If reason prevails anywhere, you would expect it to be at a university, where it is supposed to be enshrined, administered and taught. So when one Arkansas university after another says “absolutely not” to gun-toting professors and staffs, you can only be reassured.
Thursday, the University of Arkansas Board of Trustees, a most conservative bunch, exempted all the university’s 11 campuses from the legislature’s new campus gun law. Arkansas State University’s board did the same for its four campuses. The Arkansas Tech University board also voted to keep its campus gun-free, except for campus police. Other schools had acted much earlier.
Act 116 of 2013, which takes effect in August, allows instructors and staffs to carry weapons on the campus so that they can defend themselves and shoot it out with any miscreants—students, visitors or other professors—who try to make trouble. But the sponsors of the bill agreed to give schools the chance to opt out of the campus armaments if any of them had strong objections. It turns out that all of them do, which should not be a surprise.
Act 116 was one of a flood of bills eliminating or loosening the restrictions on making, selling, buying or carrying guns in public or private sanctuaries that sailed through the General Assembly, where nearly every lawmaker was terrified of casting a vote that someone could say was against guns.
The national revulsion against the latest slaughter of children by a heavily armed and suicidal maniac, this one in Connecticut, seemed to be moving toward some common-sense restraints on the circulation of military weaponry, so the National Rifle Association and the munitions makers fought back by pushing bills in state legislatures that do the opposite — encourage the purchase of more weapons or remove restrictions on their handling in public.
The theory behind the campus gun law and bills that open other sanctuaries—churches, public schools, parks, public buildings and the public streets—to open or concealed carry is that the more guns that are in the hands of good people the safer everyone will be. It is illogical nonsense. The greater the prevalence of guns the greater is the likelihood that they will be used, by impulse, by accident or by design. The evidence is in every morning’s paper.
When Dr. Amy Bishop, who learned that she was being denied tenure, pulled out her 9-millimeter pistol and murdered three professors and gravely injured three others at a biology departmental staff meeting at the University of Alabama in 2010, gun adherents argued that if the other professors had all been carrying guns, too, they could have blown Dr. Bishop away when it became apparent that she was losing control of herself. In the Wild Wild West, wasn’t the safest place to be the streets of Tombstone, where everyone had a pistol under his belt? Sure, lots of people died, but quite a few of them deserved it.
The votes by the university trustees were unanimous, as were the recommendations from chancellors, faculty senates and student associations. David Pryor, the former governor and senator and now a member of the University of Arkansas Board of Trustees, was heartened.
He said the message from students, faculty, administrators and trustees was “very clear” and he hoped every institution would elect not to be armed for battle.
Might he have a word with his son, the young Senator Pryor, who voted last month not to strengthen background checks on gun buyers?
But that’s another story.
