People aren’t “allowed” to do anything. They either exercise their natural, pre-existing (to politicians) rights, or they don’t.
A governmental entity and the media engaging in a discussion over what is “allowed” is ludicrous.
In Oregon the concealed carry law prohibits public colleges from baring licensed people from carrying pistols on campus. Regardless of the fact the Oregon Appeals Court has ruled against regulations to the contrary, the colleges are still determined to enforce them. I’ll speculate the approach is to demand students forfeit their rights as part of the admission process.
Private colleges can do whatever they want. Here is a copy of the letter I sent Linfield College, which I attended. They adopted their regulation just at the one year anniversary of the Virginia Tech shooting.
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