CAMPUS CARRY: 12 YEARS, NO MASS SHOOTINGS, NO CRIMES BY PERMIT HOLDERS
On April 20, The Washington Post ran a column showing that campus carry has been the law of the land in Colorado since 2003, and the results have not been anything like those currently fighting against campus carry claim it should be.
There have been no mass shootings and, apart from one incident in which a gun was accidentally discharged by a Colorado University employee, there have been no crimes by permit holders.
No one was injured in the accidental discharge, and the employee was fired.
The success of campus carry in Colorado is especially good news for women, who are able to level the playing field by being armed and better able to defend their dignity when under sexual attack.
The U.S. Census Bureau conducts in-person interviews with several thousand persons annually, for the National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS). In 1992-2002, over 2,000 of the persons interviewed disclosed they had been raped or sexually assaulted. Of them, only 26 volunteered that they used a weapon to resist. In none of those 26 cases was the rape completed; in none of the cases did the victim suffer additional injury after she deployed her weapon.
So, in the 26 assaults in which a woman had access to a weapon, she was able to stop the rape and was not further assaulted.
Moreover, WaPo expounded on the NCVS results by including an in-depth study by Florida State University criminologist Gary Kleck.
Kleck “conducted a much broader examination of NCVS data. Analyzing a data set of 27,595 attempted violent crimes and 16 types of protective actions, Kleck found that resisting with a gun greatly lowered the risk of the victim being injured, or of the crime being completed.”
This is one hundred and eighty degrees from what campus carry opponents want us to believe.
For example, on February 24, MSNBC published an op-ed in which Shannon Watts of Moms Demand Action claimedpassing legislation to allow women to be armed on campus for self-defense could open the door for more people to “perpetrate sexual assault” against women on campuses. And four days later, Salon magazine published a piece in which they published figures from Everytown for Gun Safety suggesting women will be in even greater danger if the gun-free zones are eradicated.
But neither the NCVS, nor Kleck’s scholarly work, nor Colorado’s 12-year example support these claims. Instead, the NCVS and Kleck show that guns in the hands of law-abiding women allow those women to stop a sexual assault in its tracks, and Colorado’s campus carry experience shows concealed carry permit holders simply aren’t those committing crimes on campuses.
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