The Violence Policy Center, for decades one of our countries most respected advocates for gun-violence prevention, released in February a startling set of numbers regarding concealed-carry licensees. These numbers ought to influence dramatically our final estimation of HB1077, the bill introduced by Representative Charlie Collins that would allow faculty and staff to carry their weapons on Arkansas college campuses.
The Center discovered that from May 2007 to February 2015, concealed-carry licensees were responsible for at least 722 murders and 28 mass-shootings. (Read the recent New York Times editorial on these findings here.)
Before you pull out your calculator and start figuring the yearly or monthly or daily kill-rates, consider the phrase, at least? Why this troubling phrase?
It's troubling because we don't know the real numbers. It's troubling because the NRA doesn't want us to know these numbers. Because the NRA in conjunction with Congress has prohibited for two decades the Center for Disease Control and Prevention from conducting research on gun-violence. And even though this ban was supposedly lifted two years ago, the CDC still cannot get funding from Congress to undertake the work that so desperately needs to be done on this debilitating problem.
So the VPC's numbers come only from news outlets and the very limited state data that is publicly available. The real numbers, then, are higher.
That's why the NRA has blocked access to the facts.
But how much higher is anybody's guess. So one of the many tragedies surrounding this suppression of data is that we have little reliable information about the extent of concealed-carry gun-violence, information that we should have before enacting any legislation that relies upon such license-holders to secure the safety of our children.
That's just common sense.
The point to all of this? We now know, at least, that our preconception of these licensees—law-abiding, upstanding gun-handlers—was simply mistaken. Many of them, of course, are exactly that: law-abiding and upstanding. But now we know that a number of them, a number larger than we had expected, are not.
So we simply don't know how widespread gun-violence is among concealed-carry license holders. But we do know this: it is more extensive than we had expected.
The conclusion is obvious: we shouldn't entrust these people with the safety of our students until we correct this mistake and obtain a clearer picture of their profile. They are, after all, the very people that we are allowing to carry guns into our classrooms.
In light of this new evidence, a few questions come to mind.
- Are we ready to grant this under-researched and armed population instant and legal access to our students, faculty, and staff?
- Do we want them carrying concealed firearms into our classes, departmental meetings, hallways, cafeterias, and libraries?
- Have we ever granted such potentially dangerous liberties to such an ill-defined, under-studied, and untrained group of citizens who are carrying lethal weapons?
- Are we ready to carry out this experiment—currently being attempted by 1.2% of our college campuses—with our children?
Let's take a deep breath before we act so rashly, particularly on behalf of campuses that have never once experienced the problem the bill is designed to solve.
Our children are worth the extra effort.