Editorial | Keep guns off college campuses

Lawmakers in Arizona, and several other states, are considering legislation that would permit faculty and students to carry concealed firearms on public university campuses. This means that students and professors who already have a firearm license would be allowed to bring guns on campus if the weapons were hidden from view. Currently, Utah is the only state to allow firearms at all public universities.

The proposal in Arizona has gained the most attention. That state already has some of the loosest gun laws in the nation: last year, it became the third state in the nation to eliminate the requirement that a permit be obtained to carry a concealed weapon. Proponents of the most recent piece of legislation argue that arming students and faculty would protect them in the event of a shooting.

We at the Daily emphatically oppose these thoughtless proposals, in Arizona and elsewhere. Allowing weapons on public university campuses would utterly fail at the task of protecting students and faculty. In fact, such measures would likely increase gun violence.

The irony of introducing a bill to loosen gun restrictions in the same state where one of the worst political shootings in American history took place just last month is not lost on Arizona's Senate president, Republican Russell Pearce, an ardent supporter of the proposal. He remarked that had someone at the shooting in Tucson been carrying a weapon and "been there prepared to take action," lives would have been saved.

The absurdity of Pearce's statement is overwhelming. The last thing that would have saved lives during the Tucson massacre would have been another terrified, untrained citizen firing into a crowd of nearly three dozen who were all fleeing for their lives. One of them clearly did enough damage.

The same holds true for shootings on college campuses. In an interview with The New York Times, the police chief at the University of Arizona in Tucson said that more firearms would greatly hinder the police's attempts to apprehend the assailant. Victims would likely end up firing at each other, and the police wouldn't know at whom to shoot.

The justification for bringing guns to college campuses is that "guns save lives."But the evidence opposing this claim is endless: In the hands of citizens, guns don't save lives — no matter how much sloganeering the National Rifle Association or other pro-gun advocates may push. According to a 1998 Emory University report, guns are 22 times more likely to be used in a suicide, homicide or criminal assault — or be fired at someone unintentionally — than they are to be used in self-defense or in a legally justifiable manner. And according to a 2010 study by the Violence Policy Center, states with low gun control and high gun ownership have a significantly higher gun-death rate than states with high gun control and low gun ownership.

There are countless more studies attesting to the danger of weak gun laws, but the underlying point is clear: Guns kill far, far more people than they save. In addition, guns pose a particular danger on college campuses, where they would inevitably to be combined with drugs and alcohol, which dramatically increases the likelihood that they would be used in an accidental injury or fatality or as part of an assault. Even without those aggregating factors, an argument between two people is much more likely to be fatal if one or both of them is armed.

What's needed, then, to prevent violence on college campuses is proper training for administrators, faculty and students to deal with an emergency. Procedures should be in place to inform students and lock down buildings as quickly as possible if a gun-related incident were to arise. There is no way to eliminate the risk posed by school shootings, but arming students and faculty would do nothing but exacerbate the danger.