By John McCoy
Arizona Daily Wildcat
February 20, 1998

University shouldn't be 'weapons free'

To the Editor,

I hope that Friday's shooting at Park Student Union will open some eyes. The so-called "weapons-free" policy of the Arizona Board of Regents is a horrendous failure. It is a failure for the same reason all gun control laws are failures: criminals don't obey them. People who are inclined to go about raping, assaulting, robbing and murdering do not obey laws, gun laws included.

This is the second shooting at Park Student Union in the past year and it would seem that carrying a gun through there might not be a bad idea. I say this in light of the fact that statistically, a victim is more than twice as likely to escape from an assault uninjured when using a firearm to resist, in contrast to not resisting at all. Also, a person resisting a robbery with a firearm is almost 50 percent more likely to escape uninjured from the encounter when compared to someone not resisting. (Kleck, Gary, "Crime Control through the Private Use of Armed Force," Social Forces, 35 (1988):1-22.)

We as a student body should call upon the Arizona Board of Regents to recognize that we are not children, and restore the rights which all people in Arizona enjoy, the right to carry our firearms and other weapons in a lawful manner. The vast majority of Arizona not designated a "weapons-free zone" and is not a bloody combat zone, and there is no logical reason to expect that repealing this silly and degrading policy on Arizona campuses would cause campuses to degenerate to that state.

John McCoy
MIS sophomore