Armed with reports of a recent spate of crimes, including the Monday morning beating and robbery of a Georgia Tech student off campus, some Tech students will renew the annual fight today for the right to carry handguns on campus.
The Georgia Tech College Republicans will demonstrate on campus in partnership with Students for Concealed Carry on Campus, a pro-carry organization that has coordinated similar efforts at campuses around the country.
“We just had a robbery last night,” Andrés Celedón, chairman of the College Republicans, noted Monday. Celedón, a third-year student of public policy, said the goal of the effort is to even out the arms race between students and criminals. “It’s just really allowing kids a way to defend themselves.”
But university officials want to keep the current law, which prohibits civilians from carrying a gun on the campus of any Georgia college or university. Students cannot legally keep firearms in their dorm rooms, although legislators changed the law last year to allow them to keep guns under lock and key in their vehicles.
From year to year, Georgia lawmakers regularly entertain — and thus far have defeated — bills that would overturn the concealed-carry ban. That suits university administrators just fine.
“We believe that the safest environment is to prohibit firearms from being present in our classrooms, in our labs, in our dormitories and on our campuses,” said Tom Daniel, senior vice chancellor for external affairs for the University System of Georgia. There is no place for guns in a learning environment, he said, adding campus security is rightly entrusted with keeping students safe.
But gun rights advocates say that Georgia Tech students, subject this year to a string of robberies, burglaries and assaults, including one rape, many of them off-campus, need more than campus police. “They believe in law abiding citizens protecting themselves,” said Jason Stubbs, state director for Georgia Students for Concealed Carry on Campus, who will also be at today’s event.
“That’s an awful idea,” said Charlotte Sloan, 23, a second-year student in chemical engineering. Having guns readily available would not make the campus safer, she said, and would probably enable suicides. The gun-rights issue came into sharper focus across the nation in 2007 after an English major at Virginia Tech killed 32 people and wounded 25 others in a two-hour shooting spree. That prompted an effort at overturning laws banning guns on campuses around the country and led to the formation of the Students for Concealed Carry on Campus.
Pro-carry advocates argue that an armed student body could have prevented or truncated such an attack.
At today’s demonstration, scheduled from 11 a.m. until 2 p.m. in front of the student center, students will hand out literature and answer questions, Celedón said. Their aim, he said, is to counteract a “public perception that guns are inherently evil.”
“Guns don’t shoot themselves,” he said. “People have to shoot them, and people who are registered gun carriers are usually the most careful with their weapons.”
That’s true, said a public policy analyst — but reversing the campus gun ban would have little effect either way.
“In this debate there are two very passionate camps,” said David Kennedy, director of the Center for Crime Prevention and Control at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice in Manhattan. “One is adamantly pro-gun, one is adamantly anti-gun.
“The pro-gun camp is operating out of the conviction that if more people carry concealed guns legally — folks who have been through a background check and don’t have criminal records — that this will lead to a lot of crime control. They will be able to intervene in dangerous situations and do something about it.”
Conversely, said Kennedy, “the anti-gun crowd is convinced that if a lot more people are able to pass background checks and get carry permits, they will end up using their guns wrongly, and then a lot of people will get hurt.
“The fact is that both sides are wrong.”
When restrictions on gun-carry permits are loosened, said Kennedy, generally only a small number of people seek such permits, and those who do only rarely end up in a situation where they can use it to prevent a crime.
On the other hand, more permits rarely lead to more injuries, he said. “When you’re the kind of person who can pass a background check and get a gun permit, you’re not the kind of person who will shoot someone else for no reason.”
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