Campus Carry: 11 States with No Mass Shootings, No Campus Crimes by Concealed Carriers

For all the hand wringing and apocalyptic warnings that gun controllers make when a state considers campus carry, empirical evidence proves that law-abiding citizens with guns on campus are just that—law-abiding.

Therefore, the 11 states that allow campus carry stand out as yet another example of why law-abiding citizens with guns are a good thing.

Writing in The Kansas City Star, Crime Prevention Research Center’s John Lott looks at the fact that campus carry took effect in Kansas and Georgia on July 1, and explains:

Gun control advocates in Kansas [predicted] disaster, just as they have in each new state that adopted campus carry. Unable to point to any actual catastrophes, opponents do their best to imagine what might go wrong.

But at school after school, no problems have occurred. Over the decades, not a single permit holder who was allowed to carry on university property has committed a crime with his gun. No permit holder has ever gotten angry over a grade and started shooting. As far as we know, no permit holder has ever used his gun to threaten anyone on campus. There have only been six accidental discharges, all of which involved minor injuries. In no case did someone other than the permit holder get a hold of the gun.

This is just reality. Throughout the 2015 debate on campus carry in the Texas legislature, gun control proponents put forward “what if” scenarios and spoke as if we really had no idea how campus carry would turn out. Yet, campus carry has been the law of the land in Colorado since 2003 and there have been no mass shootings or crimes committed by a concealed carry permit holder that state.

And Lott brings up an under-reported point: In addition to not committing crimes, there have been instances where armed, law-abiding students use their guns to stop crimes. He writes:

[Former University of Kansas professor Jacob] Dorman claims that ‘arming students has done nothing to quell active shooter situations because students do not have the training to effectively combat shooters.’ My research has found numerous instances of concealed handgun permit holders with no more training stopping dozens public shootings.

Concealed carry permit holders are among the most law-abiding of law-abiding citizens, and are therefore an economical deterrent to crime whether they are in a Walmart, an ExxonMobil gas station, a church, or a university. The doomsday talk that precedes the passage of a campus legislation is factually baseless.

AWR Hawkins is the Second Amendment columnist for Breitbart News and host of Bullets with AWR Hawkins, a Breitbart News podcast. He is also the political analyst for Armed American Radio. Follow him on Twitter: @AWRHawkins. Reach him directly at awrhawkins@breitbart.com.