By Rachel Alexander
Arizona Daily Wildcat
March 24, 1998

The regents' anti-self-defense policy

"They that can give up an essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety." - Benjamin Franklin, 1759

Imagine if Congress passed a law prohibiting the use of seatbelts. Even though one out of every four people will be in an auto accident and thousands of lives are saved by seatbelts, the government decides that seatbelts must be made illegal because of the few people whose deaths were attributable to them.

This is the same type of reasoning the Arizona Board of Regents has used to prohibit the use of defensive firearm protection on campus. On the surface, this appears to be a good regulation. Unfortunately, it does not take into account the reality of criminals and crime. Since this regulation was implemented, the number of assaults on the UA campus has increased. In 1996, there were 56 reported assaults. National statistics show that three out of four women will be victims of violent crime. Eighty-seven percent of all violent crimes occur outside the home. Although the chances of being a violent crime victim are greater than being in an auto accident, the board has decided to prevent students from protecting themselves. Like the government's reasoning in the hypothetical seatbelt scenario, their reasoning is faulty.

First of all, according to federal Department of Justice statistics, 90 percent of violent crimes do not involve handguns, so banning them will not prevent these assaults. Secondly, the justice department statistics showed 93 percent of guns involved in violent crimes are illegally obtained by perpetrators who are not going to pay attention to a regulation forbidding guns on campus. Thirdly, like seatbelts, guns save more lives than they take. A gun is 30 to 40 times more likely to be used to defend against an assault or other crime than to kill anybody. In most cases of successful self-defense the gun is not even fired.

The regents' policy hurts most the students who live in university residence halls. They are prevented from protecting themselves in their own homes. Department of Justice statistics for 1991 show that only 28 percent of calls to police for all crimes of violence are responded to within five minutes. The police cannot always be there to protect you. The U.S. Supreme Court has ruled that the police have no duty to protect individuals. Denying

students the right of self-defense in their living quarters seems a rather drastic invasion of privacy. Other universities, such as the University of Montana, allow students to store their handguns in special facilities in the dormitories and permit the residents of the university's family housing to keep their guns in their own homes.

This far-reaching anti-self defense policy even forbids having a gun in your car while it is parked on campus. Perhaps you are a member of a shooting club that meets after class? Instead of leaving from class and driving to your club, you must make an extra trip to pick up your rifle, then drive back to the club. And you can forget about that concealed weapon class and permit you paid for. In order to protect yourself while driving to and from school, you'd have to violate this law, which is punishable by six months in prison and/or a $1,000 fine.

What about classes that involve some necessary weapons instruction? My Trial Advocacy professor taught us how to handle a gun in a jury trial; how to hold it, show it to the witness and jury and pass it around the jury. There were some very important lessons, such as not to point the gun barrel at anyone and to keep it in the locked-open position so everyone can tell that it is unloaded. This is extremely critical information, information that should be learned in school first, rather than in the courtroom. Yet, according to current school policy, this instruction was illegal.

The current policy forbidding defensive firearm protection may violate an Arizona statute. A.R.S. 13-3102.A.10 states that when entering any public establishment, if the operator of the establishment makes a reasonable request that a person carrying a deadly weapon remove it, the person must place it in the custody of the operator of the establishment. The University of Arizona makes no accommodation for this requirement. Some of the universities that restrict firearms contain provisions in their policies providing for storage of firearms while the student is on campus. These universities include the University of Vermont, which is notable since Vermont is the only other state besides Arizona that does not restrict carrying a gun through selective permitting. The University of

Vermont's police services provide storage facilities for firearms, readily accessible to their owners twenty-four hours a day. Furthermore, unlike the UA, most universities allow individual students to obtain exceptions to this rule.

The U.S. government surveyed 1,874 felons, and found that 40 percent said they had at one time decided not to commit a crime because they were afraid the victim was carrying a firearm. Too bad the signs prominently displayed around campus let the criminals know we're all defenseless.

Rachel Alexander is a second-year law student. Her column, "Common Sense," appears every other Tuesday.