Concealed Carry = Campus Safety

Another tragic school shooting took place last week at Umpqua Community College in Roseburg, Oregon. The shooter, who was later identified as 26-year-0ld Chris Harper Mercer, open fired around 10:40 A.M., killing nine and wounding another nine people before exchanging fire with police and eventually committing suicide. Though more information has been uncovered since the attack, the motives of the shooter are still uncertain.

In typical liberal fashion, President Obama and his drones exploited the tragedy before the bodies of the dead were even cold.  According to an article in The Hill, Obama’s press secretary Josh Earnest released a statement within hours of the event to rally support for gun control:

Earnest said the “vast majority of Americans” support stricter gun laws, including closing the so-called gun-show loophole. But he said Obama is “realistic” about the dim prospects of congressional action on gun control.

“The president has been quite candid about how this is and has been a source of frustration for him,” he said.

“It has at all not been lowered at all on the priority scale, but at the same time the president is realistic that we’ll need to see a fundamental change” about how the public presses for action.

Gun control advocates also took to Twitter following the tragic shooting.

What people fail to realize, especially after a tragedy like this, is that guns are NOT the issue. Even if extremely stringent gun laws like those in Great Britain are passed, criminals will still find ways to commit violent acts. After Great Britain banned all guns, their violent crime rate skyrocketed to levels exponentially higher than the United States. In 2009, 12 years after the gun ban was passed, the Daily Mail reported that:

The UK has the second highest overall crime rate in the EU. It has a higher homicide rate than most of our western European neighbors, including France, Germany, Italy and Spain. The UK has the fifth highest robbery rate in the EU.

It has the fourth highest burglary rate and the highest absolute number of burglaries in the EU, with double the number of offenses than recorded in Germany and France

Great Britain has 2,034 violent crimes per 100,000 residents, compared to 466 violent crimes per 100,000 residents in the United States. Great Britain also has a homicide rate of 1.49 per 100,000 residents, and has 523 burglaries per 100,000 residents. Criminals in Great Britain are more likely to commit crimes, likely because they know they won’t face immediate armed resistance. In short, gun control simply does not curb violence.

How, then, do we make our schools safer?  We empower students to defend themselves: students should be able to arm themselves if they so choose.

Read the rest of Chris’s article over at The College Conservative.