The administration of Indiana University should revise its policy banning all guns from its

campusesallowing licensed, responsible students to carry concealed firearms on campus.

Hypothetically submitted to Indiana Daily Student

CMCL-C228: Argumentation and Public Advocacy

Mark Nagle

April 24, 2013

Kyle Bandy
kybandy@indiana.edu

Its a gorgeous sunny morning in Bloomingtonthe first day in seemingly an eternity

that students can venture outside without a jacket. The clock on the Student Building strikes
eleven, and hundreds of students emerge from Ballantine eager to eat lunch, to study for an

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upcoming exam, or to catch the bus home. Suddenly in the midst of the huge throng of students
several loud noises tarnish the tranquil scenethen screams followed by still more loud bangs.
It doesnt take long for students to realize gunshots are ringing out on the campus of Indiana
University. Its difficult to tell from which direction the shots are coming; students scramble in
every directionpanicking. After what seems like a half-hour of the pandemonium, police
arrive on the scene only to find the gory carnage the shooter (or shooters) left behind. Law
enforcement officers from all around Monroe County stream past the Union on Seventh Street
bound for the locus of the terror; the entire campus is locked down as a manhunt begins. Hours
later, the gruesome process of counting fatalities commences.
For many students, faculty, and administrators, the aforementioned tale is nothing but an
unrealistic, albeit discomforting, fiction. For the student body of Virginia Tech University in
mid-April 2007, this nightmarish fiction morphed into a real-life nightmare. While it is certain
universities nationwide have learned valuable lessons from the events at Virginia Tech in terms
of properly handling an active shooter situation, the protocol remains purely reactive and reliant
upon the tortoise-like pace (relatively speaking) of police response. At the Virginia Tech
Massacre, police spent three minutes traveling to the site of the shooting only to spend five
additional minutes unraveling the chains from the entrance of the building the shooter had used
to contain his victims. During the shooters eight-minute rampage, 170 rounds of ammunition
were discharged, thirty-three lives were lost, and twenty-three people were injured in the barrage
of gunfire. This incidents destruction and tastelessness could just as easily have happened on
the campus of Indiana University, but couldnt we go beyond simply relying on the police to
respond to such a disaster? I contend it is in the best interest of the administration at Indiana

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University to allow licensed and responsible students to carry concealed firearms on campus in
order to defuse or deter on-campus violence.
First of all, lets examine the more general proposition that concealed carry laws in
municipalitiesnot necessarily college campusesare beneficial. While it may seem
counterintuitive that allowing citizens to carry guns correlates with less crime, in fact research by
Dr. John Lott Jr., author of over seventy published articles regarding gun control, concludes
violent crimes are more rare in municipalities with nondiscretionary concealed-carry laws. To
clarify, violent crimes are termed murder and nonnegligent manslaughter, forcible rape,
robbery, and aggravated assault by the Federal Bureau of Investigation. According to Blacks
Law Dictionary, a concealed weapon is defined as a weapon that is carried by a person but
that is not visible by ordinary observation. A common method of concealment for handguns is
the use of an ankle or shoulder holster in conjunction with carrying a relatively small firearm.
Clearly carrying the weapon on ones hip in similar fashion employed by law enforcement
officers with their service weapon would not constitute concealed-carry.
In order to perform data analysis in his study, Dr. Lott determined the date each state or
countys non-discretionary concealed-carry laws went into effect and then used the Federal
Bureau of Investigations Uniform Crime Report data from 1977 to 2006 in order to observe any
appreciable fluctuation in crime after the laws were passed. By analyzing the difference in crime
rates between states with and without nondiscretionary concealed-carry laws, Lott illustrates that
states with these laws experience an average violent crime rate of 403.2 per 100,000 people
while states with more restrictive handgun laws saw an average violent crime rate of 505.2 per
100,000 people. In clearer terms, states with more restrictive gun laws saw a twenty-five percent
higher crime rate than less restrictive states. Even more dramatically, robbery crime rates were

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eighty-four percent higher in states with more restrictive gun legislation. In municipalities
adopting nondiscretionary handgun laws, violent crime as a whole decreased by 4.9%, murder
decreased by 7.7%, rape decreased by 5.3%, and aggravated assault decreased by 7.01% with all
four of these statistics being significant at a one percent level. In short, if every municipality in
the country were subjected to nondiscretionary handgun permit laws, the number of murders per
year would likely decrease by 1,400 in one year.
Next, lets discuss what kind of restrictions should be placed upon students who wish to
carry concealed weapons. Indiana law only grants gun permits to citizens twenty-one and older
a constraint I dont particularly disagree with. I posit the university should have some
additional requirement that students pass a criminal background check and a training course
involving shooting proficiency. As state law allows nearly anyone over twenty-one to acquire a
gun permit, its reasonable the university impose some further restriction.
In the past decade, five states have begun to allow concealed carry at public universities.
While opponents of allowing college students to carry firearms on campus fear that the guns
would be used recklessly in a drunken stupor using data from a 2002 Journal of American
College Health study to back up their claim, thats just not the case. In 2004 the Utah state
legislature passed a law explicitly mandating the state law guaranteeing the right to carry
concealed weapons on state property covers state universities, too. When the University of Utah
challenged the law in court, the Utah Supreme Court upheld the lawforcing the university to
allow anyone with a concealed carry permit to possess a firearm on its campus. According to a
spokesperson for the Utah Attorney Generals Office, there hasnt been a single incident since
it permitted concealed weapons on campus.

