The state of Texas remains a serious contender for the title of “America’s most controversial state.” Lawmakers have introduced legislation repealing some of the current restrictions on gun ownership on public university campuses. If the bill passes, holders of legal concealed carry permits (at least 21 years of age), will be able to carry a concealed weapon with them into most buildings, including classrooms (current Texas law bars guns from campus buildings).
And though the debate in Texas currently holds captive the national spotlight, this issue has national ramifications as well: The New York Times reports that as many as a dozen state legislatures currently have some kind of campus-carry legislation under consideration.
As with most debates about public policy, advocates of both sides of the debate share a common goal: they seek to reduce the incidence of violence and crime on college campuses. In this particular debate, both sides have decided to play the “Virginia Tech” card, claiming that their respective policy proposals will prevent such horrors from occurring yet again. Opponents argue that widespread ownership of guns on campus would lead to a greater incidence, or at least a greater risk, of both accidents and deliberate shootings. If college students, after all, spend much of their four (or more) years of college engaging in frivolities of various sorts, many of them involving alcohol and other impairments of judgment, then one should think that they will probably not handle firearms responsibly. Indeed, since many school shootings share the commonality of their perpetrators having easy access to guns, surely no good can come from easing restrictions on the transport and possession of firearms on campus.
Proponents of allowing for concealed carry on campus, on the other hand, argue that a well-armed student and faculty populace can react quickly and swiftly to any shooting that does occur. “There’s no magic line, there’s no magic barrier that makes me more safe on the campus than it is when I’m being a real person in the real world outside of the school,” says an Arizona State University student recently interviewed by the New York Times.
In this respect, the debate over concealed carry on campus bears remarkable similarity to the general and broader debate over the wisdom of restrictions on firearm ownership and use. Still, not all advocates of rather permissive laws regulating firearms necessarily advocate for their presence on college campuses. The current Texas statute, for example, also restricts possession of weapons in state penitentiaries (or near them, on days of execution), the secure areas of airports, as well as courts and other government buildings.
Even libertarians and some of the most committed advocates of gun ownership can concede that restrictions such as these can be reasonable. But as this column has argued before, gun control laws only succeed in accomplishing their goals under the assumption that law enforcement can actually control all the weapons in question. Courthouses, airport terminals, and state penitentiaries all have safeguards that can (generally) ensure the absence of dangerous weapons. Enforcing these restrictions meets with greater difficulty on college campuses, as many institutions would find it extremely burdensome to place metal detectors and security guards at the entrance to every building and sector of campus – and even then, this would not guarantee the detection of all potentially harmful objects (the repeated failures of the TSA, for example, should provide a healthy dose of skepticism in this regard).
Nevertheless, the claim that college students, generally deemed an irresponsible bunch, would badly handle their firearms and cause horrific accidents, does have some plausibility. However, one must also consider that Texas, much like other states, sets its legal age to carry a concealed weapon at 21 years of age. Any freshman mishandling a weapon would automatically bear the guilt of breaking the law. Additionally, it seems intuitive that laws, as a general rule, should punish irresponsible use of dangerous substances, but permit their responsible use. This is the method according to which current law treats all sorts of things: alcohol, automobiles, tobacco, and (in general circumstances) firearms.
Regardless of which proposal (the permitting or the banning of concealed weapons) makes for a safer campus, it is perhaps worth noting that the current debate revolves around the wrong question. Both sides seem to assume that the state legislature has the competency to judge the wisdom of gun permission or restriction on campus. But this is not the case. Generally speaking, one-size-fits-all nostrums such as these cannot provide a truly satisfactory resolution.
In this case, the libertarian perspective offers a rather modest and commonsense proposal: that university administrations and police departments, and not state legislators, should have the final say on the use, storage, and transport of weapons on campus. It suggests that states create a freer “market” for colleges, in which safety policies, much like other internal affairs, serve as one of the factors in a student’s decision to enroll in a particular college, and also serve as a factor in what type of campus a university administration wishes to have. The particular experience needed to make these kinds of decisions does not exist in the minds of state legislators as much as it does in the eyes of school presidents and police chiefs.
Photo Credits: MSNBC