The second amendment has been getting a surprising boost on campuses lately—from college women—much to the consternation of university administrators. “After finishing a midterm exam one night in 2007, Amanda Carpenter was walking back to her car at the University of Nevada at Reno when she was attacked and raped,” Rachel Wiseman wrote in The Chronicle for Higher Education on October 14, 2011. “The rapist had a gun.”
“She didn’t.” Then Amanda joined Students for Concealed Carry on Campus. “Had I been carrying that night,” she told Wiseman. “I know I would have been able to stop my rape.”
“In more than a dozen states, legislation has been introduced to allow the carrying of concealed firearms on public-college campuses or to soften the gun bans there,” Wiseman reports. “Legislatures in Mississippi and Wisconsin passed such bills in their most recent sessions.”
University officials, meanwhile, remain reluctant to join this bandwagon. “many college administrators are opposed to allowing guns on their campuses, and are interpreting the language of concealed carry laws in restrictive ways,” Wiseman wrote. “In Wisconsin, for example, despite the new state law, the University of Wisconsin at Madison has established a policy that any faculty member who carries a firearm on campus can be subject to dismissal.”
Malcolm A. Kline is the Executive Director of Accuracy in Academia [1].
If you would like to comment on this article, e-mail mal.kline@academia.org [2]