide in which young children have been punished, suspended, and even expelled for behavior as benign as pointing a piece of chicken at another child and saying "pow, pow, pow." It would appear that the liberal campaign to make America "enlightened" like European firearm-free nations is exerting enormous influence at the grass roots level, even in formerly play tolerant suburbs.

What toys do your children choose to play with when presented with several choices? After reading Turley's article and perusing some of the psychological books he examined, you may learn more about your children and their natural affinities and values than you may think. Chances are, if you can never find the celery in the refrigerator, your child may be smuggling replacement swords to his guerrilla army comrades at the playground.