You Have Got to be Joking, Right?

According to Al Jazeera, due to the numerous accounts of sexual assault on college campuses across the nation, various pro-gun advocates have addressed a need for "campus carry." This type of firearm carry would allow students to carry a firearm on campus in order to defend themselves. However, many anti-gun figures, including former New York mayor Michael Bloomberg, have called the wish for campus carry a "grotesque display of opportunism." Being anti-gun, Bloomberg and all the others who oppose the bill do not see that the wish to pass the law is not to get more firearms in America, but to protect and save the lives of those who are being sexually assaulted. Many against the passing of the bill state that "...they're [pro-gunners] denying the indisputable fact that the vast majority of campus assaults are perpetrated by a partner, friend, or close acquaintance — the types of people around whom people would never think to carry a gun." Again, the anti-gunners do not understand how firearm culture works. When one decides to carry, they do not carry when it is convenient, or say, "Oh, I am only going to the store. I don't need my gun." Instead, a concealed or open carry permit holder carries his or her firearm everywhere, due to the simple fact that an everyday convenience store run, can turn into a gunfight with no warning. This is all because humans are unpredictable, just as the girls who were harmed know. The situation that happened to those girls that scarred them for life would have been very different had campus carry been allowed. As Students for Concealed Carry, an organization of students that lobbies for the right to concealed carry on college campuses, stated, "Until college campuses can guarantee a student will never encounter a threatening situation, they must never prohibit students from their own means of protection." Not only would the simple fear of the possibility of someone carrying deter a possible sexual deviant from performing the crime, but if that does not, then a bullet will. As 20 to 25 percent of college women have either been sexually assaulted or have had someone attempt to sexually assault them, firearms seem to me as one of the greatest deterrent and possible deadly force solutions. Even one woman by the name of Amanda Collins, who was sexually assaulted on campus in 2007, had stated that she could have defended herself had she been allowed to carry her firearm that she had the legal permit to carry, yet her college was a "gun free zone." Of course, her attacker did not listen to the sign that banned firearms and carried one anyway. Firearms would change the outcome of almost all sexual assaults in all areas of the world, not just college campuses, yet anti-gunners seem to be blinded by their ignorance.