A Year After Virginia Tech, Students Hope to Carry Guns on Campus

Wednesday (April 16) marks the one-year anniversary of the worst school shooting in U.S. history: the Virginia Tech tragedy, which took the lives of 27 students, five faculty members and the shooter. While schools across the country have instituted a variety of new security measures to help prevent future attacks — from wireless campuswide alert systems and modified high-tech door locks to low-tech fixes, such as loudspeakers and sirens on rooftops — more and more students are fighting for the right to carry concealed weapons on campus.

Led by the national advocacy group Students for Concealed Carry on Campus, whose membership has swelled to more than 25,000 in recent months, these students are convinced that one of the best ways to stop another campus shooter is to allow students to arm themselves. The group formed in the wake of the Virginia Tech shooting, and it now has nearly 300 chapters in 43 states.

"We just want to protect ourselves," said Stephen Feltoon, 22, the Midwest regional director for the organization and a recent University of Miami (Ohio) graduate in in psychology, who has had a concealed-carry permit for more than a year. "That's why the majority of people get concealed-carry licenses, not so they can play hero or act like a police officer and kick in a door and get the bad guys and get their face on the news. It doesn't make sense to us. Why is it OK to walk around the streets of, say, Cincinnati, with a concealed gun in your waist, or to walk into a 300-person movie theater with one, but not into a 300-person lecture hall?"

One of the leading organizations lobbying against the expansion of concealed carry on campuses is the International Association of Campus Law Enforcement Administrators. Associate Director Christopher Blake said that his organization believes not only that concealed carry does not make campuses safer, but that there is no evidence to suggest that allowing students to carry concealed weapons reduces violence at all. "We are concerned that it would increase violence," said Blake, whose organization has 1,200 college and university members, as well as 2,000 individual members. "Our real concern is that a campus police officer responding to a situation might not be able to distinguish between the shooter and other people with firearms."