by The Coalition to Stop Gun Violence is horrified at the thought that trained, state-certified, law-abiding adults should be allowed to carry concealed on the property of higher education institutions. To that end, they have established a new website called Armed Campuses. The website lists those schools where concealed carry on campus is permitted.
CSGV tries to equate gun-free zones as safe places.
The overwhelming majority of colleges and universities in the United States of America prohibit the carrying of firearms on their campuses. These gun-free policies have helped to make our postsecondary education institutions some of the safest places in the country.
To justify this position they use 1999 stats from the Department of Education that says that the criminal homicide rate on college campuses is lower than the criminal homicide rate for the United States as a whole. While their stats may be correct insofar as they go, no effort is made to compare rates for urban campuses versus rural campuses or anything in between. Moreover, using 1999 stats cuts out the murders that happened at gun-free Virginia Tech and gun-free Northern Illinois University.
The site tries to say that rapes and other violent crimes perpetrated against college students happens off campus 93% of the time. That is like saying that if a student at UNC-Chapel Hill is robbed on the north side of Franklin Street it is off-campus crime while if it happened on the south-side it may well have been on campus. It is still a violent crime.
When discussing so-called gun-free zones, I prefer to remember what Massad Ayoob said about them on Tom Gresham’s GunTalk radio program a few years ago. He said “so-called gun-free zones are nothing but hunting preserves for psychopaths.”
If I were a parent, I would use the Armed Campuses website as a place to look for a place to send my child and not as a place to avoid.