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Colorado State University has a similar policy to that of Utah universities. Furthermore,
it has a comparable number of enrolled students to Indiana University. Since allowing concealed
carry on its campus in 2003, the number of sexual assaults fell by ninety percent. Note that the
concealed weapons were not actually used to induce this reduction in sexual assaults; the simple
fact that a potential victim could be carrying a gun was enough to deter would-be rapists
effectively. Crime on campus certainly isnt isolated to Colorado, either. In 2009 through 2011,
universities in Indiana have seen a total of 214 sexual assaults on campusnot to mention 74
robberies, and 130 aggravated assaults. Drawing back to Dr. Lotts 2010 book More Guns Less
Crime as well as Colorado States dramatic drop in crime, we can conclude with a high degree of
certainty that allowing guns on campus would lower Indianas campus crime rate, too.
It is also worthwhile to examine the U.S. Supreme Courts posture on the individual right
to bear arms. In 2008 the Courts decision in D.C. v. Heller largely invalidated gun bans
throughout the country by interpreting the Second Amendment to the Constitution to protect the
individuals right to carry a handgun; however, Justice Scalia, writing for the majority, conceded
that like the First Amendment, the Second Amendment is not to be applied without limits. He
named schools and government buildings as sensitive places where guns can still be banned.
While precedent agrees that regulating firearm possession in these places is permissible, so too
did the precedent in many states and localities supporting restrictive gun bans in the home
similar to the District of Columbia law struck down by the Court. While it is certainly easy to
point to schools as acceptable gun-free sensitive places, shouldnt the Court examine the
evidence to determine whether or not this impediment on the Second Amendment is justified?
Certainly the arguments presented in this piece provide convincing evidence to the contrary.

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Admittedly, however, convincing our nations highest Court that its decision is even slightly
flawed would be arduous to say the least.
At its heart, the Courts decision in D.C. v. Heller protects nearly unconditionally
guarantees the right for citizens to carry within their homes a loaded handgun. Indiana
University requires that first-year students live on campus their first year at the university with
some narrow exceptions. In effect, this makes a students residence hall her home for eight
months. The Court does not explicitly explore the case in which ones home is within a
sensitive place; however, the Courts statement that a total ban on handgun possession in the
home amounts to a prohibition on an entire class of arms that Americans overwhelmingly
choose for the lawful purpose of self-defense, certainly suggests ones right to bear arms within
the home trumps the sensitive place doctrine; ergo, students should, at the very least, be
afforded the opportunity to possess a gun in their dormitories. By way of the countless examples
of on-campus shootings, its only logical that the I.U. administration extends this right to the
entire campus.
I call on the administration at Indiana University to recognize the entirely possible
hypothetical scenario presented at the beginning of this essay; while the university has in place
an active shooter plan, I contend that its not enough to prevent widespread injury in the event
of such a catastrophe. Using the evidence set forth herein, its patently obvious that allowing
students to arm themselves would have negligible, if any, negative side effects.

Works Cited
Agger, Ben, and Timothy W. Luke. There Is a Gunman on Campus: Tragedy and Terror at
Virginia Tech. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2008. Print.

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Associated Press. "Utah Only State to Allow Guns at College." NBCNews.com. 28 Apr. 2007.
Web. 17 Apr. 2013.
Donohue, John J. "The Impact of Concealed-Carry Laws." Evaluating Gun Policy: Effects on
Crime and Violence. By Jens Ludwig and Philip J. Cook. Washington, D.C.: Brookings
Institution, 2003. Web. 16 Apr. 2013.
Garner, Bryan A., Ed. Black's Law Dictionary. Ninth Ed. St. Paul, MN: West, 2009. Print.
Gelineau, Kristen. "Police Response Timeline at Virginia Tech Examined." The Boston Globe.
The New York Times Company, 26 Apr. 2007. Web. 17 Apr. 2013.
Glovin, David, and Oliver Staley. "Handguns on Campus Make Utah Colleges Model After
Court Rulings." Bloomberg. Bloomberg L.P., 2 July 2010. Web. 16 Apr. 2013.
Greenfield, Daniel. "Sexual Assaults Fell 90% After Colorado Springs University Legalized
Campus Guns." Frontpage Mag. 22 Feb. 2013. Web. 17 Apr. 2013.
Lott, John R., Jr. More Guns, Less Crime: Understanding Crime and Gun Control Laws. Third
Ed. Chicago: University of Chicago, 2010. Print.
Miller, Darreil A. H. "Guns as Smut: Defending the Home-Bound Second Amendment."
Columbia Law Review 109.6 (2009): 1278-356. JSTOR. Web. 16 Apr. 2013.
Plassmann, Florenz, and John Whitley. "Confirming "More Guns, Less Crime"" Stanford Law
Review 55.4 (2003): 1313-369. JSTOR. Web. 16 Apr. 2013.
Skorton, David, and Glenn Altschuler. "Do We Really Need More Guns On Campus?" Forbes.
Forbes Magazine, 21 Feb. 2013. Web. 16 Apr. 2013.
United States. Department of Education. Office of Postsecondary Education. The Campus Safety
and Security Data Analysis Cutting Tool. U.S. Department of Education, 2011. Web. 16
Apr. 2013.

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