College is a unique educational experience, particularly on many smaller campuses. It’s a place where you have people who aren’t quite old enough to vote potentially attending classes with people on social security. Hell, I went to college with my grandmother, so it does happen.
Because of this age difference, though, it means that a lot of people are mature, responsible adults with a lifetime of experience.
It also means a lot of people who have carried a gun for decades who now have to decide whether they want to stay safe or get a degree that might be needed for their career development. Then you’ve got the people who are just becoming old enough to own a gun who want to carry, all on the same campuses.
And Florida looks to be responding to that need.
Unsurprisingly, some are bringing up Parkland and the post-Parkland gun control laws passed there, and taking issue with the push for campus carry in the Sunshine State. Take this one, for example:
For some people, this debate is theoretical. For many Floridians, like myself, it hits far too close to home. In 2018, I lived a 15 minute drive from Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School. For me, this day is not one marked by love, but by the deadliest mass shooting at a high school in U.S. history.
The terror that day left a trail of anxiety and heartbreak that lingered long after the shooting at the high school in Parkland ended with 17 people killed. My husband’s colleague ran out of work and raced to the scene, frantic to check on his daughter, a freshman at that high school at the time. So many other parents did the same. And too many were met with gut-wrenching news.
After Parkland, Florida lawmakers took meaningful action to protect students and educators. Some reforms followed, including raising the minimum age to purchase long guns to 21. Yet eight years later, the Legislature approved a measure that moves in the opposite direction — expanding where guns can be carried and who can carry them.
This is unconscionable and signals a troubling shift to expanding access to firearms instead of preventing gun violence.
What the author fails to understand is that campus carry isn’t a step backward in trying to prevent so-called gun violence. If anything, it’s a step forward.
Look at what happened at Old Dominion University in Virginia, for example. In that case, we had a man convicted of trying to provide material support to ISIS, who was out of prison early because he completed a drug treatment program–despite his conviction having nothing to do with drug use, mind you–that turned to someone with a history of gun trafficking to get a firearm illegally. He then took that illegally obtained and illegally possessed firearm into a gun-free zone and killed someone before the ROTC class took him out.
At no point did any of these laws stop that shooting. Had the killer started in any other classroom, we’d probably have seen a massive bloodbath, much like Virginia Tech was.
You do not stop determined terrorists with laws. You stop them by shooting them in the face before they can hurt anyone.
It’s not unconscionable to recognize that fact, nor is it troubling to address it.
Lawful adults aren’t the problem. They never have been and never will be. What Florida missed with Parkland isn’t that the gun laws were insufficient, but that the killer had been coddled by the local police, who let numerous cases of domestic violence go, to say nothing of his violent outbursts in school. Everyone freaking about the so-called school-to-prison pipeline helped make sure that killing happened, all because he wasn’t punished as he should have been.
He wasn’t a lawful adult.
And neither was the Old Dominion University shooter with his felony conviction for aiding terrorists.
Punishing the law-abiding only makes them more vulnerable to the criminal. It’s as simple as that, and the author of this piece, like so many other champions of gun control, ignores that little tidbit.
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