Posted on 12/09/2011 7:25:45 AM PST by marktwain
Sen. Jim Banks: Students Should Be Allowed To Protect Themselves
INDIANAPOLIS -- College students could soon be able to carry guns on public campuses in Indiana.
Republican Sen. Jim Banks of Columbia City has introduced legislation that would allow licensed gun owners to have firearms on campus.
The law has the potential to impact hundreds of thousands of students and staff at public universities, including Indiana University, Purdue University, Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis, Ivy Tech, Indiana State University, Ball State University, Vincennes University and the University of Southern Indiana.
The legislation would not apply to private colleges and universities.
Banks said he proposed the bill so that students could protect themselves, RTV6's Kara Kenney reported.
"Almost every gun crime that's ever happened has occurred with people who aren't licensed," Banks said. "This is a constitutional issue, your Second Amendment gun rights."
Currently, universities in Indiana ban firearms on campus through their own policies.
Under standard campus rules, students could face sanctions and non-students could be banned from campus if they are caught carrying a gun.
Despite the standard policies, Banks said zero-tolerance of guns on campus is unconstitutional.
"These are taxpayer-funded entities, subsidized by you and I as taxpayers, and for college campuses to restrict gun rights on campus is just plain wrong," Banks said. "I think we're behind on this issue and we need to pass a law allowing students to carry guns on campus if they're licensed to do so."
Lawmakers in Wisconsin recently passed legislation to allow college students to protect themselves, but a similar measure failed to pass the Purdue University Student Senate in November.
Purdue student Zachary Briggs spearheaded the efforts to change university policies for students who want to carry guns.
(Excerpt) Read more at theindychannel.com ...
Boiler up!
Changing the law probably won't change what people do there.
Now, about IUPUI ~ probably the same deal.
My alma mater passed one of those resolutions that excluded licensed concealed carry handguns from campus and I wrote the following letter in response.
Your decision against legal concealed carry memorializes the anniversary of the Virginia Tech shootings with practiced irrationality. You replicate the same comforting environment Seung-Hui Cho embraced, while asserting psychopaths must cower before a rule forbidding licensed students to carry pistols.
A rigorous, twenty-year study by John Lott and William Landes from University of Chicago Law School supports expanded concealed carry in public places. Passage of shall issue laws correlates with large decreases in multiple victim shootings, and reduced harm when shootings actually occur. Use of citizen deadly force makes startling interruptions causing assailants to abandon or improvise assaults. Police then respond to incidences in progress, instead of arriving for body counts and paperwork.
Also important were absences of shootings. Public place shootings provide perpetrators leading roles in malevolent fantasies. Previously imagined screams and explosions suddenly penetrate their beings, embellished by intimate, self-created visual stimuli of human terror, bloody mists, broken bodies, culminating in splendid, convulsive suicides at their chosen moment. The latent presence of armed citizens provides a deterrent disqualifying those places, and leading prospective murderers to abandon fantasies, or to seek a supportive “gun free” environment.
Rather than invite or allow licensed individuals, it seems more comforting for public officials and media to weave pleasing illusions around an occasional Columbine, Omaha mall or Virginia Tech, than recognize repeated cases of armed citizens thwarting violence. The Linfield campus shall become an official island of contentment for predators, during the ten-minute plus police response time.
Link to Study: http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=272929
I’m thinking sales in the campus book store. ....
Down here in GA, Georgia Tech Students get violently mugged on a weekly basis. Of course, I don’t know what they expect when they’re a stone’s throw away from the “po’ fokes” housing projects. But anyways, they too are hounding the college admins for gun carrying rights on campus.
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