AFFORDING DISASTER: CONCEALED CARRY ON CAMPUS

As of March 2012, students with concealed carry permits attending public colleges and universities in the state of Colorado may carry their weapons on campus. Colorado is one of six states with legal provisions permitting guns on public campuses. An additional twenty-two states leave it up to the governing bodies of individual colleges and universities to determine their institution's gun policy, while twenty-two states ban concealed weapons on campuses.1 The NRA often asserts that 'an armed society is a polite society.' They and those who favorably quote them take this as a positive result of an armed citizenry. People won't be rude. They won't argue. They won't say anything offensive, for fear of being shot. And that may be right. But we do not want a polite campus. If an armed campus is a polite campus, then students at such campuses will miss a fundamentally important aspect of their college experience. Students ought to be able to voice their opinions, to argue with others, and to test new ideas without fear. The threat of violence that guns create challenges the most fundamental liberty we have: the freedom of speech.2 Concealed carry advocates advance two primary arguments in favor of eliminating gun bans on public campuses: a rights-based argument and a consequentialist argument. According to the rights-based argument, campus gun bans interfere with lawful gun owners' right to protect themselves. The consequentialist argument proclaims that the presence of guns on campus makes said campus safer for all.3 Section 1 of this paper examines the consequentialist argument: that the presence of guns on campus makes said campus safer. We discuss some of the empirical studies that focus on safety and the presence of guns, and argue that there is no evidence that the presence of legal guns makes campuses safer. In fact, such guns are likely to make campuses less safe.4 In Section 2, we address the question of whether gun owners have a right to carry their guns on college campuses. We argue that campus gun bans are legitimate even if one has a general moral right to carry. In section 3, we discuss some of the negative effects of allowing concealed weapons on public campuses. Finally, in section 4, we turn to the work of ecological psychologist J.J. Gibson. Gibson offers a concept that is informative to the gun control dispute: affordances. We argue that this concept and its supporting theory provide theoretical support for the empirical evidence that the pres