You highly underestimate what people will actually do given the right motivation.

I cant believe that some people think that this is a good idea. Its funny because I was just having a conversation with a japanese diplomat tonight about the insane gun culture that we have in this country. He used to be a police detective in Japan before he moved to NY and told me that there are about 10 to 20 police shootings per year in Japan....in the whole country.....per YEAR.

Why are Americans so obsessed with guns? Is it because they've watched so many westerns and movies about good guys beating the bad guys using guns that they think to be a good guy you need to own a 357 Magnum?

And how can the root of the problem, guns, be solved by adding more of said ingredient to the population???

the reasoning just makes my head hurt.

also why is everybody who is arguing for more guns from a state that elected Bush in as president....twice?

oh...right....nevermind.

It isn't America's history of violence.

It isn't the gross class divide in America

It isn't at all the American culture that is a breeding ground for violence.

None of these.

It's because guns exist. Guns make people go out and do terrible things. If there were no guns people would just go to their jobs and live out their happy little lives with nary a care in the world.

Hi, my name'th LEtranger, and I jutht turned thixth!

+1.

They were supposed to protest by wearing empty holsters on my campus. Happily, it was a non-event in my classes. I'm pretty sure I'd've handled it poorly.

tb

Yes, but then they would get invaded by giant green fanged fraternal twin aliens. And have really bad playground slides.

Do you hear this LEtranger?!

Could you bear to live in an America with really bad playground slides? The kind that are metal and get way to hot in the sun and there's that one rivet that always catches your jeans?

IS THIS WHAT YOU WANT FOR AMERICA?

It always saddens me when someone misses an obvious yet hilarious Simpsons reference. D'oh.

I knew it was simpsons, but not which one. Was this the halloween episode with the monkey hand where they wish for world peace and then the aliens come but we scrounge up things like a board with a nail through it?

Edit: TV's been gone from my life for a long while now (forgive me).

Yes. And the slide is made of recycled guns and shoots off occasionally when Ralph slides down.

And all is well in my world again.

So it is guns that make people do bad things Heathen? Man all the stuff I have read on the medieval era must be wrong then...could have swore terrible things were being done long before guns came around. Man my entire theory on the crusades is wrong now...damn.

"You know what the definition of a hero is? Someone who gets other people killed."

I have a POV but not all the answers. I've held a CW permit for eight years, I carry regularly, live downtown, vote liberal, and am from a family of academics -- professors, all. Given what I've read here, perhaps most of you will agree with my first point:

1. No matter who you are, if you're going to carry, you should know what you're about. This goes for civvies and for law enforcement. What, you ask, cops are cops, right? News: Many sworn police officers (even on the FBI level), can barely re-qualify annually, and then only with much coaching. I know a couple of people who owe their jobs as firearms instructors to this fundamental ineptitude. I read a NY study that showed only 1 out of 13 rounds fired by a NY cops in actual firefights hit its intended target. (No disrespect intended to NY's finest.) Cop or civilian, if you haven't been trained in stress-fire situations, you're not likely to perform well in an actual firefight. (It's humbling when the computer shows that your first round went into the ground and the second missed by five feet. Take it from me.)

I would advocate more stringent training as a requirement for a concealed permit, but this might be because I'm a geek who would enjoy the training.

2. In my state, you must be at least 21 years of age to apply for a Concealed Firearms Permit (CFP). That rules out many of those on campus whose mind and character are, shall we say, less formed than their older counterparts. Again, no offense intended.

3. The (formerly) almighty dollar is the currency of wealth, and to criminals, the handgun is the currency of power. Not the former USSR, not the UK, not Jamaica (life sentence for carrying a single bullet with no gun in sight) -- no state, totalitarian or otherwise, has made its citizens safe from gun violence by denying regular Joes the right to carry. I read BBC every day and every day it reports gun crime in the UK. The punks are going to find a way to pack heat, because they live for it and die by it. Especially in the U.S., tell ya what, we're awash in firearms -- the genie is out of the bottle. So I say we deal with it intelligently, and I make no claim to all the intelligence on the topic. This is my take only, and I have an open mind.

