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Texas’ Campus Carry Law
According to Adam Lankford, an associate professor of criminal justice at the University of Alabama, “Between 1966 and 2012, there were 90 mass shootings in the United States. The 90 US mass shootings are nearly one-third of the 292 such attacks globally for that period. While the United States has 5% of the world's population, it had 31% of all public mass shootings” (Christensen 2). Unfortunately, in the United States, mass shootings seem to be on the rise. As a country that has the greatest percentage of mass shootings in the world, the state of Texas has responded by legislating a new law that permits carrying guns on college campuses. The new law is often called “Campus Carry” and allows students who are at least 21 years old and have a concealed gun license to carry their own guns into all public colleges and university buildings, classrooms, and dorms effective August 2016. Despite the seriousness of American mass shootings, students shouldn’t be allowed to carry gun on campuses so that they can defend themselves.
Due to American gun violence, there are many who advocate for allowing personal gun ownership for self-protection and for the protection of others. It might be true that the new Texas’ Campus Carry Law that allows students to carry their own guns could prevent some of the carnage inflicted by someone bent on mass shootings on campuses. Advocates of the Texas’ Campus Carry Law could argue that if the new law saved even one life, the law would be worthy of passing. For many college students and staffs who are anxious about their safety on campus, possessing a concealed weapon could relieve their worry and help them to focus on their academics. Carrying concealed weapons on campus could also prevent mass murders because the response time in confronting the mass shooter could be much shorter. However, the disadvantages of the Campus Carry Law outweigh these benefits.
Allowing students to bring guns onto college campuses is unlikely to reduce mass shootings on campus. Since the students who bring guns to campus are first time users, their ability to defend themselves or even to stop mass shootings is still being questioned. A report published by the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health with contributions from researchers at Stanford University and University of Massachusetts, examines available research on right-to-carry gun laws and data about mass public shootings in public spaces, concluding that neither "gun-free" zones nor right-to-carry gun laws appear to affect mass shootings in public spaces” (Samuels 2). Another study conducted by Louis Klarevas, an associate lecturer at the University of Massachusetts and one of the report's co-authors, found that “111 high-fatality mass shootings—defined as events in which six or more people are killed—that occurred in the U.S. since 1966 and found that only 13 had taken place in a truly gun-free zone” (Samuels 2). Interestingly, the expert also...
