Sen. Cook's appeal passes

All the empirical evidence indicates that the opposite is true. When responsible citizens are lawfully allowed to be armed, violence typically decreases. It is the possession of weapons by the criminally irresponsible, especially in the presence of an unarmed general populace, that that increases violence. And that is what the banning of concealed carry on campuses creates. The ban only stops the responsible people who are not a threat to the safety of the campus community. There is no actual mechanism to prevent a person who intends to violate the ban from doing so. So all the ban does is disarm those who would carry a weapon responsibly while allowing the irresponsible to do as they please.

In the early 1980s, few states allowed citizens to carry concealed firearms legally, and most of those had highly restrictive requirements for obtaining a license to do so. Today, all but two states allow concealed carry, and the overwhelming majority are "shall issue", meaning that any person who is not prohibited from purchasing a handgun can apply and get a license. Two states currently require no license at all, and at least three more currently have legislation pending to drop the license requirement.

Given all that, our violence statistics should have gone up over that same period of time if your premise was correct. Instead, we've seen a remarkably steady DECLINE in violent crime, gun crime, and even gun accidents in the same period. So all the fears about increased violence, increased crime, and even accidental injuries do not hold up to factual scrutiny. Carrying a gun is a big responsibility, and generally responsible people who decide to do so recognize this. So when they decide to start carrying, they tend to take it seriously and the numbers show that they are involved in less violence, less crime, and fewer accidents than virtually any other segment of the population.

A couple of problems here. First, if you actually do read the incident, you'll see that shooting the other officer was justified, because the first officer was threatening to shoot people for the heinous crime of....underage drinking. He was, for all intents and purposes, involved in a criminal assault with a firearm, even though he was working undercover. In that situation, he should have been shot. Second, this was not an accidental shooting. The officer who shot Jenkins saw a criminal act with a handgun, and acted appropriately. He might not have shot Jenkins had he known that he was an undercover officer, but Jenkins was acting criminally, and nothing the officer did who shot him was wrong.

This leads to the other problem here - these officers were certified with firearms, as you said. But do people really understand what that means? It does NOT mean "trained" or even competent. Certification is a process to allow police departments to avoid civil liability, not to ensure that officers are properly trained with firearms. Most police and military personnel are NOT well trained in the safe use of firearms, they are MINIMALLY trained, if at all. Certification involves no actual training at all. It only requires a skills test (and a pretty pathetic one at that), so that if an officer does shoot someone when they shouldn't have, the department can come back and say "well, he passed qualification, so it's not our fault". Most police officers are no more knowledgeable about firearms than the average citizen, and many even less so. As a firearms trainer who served both in the US Army and as a police officer, I know. In fact, the worst students to deal with are current/former cops and soldiers, because they all think that the very minimalist training they get makes them experts, when in fact they are usually some of the most irresponsible people I've seen with a firearm. I would feel much safer in a room full of armed undergraduates who had taken a couple NRA firearms courses than I would with a room full of armed cops and soldiers, as far as firearms safety goes.

I know people here are saying it's an issue of their freedom but there are serious consequences when it comes to guns. All it takes is a few shots fired by either one nut or irresponsible person to end someone's life.