4. The true story of why I got my CFP: I'm at the massive outdoor party in downtown Salt Lake celebrating the award of the 2002 Winter Olympic Games. I'm with my buddy who had been a state prison guard for a year or so (he went on to be a SWAT cop and now a Federal Air Marshall). Every twenty minutes or so throughout the evening he points out someone new and says, "See that guy over there...5 to 7 for aggravated rape," or "Felony assault." You get the pic. He says, "Think any of those guys love me? We're here with [my wife] and the kids and I wish you had a permit to carry." That made an impression on me: Real felons, real god sons, a real sworn peace officer wishing I could do something more than speed dial 911. I'd say the makeup of a crowd in other states isn't much different. It's probably better on most campuses, but then again...VTec.

5. Most criminals are, for lack of a better word, cowards. How much moxy does it take to pull a gun on an unarmed person and demand their money? Or to shoot up unarmed students as at VTec? Less than zero. To my mind, the presence of 80,235 fellow CFP holders in this state constitutes a psychological deterrent to criminals and an actual response capability in extremis. That someone could or does shoot back (whether the defender is Wyaat Earp or not) changes the equation ENTIRELY in an assailant's mind. (Ask anyone who's been in a firefight.) That's a GOOD thing for the good people among us. In nearly every case, the arrival of an armed opposition at a rampage shooting shuts down the carnage pronto.

6. The question is, Would lives have been spared had not the shooters been granted UNOPPOSED free rein in the interim? I'm not God, and this is a hypothetical question with a thousand variables, but left to answer it for myself, I say "Probably, yes." Come into my classroom, Mr. Shooter, and you'll be greeted by the business end of a .45. Now, even if I don't shoot -- because I'd prefer not to if it can be avoided -- you'll probably decide that the next classroom down the hall looks like a better, softer target. The sooner the shooter meets resistance and decides to blow out their own brains the better.

Anybody who imagines that we're talking OK Corral business with squinty eye-to-eye duals, doesn't see it the way I do, the way I read it, the way I hear it from first-hand sources. The way I hear it, an average armed citizen will deter or blunt the effectiveness of a shooter who, for all their deranged fantasies and YouTube posturing, generally lack the discipline to learn how to shoot and who has no stomach for anything but free slaughter of defenseless victims.

7. Semi-related factoid: I read an interesting piece, which I wish I could cite here, indicating that today's gun violence, in terms of per-capita firearms murder rate, far exceeds anything known in the so-called Wild West. Sorry I don't have the reference, but pretty good records have been kept in this city since Day 1 in 1847. My uncle has by G-G-Grandfather's Spencer Repeating Rifle, the one carried overland through hostile territory. That's kinda real to me, as are the following incidents fresh in the public mind:

8. Trolley Square Mall shooting earlier this year in my city, where I shop regularly: Off-duty officer takes out a rampage shooter who had obtained guns illegally.

Pioneer Park, one block away from my condo (in the "good" part of town), last month an upstanding citizen (my buddy's neighbor) knifed by a transient. Killed. Generally, guns trump knives, BUT a trained knife fighter, if he's within 6 feet of you, is as lethal as a shooter. These incidents stand out because they're close to home, and there are fresh ones in the paper daily. Sorry folks, this city's crime rate is zilch compared to D.C., however death by random violence, gun or knife, is far from theoretical here.

9. So, given this landscape, my subjective take is this. I'd feel safer sitting in a stadium of CFP holders who have passed a FBI background check and had some minimal training than I would feel in a stadium of unarmed folks who depend on the diligence of relatively few officers -- who may or may not know what they're doing -- to handle a nut-job shooter. In my city of 180,000 people, the SLPD swing shift consists of 12 officers. Do the math. Following a firearms incident in MY parking lot a few years ago, I know what the SLPD response time is (better, actually, than what the number of officers suggests), but allowing plenty of time for a nut-job to wreak a lot of havoc had they been so motivated.

10. Now, to bring this home to the local University of Utah campus -- not unlike my metaphorical stadium of folks. We've been through a state-wide flap on this recently. My take: If the U can reasonably guarantee my safety while on campus, then I'll leave my weapon in the glove box. But we know that the U can't guarantee this -- and won't even try. Guess what? The weapon's staying on my hip, discreetly. Faculty can object to concealed carry eloquently and vehemently -- and have they ever -- but they tend to discount that higher ed is this state's largest single budget line item, one that's paid by the same people who voted in the concealed carry laws.

