The overwhelming majority of America’s 4,400 colleges and universities prohibit concealed carry permit holders from bringing their firearms on campus. If they can be trusted with them in nearly every other public place, why not campus?
According to the National Conference of State Legislatures, there are 16 states where concealed weapons are banned entirely on campuses, 23 states where colleges have the power to allow or forbid them, and 10 states where concealed carry is allowed.
If the results out of the University of Kansas are any indication, there’s nothing to fear when it comes to allowing concealed carry permit holders to carry on campus. According to the Daily Wire,
Deflating the leftist narrative that more guns means more crime, the University of Kansas saw a significant decrease in crime since implementing campus carry in July 2017.
According to university police, the number of crimes dropped on campus from 2016 to 2017. A news release from the KU Office of Public Safety showed a 13% decrease. There were 770 criminal offenses reported on campus in 2016, but that dropped to 671 reports in 2017.
There were also zero criminal weapons violations in 2017. Campus police statistics show 14 weapons violations from 2008 to 2016.
Nationwide, there are about 16.5 million active concealed carry permits in the U.S. according to the Crime Prevention Research Center (CPRC), only 182,000 of which have been issued by the populous left-leaning states of California and New York.
A Government Accountability Study (GAO) puts the percent of the adult population with a concealed carry permit at only 4.2 percent for all states, excluding California and New York. That’s about half of what CPRC’s figures implied, but the GAO’s study did lack data from five states.
Those who believe only police should have guns should know that concealed carry permit holders are among the most law-abiding people in the country. In 2016, 26 concealed permit holders supposedly committed 29 homicides (I say supposed, because most of those cases are still pending). Out of 16.5 million permit holders, that’s a homicide rate of below 0.2 per 100,000 permit-holders. The national firearm homicide rate is about 3.8 per 100,000.
And what of crime as a whole? More from the report:
As the National Review reminds us, a study in Police Quarterly found that from 2005 to 2007, police committed 703 crimes annually on average. Of those, there were 113 firearms violations on average.
With 683,396 full-time law-enforcement employees nationwide in 2006, we can infer that there were about 102 crimes by police per 100,000 officers. Among the U.S. population as a whole, the crime rate was 37 times higher than the police crime rate over those years — 3,813 per 100,000 people.
Now let’s look at permit holders. Between October 1, 1987, and January 31, 2015, Florida revoked 9,366 concealed-handgun permits for misdemeanor or felony offenses. This is an annual rate of 12.5 crimes per 100,000 permit holders — a mere eighth of the crime rate among officers.
When concealed carry permit holders are more law abiding than the police, why wouldn’t you want them armed everywhere they go?
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