Lawmakers Debate Effect of Weapons on Campus
By MARC LACEY
Published: February 26, 2011
PHOENIX — Along with the meaning of life and the origin of the universe, college students across the country have another existential question to ponder: the wisdom of allowing guns in class.
Chris Richards for The New York Times
Anthony Daykin, the University of Arizona police chief, says allowing guns on campus could complicate his officers' efforts.
In Arizona, known for its gun-friendly ways, state lawmakers are pushing three bills this year focused on arming professors and others over the age of 21 on Arizona campuses. Sponsors talk of how professors and students are now sitting ducks for the next deranged gunman to charge through the classroom door. Some gun rights advocates go so far as to say that grade school teachers ought to be armed as well, although even this state is not ready for that proposition.
About a dozen legislatures nationwide, concerned about the potential for campus shootings, are considering arming their academies. Gun control advocates say Texas is probably the most likely to pass such a measure, with Arizona also in the mix.
Arizona’s proposals to loosen restrictions on campus weaponry, coming so soon after the shooting rampage in Tucson that left six dead and 13 wounded, have prompted a fierce debate at the state’s public universities, with significant brain power focusing on the issue of firepower. Administrators and campus police chiefs at Arizona State University, Northern Arizona University and the University of Arizona have all expressed opposition to allowing guns. Faculty members are circulating petitions against guns as well. Most, but not all, students also appear opposed.
Still, the state’s powerful gun lobby, with allies galore in the Legislature, is pushing hard. The notion has been floated in previous legislative sessions, but this year proponents believe they may have the momentum to get it done.
“We can’t rest on our laurels,” said Todd Rathner, who runs the Rathner & Associates lobbying firm and is working to have Colt named the state’s official firearm. “We’re making inroads, but I’ve been in politics long enough to know that the pendulum swings and there is no way to know if the pendulum won’t swing in the other direction.”
Campus shootouts are a relative rarity, but they do occur. The most notorious shooting at an Arizona university took place in 2002 when a disgruntled nursing student shot three professors to death.
Anthony Daykin, the police chief at the University of Arizona in Tucson, where the shootings occurred, said his officers would be at a loss if they arrived at a shooting scene in a lecture hall holding hundreds of students and found scores of people pointing, and possibly shooting, weapons at one another.
One student who found himself in the midst of a campus shooting agreed. “I don’t think two people having guns and firing them in public is that good of an idea,” said Nate Hightower, who was at South Mountain Community College in Phoenix in 2008 when a former student opened fire in a dispute with another young man, injuring three people.
On Feb. 14, there could have been a shooting at a Phoenix-area high school. Officials say a student had intended to kill a teacher, but a classmate told the authorities that the student had a gun before he could carry out his plan.
Keeping guns out, not allowing more in, is the answer, critics of the bills say. Others contend that allowing guns on campus will help ensure that universities stay relatively tranquil.
State Representative Jack Harper, who introduced a bill allowing professors to carry guns, said an Arizona State University professor, whom he has refused to identify, first raised the issue with him. “When law-abiding, responsible adults are able to defend themselves, crime is deterred,” Mr. Harper said in a statement.
That is the philosophy in Arizona as a whole, where gun laws are among the least restrictive in the country. If law-abiding people can carry guns one step outside the campus to keep criminals at bay, supporters ask, why not allow them to enter a university with their firearms?
That is already permitted in Utah, alone so far in allowing guns to be carried on all state campuses.
“I think that every person has the right to bear arms no matter what the circumstances,” said Ashlyn Lucero, a political science student at Arizona State University who has served in the Marine Corps, is the daughter of a sheriff and grew up hunting.
Ms. Lucero carries her Glock pistol whenever possible and would carry it on campus if she could. “If I’m going out to eat somewhere, I usually have a gun with me always,” she said. “It’s just one of those things that you never know what’s going to happen.”
Thor Mikesell, a senior majoring in music who grew up hunting, is also a backer of allowing guns on campus. “There’s no magic line, there’s no magic barrier that makes me more safe on the campus than it is when I’m being a real person in the real world outside of the school,” he said.
Mr. Mikesell said he does not carry his gun with him all the time because his girlfriend objects. But he does not consider gun carriers extreme.
“This is not the 1890s’ O.K. Corral shoot ’em up, bang ’em up,” he said. “These are not vigilante kind of people. Their interest is their personal security and the security of their family.”
The State Senate president, Russell Pearce, who recently said he would not prevent senators from taking guns into the Senate chamber despite rules against it, is an advocate for loosening as many gun restrictions as possible.
There are a bevy of other gun proposals this year, including measures that would allow guns in public buildings and make the Republican-dominated Legislature the sole arbiter of gun laws throughout the state. A Democratic proposal to restrict the sale of high-capacity magazines like those used in the Tucson shooting stands little chance of passing.
“Guns save lives, and it’s a constitutional right of our citizens,” Mr. Pearce said of the guns-on-campus proposal. Speaking of the Tucson shooting, which took place at a shopping center and not on a university campus, Mr. Pearce, a former sheriff’s deputy, said, “If somebody had been there prepared to take action, they could have saved lives.”
Carmen Themar, a program coordinator at the University of Arizona College of Nursing, was at the university on the morning nine years ago when a student began moving through the building and shooting professors. Despite the terror of the episode, she is not convinced that more guns would have prevented the attacks.
“Let’s say we had guns on the campus back then,” she said. “We might have had a shootout, more bullets in the air, and bullets don’t always go where they are aimed.”
Anne Mariucci, the chairwoman of the Arizona Board of Regents, the governing board for the state’s universities, said she would prefer that universities be places where disagreements are resolved by debating, not squeezing the trigger.
“Yes, the world is a dangerous place these days, but I don’t think you fight fire with fire,” she said. “I don’t think that bringing guns on campuses is the image of the peaceful, civil discourse that universities are supposed to be about.”
