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Friday, March 29
The Indiana Daily Student

New bill supports concealed carry on campus

The push to allow the concealed carry of firearms on college campuses is underway in the Indiana General Assembly.

House Bill 1143, a new piece of legislation that was introduced into the Indiana House Committee on Public Policy on Jan. 8, would make significant changes to Indiana’s gun regulation laws, including allowing concealed carry of firearms on college campuses.

The law, which was authored by State Rep. Jim Lucas, prohibits any state agency or state-supported property from regulating the concealed carry of weapons by individuals with a proper permit.

Miles Vining, the current head of Students for Concealed Carry on Campus at IU, offered a comment on the subject when asked why they supported concealed carry laws.

“The biggest reason is because of the vulnerability of college campuses in general,” Vining said. “There’s a very good reason you don’t hear about mass shootings taking place in gun shops or gun shows.”

The SCCC is a national organization that was established after the fatal shootings at Virginia Tech in 2007. It promotes the concealed carry of handguns on college campuses.

“A lot of people seem to think that we are simply for legislation to allow firearms on campus,” Vining said. “Although that is our main goal, our interests go much deeper than that. It’s often said ... that never pulling your gun out is preferable. So a large part about our group is promoting things like situational awareness and self-defense alternatives.”

Vining said it is already legal to carry a concealed weapon in Indiana if you have the proper permits, but IU often chooses to expel students whom they can prove were carrying concealed weapons.

There are already laws that ?allow for the concealed carry of weapons on college campuses in seven states, including Colorado, Idaho, Kansas, Mississippi, Oregon, Utah and Wisconsin.

Lucas commented on his motives for drafting the bill in an article published last week.

“I want to decriminalize self-defense and recognize their right to carry firearms lawfully,” he said.

“People that are committed to violent crime are not deterred by laws. It doesn’t work. Making good people helpless will not make bad people harmless.”

School shootings have increased throughout America. In Jan. 2014, a student shot and killed another student at Purdue University.

In September, a student at Indiana State University was shot, but not killed, in a fight with another student.

IU has its own history of shootings, most prominent the incident in July 1999, when 26-year-old Korean doctoral candidate Won-Joon Yoon was shot and killed on campus.

A study of people’s opinion of concealed carry laws on college campus was published in the Journal of American College Health in July 2014 by Jagdish Khubchandani, an assistant professor of community health education at Ball State University.

The study surveyed 1,649 students in 15 different Midwestern universities and found 78 percent of students oppose allowing concealed weapons on campuses. About 66 percent did not feel “carrying a gun would make them less likely to be troubled by others.”

In a separate study also administered by Khubchandani, 401 college presidents were surveyed about their opinions on the subject.

According to the study, 95 percent of college presidents oppose allowing concealed handguns on campus, and 92 percent said campuses would seem unsafe if they permitted the concealed carry of ?firearms.

Similar legislation has been introduced to the state legislature in Florida this month. A spokesperson for Moms Demand Action for Gun Sense in America, a group that promotes the regulation of firearms, commented on the legislation.

“Forcing our institutions of higher education to allow guns on campus is the wrong answer for our college communities,” Cheryl Anderson, spokesperson from the Florida chapter of MDAGSA, said in a press release.

“College life is already rife with academic pressures, alcohol and drug abuse. Forcing schools to introduce guns into the mix is dangerous and doesn’t make sense.”

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