Regardless of your opinion on the subject, you’ve likely heard of Georgia’s bill to allow those with the legal permits to carry firearms on college campuses. At the time of writing, the bill has been passed, but Governor Deal has the opportunity to veto the bill by the end of the month. Many people have many different takes on this situation, and while there are certainly benefits and detriments on either end of it, here is my take on the scenario.
Having been born and raised in Georgia, I’m no stranger to guns and enjoy using them against the menacing armies of Coca-Cola and Pepsi each Thanksgiving. I’ve used a small variety of weapons, but being under 21, I do not personally own one. The idea of being allowed to carry a gun on campus does seem rather attractive to me at first glance, even if it is not allowed across the entire campus (dorms, for example, will still be gun-free).
Let’s look at the positive sides of letting the bill pass. You can almost hear a bald eagle calling in the distance when bringing up freedom, and the bill would follow this by lowering some restrictions on where carrying is allowed. While I do appreciate this, it’s small enough to be fairly superficial and doesn’t particularly swing my opinion. The other big point in favor is increased safety on campus. Having more people armed would seem to offer more resistance to someone threatening another person or to an active shooter. Moving further, it would mean having personal defense rather than having to rely on another entity for safety.
The counter-argument here is that the campus security is more than capable of keeping students safe, and arriving at an active shooter scene to find multiple people wielding guns creates confusion and delay in stopping the criminal. Other large arguments include intimidation of professors and escalation of disagreements. Kennesaw State University and many other colleges have a wide range of minds and viewpoints of the world, and many topics are discussed from various angles. On occasion, discussion can turn to more controversial subjects, and the thought that any of the students could be armed has the potential to create wariness in professors, who might then teach to the majority and stifle intellectual growth. Furthermore, the idea that arguments escalate more quickly, and more often result in violence, in the presence of a weapon. This would indicate that allowing students to carry firearms would increase the number of gun-related incidents.
As much as I would like to believe that having a gun near a heated debate is no more dangerous than a knife or lead pipe, the fact remains that it is far easier to end someone’s life with a single bullet, rather than some sort of physical attack. I do feel that this is balanced out by the potential for a bystander to quickly resolve a situation involving a gun-wielding maniac, but that does assume the heroic bystander has adequate training or experience to incapacitate the villain without increasing the body count or causing another would-be hero to shoot the first man, thinking he was the opponent. Altogether, I see the bill as relatively neutral, having both positives and negatives, and Kennesaw State, at least, is a fairly safe campus. This might be a case of “don’t fix it if it ain’t broke.”
