Liberals Aghast as They're Losing the Gun Control Debate

The bucolic campus of Virginia Tech, in Blacksburg, Va., would seem to
have little in common with the Trolley Square shopping mall in Salt Lake
City. Yet both share an important characteristic, common to the site of
almost every other notorious mass murder in recent years: They are
“gun-free zones.”

Forty American states now have “shall issue” or similar laws, by which
officials issue a pistol carry permit upon request to any adult who
passes a background check and (in most states) a safety class. Research
by Carlisle Moody of the College of William and Mary, and others,
suggests that these laws provide law-abiding citizens some protection
against violent crime. But in many states there are certain places,
especially schools, set aside as off-limits for guns. In Virginia,
universities aren’t “gun-free zones” by statute, but college officials
are allowed to impose anti-gun rules. The result is that mass murderers
know where they can commit their crimes.

Private property owners also have the right to prohibit lawful gun
possession. And some shopping malls have adopted anti-gun rules. Trolley
Square was one, as announced by an unequivocal sign, “No weapons
allowed on Trolley Square property.”
In February of this year a young man walked past the sign prohibiting
him from carrying a gun on the premises and began shooting people who
moments earlier were leisurely shopping at Trolley Square. He killed
five.

Fortunately, someone else — off-duty Ogden, Utah, police officer
Kenneth Hammond — also did not comply with the mall’s rules. After
hearing “popping” sounds, Mr. Hammond investigated and immediately
opened fire on the gunman. With his aggressive response, Mr. Hammond
prevented other innocent bystanders from getting hurt. He bought time
for the local police to respond, while stopping the gunman from hunting
down other victims.

At Virginia Tech’s sprawling campus in southwestern Va.,
the local police arrived at the engineering building a few minutes after
the start of the murder spree, and after a few critical minutes, broke
through the doors that Cho Seung-Hui had apparently chained shut. From
what we know now, Cho committed suicide when he realized he’d soon be
confronted by the police. But by then, 30 people had been murdered.

But let’s take a step back in time. Last year the Virginia legislature
defeated a bill that would have ended the “gun-free zones” in Virginia’s
public universities. At the time, a Virginia Tech associate vice
president praised the General Assembly’s action “because this will help
parents, students, faculty and visitors feel safe on our campus.” In an
August 2006 editorial for the Roanoke Times, he declared: “Guns don’t
belong in classrooms. They never will. Virginia Tech has a very sound
policy preventing same.”

Actually, Virginia Tech’s policy only made the killer safer, for it was
only the law-abiding victims, and not the criminal, who were prevented
from having guns. Virginia Tech’s policy bans all guns on campus (except
for police and the university’s own security guards); even faculty
members are prohibited from keeping guns in their cars.

Virginia Tech thus went out of its way to prevent what happened at a
Pearl, Miss., high school in 1997, where assistant principal Joel Myrick
retrieved a handgun from his car and apprehended a school shooter. Or
what happened at Appalachian Law School, in Grundy, Va., in 2002, when a
mass murder was stopped by two students with law-enforcement
experience, one of whom retrieved his own gun from his vehicle. Or in
Edinboro, Pa., a few days after the Pearl event, when a school attack
ended after a nearby merchant used a shotgun to force the attacker to
desist. Law-abiding citizens routinely defend themselves with firearms.
Annually, Americans drive-off home invaders a half-million times,
according to a 1997 study by the Centers for Disease Control and
Prevention.

In Utah, there is no “gun-free schools” exception to the licensed carry
law. In K-12 schools and in universities, teachers and other adults can
and do legally carry concealed guns. In Utah, there has never been a
Columbine-style attack on a school. Nor has there been any of the
incidents predicted by self-defense opponents — such as a teacher
drawing a gun on a disrespectful student, or a student stealing a
teacher’s gun.

Israel uses armed teachers as part of a successful program to deter
terrorist attacks on schools. Buddhist teachers in southern Thailand are
following the Israeli example, because of Islamist terrorism.

After the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks in the U.S., long-time gun control
advocates, including Sen. Barbara Boxer (D., Calif.), agreed that making
airplane cockpits into “gun-free zones” had made airplanes much more
dangerous for everyone except hijackers. Corrective legislation,
supported by large bipartisan majorities in both houses of Congress,
allowed pilots to carry firearms, while imposing rigorous gun-safety
training on pilots who want to carry.

In many states, “gun-free schools” legislation was enacted hastily in
the late 1980s or early 1990s due to concerns about juvenile crime.
Aimed at juvenile gangsters, the poorly written and overbroad statutes
had the disastrous consequence of rendering teachers unable to protect
their students.

Reasonable advocates of gun control can still press for a wide variety
of items on their agenda, while helping to reform the “gun-free zones”
that have become attractive havens for mass killers. If legislators or
administrators want to require extensive additional training for armed
faculty and other adults, that’s fine. Better that some victims be armed
than none at all.

The founder of the University of Virginia, Thomas Jefferson, understood
the harms resulting from the type of policy created at Virginia Tech. In
his “Commonplace Book,” Jefferson copied a passage from Cesare
Beccaria, the founder of criminology, which was as true on Monday as it
always has been:

“Laws that forbid the carrying of arms . . . disarm only those who are
neither inclined nor determined to commit crimes . . . Such laws make
things worse for the assaulted and better for the assailants; they serve
rather to encourage than to prevent homicides, for an unarmed man may
be attacked with greater confidence than an armed man.”


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Mr. Kopel is research director of the Independence Institute in
Golden, Colo., and co-author of the law school textbook, “Gun Control
and Gun Rights” (NYU Press).