The academics in my family are remarkable human beings of great accomplishment, and I have profound respect for them, but I quietly believe that they ignore certain practical realities of a) threat of armed violence prevalent in our community, and b) their fellow citizens' legitimate, democratic, and constitutional response to that threat. When faculty request "No guns on campus," they're really asking me to be a soft target, as if the campus were raised above the city and its problems. Since it's not, when the unspeakable happens, faculty and students pay in blood for misguided high-mindedness that is, in my view, one of supremely arrogant wishful thinking.

A Harvard prof once said to me across the dinner table, speaking of the Second Amendment, "No right is absolute." He was absolutely correct -- and rather axiomatic. For him, this was reasoning sufficient to wish away violent crime with a student-faculty pact of unilateral disarmament.

My response: You can't ask your students over 21 years of age in this state to submit willingly to potential violence to stroke your ideals. You are welcome to hide under your desk with tweed in your ears, but if you have an ounce of respect for your students and their human dignity, you've got to say, "Hey, if someone comes in to shoot you, feel free to respond proportionately, and kindly draw fire away from my desk."

I honor pacifist ideologies, and the ultimate price a pacifist must be prepared to pay to sustain the ideal. Similarly, I ask no one else to get a CFP. But I insist that I will defend my life and those of my loved ones -- wherever I am, at the shopping mall or the U. Granted, I'd rather live in a "safe" city and not bother packing as I walk down the city sidewalk to the 7:10 show. But until I do live in that city, there's nothing that can match the sense of self-reliant security that the CFP brings. Eagles have talons, turtles have shells, nearly every critter has some means of self-defense. As the currency of power among the world's deadliest predators is the handgun, I'll not be without. That I don't have to be defenseless is something I really like about this state.

New Topic
You guys talking about Revolution are kinda off topic, but onto a really interesting separate thread. Vietnam vets I've talked to have respect for what a motivated VC could do in PJs with a handfull of rice and an AK-47. Here's another scenario: Rawanda. How were 800,000 killed so quickly? Many more people were clubbed or hacked to death by machetes than were shot. Could that happen to an armed citizenry? Could you round up a town of Americans, put them in the church, and torch it? Just throwing it out there as a question....

I kinda like the U.S.A. -- it's better than we may realize.

Police can only do so much. Right now, Nationwide there is a shortage of Law Enforcement Officers. In Washington State where I live and work in Law Enforcement, we are short almost 600 cops statewide.

Law Abiding Citizens with guns that have a concealed carry permit are not going to cause problems. Look at the FBI statistics for felonious assaults against Law Enforcement Officers. Of all incidents involving the use of firearms against cops none of the guns where aquired legally.

What does this say? Law abiding citizens do not commit the crimes.

Will concealed carry make a college campus any safer? Hard to say. But I know for a fact that in areas where individuals have the right to carry a firearm, crimes against people are far less then in areas where there is gun restrictions.

Now in regards to amatuers with firearms. I have been in more high risk stressful situations than I care to remember, I have seen trained police and military personal freeze up under life and death situations. This is also going to be true of the untrained average joe with a concealed pistol license. They are not going to play the hero. More then likely in a "shootout" they will react like everyone else not experianced with it, and they will seek cover and/or panic.

What does a concealed carry permit offer? It is a deterrent, it causes criminals to rethink what type of crime they are willing to commit. If there is a possibility that the person(s) a criminal is thinking about harming has the capability to cause them harm, then they will seek another victim. Once again, areas with concealed carry laws have a far less number of crimes against persons then areas with restrictive gun laws.

But this debate has raged on since the 1980s. Both sides have some valid points and some ludicrious ones as well. The issue of a college student being under a lot of stress and having the easy access to alcohol/drugs etc. is BS. If they have access to a firearm and are wanting to harm themselves or another then they will. regardless of whether the School permits concealed carry.

When another asshole takes a gun onto a School Campus and starts randomly shooting people, think about this. It takes Police on average 3 minutes to respond to an area. Once an emergency that requires Police or FIrefighters emerges, someone has to notify 911, then police have to be dispatched to that emergency. But if someone at that scene has the knowledge, training, ability and willingness to react and save people then they should have every right too.