Re: Exceptions to the rule

Columnist Cole Lewis is wrong. The two students at Gonzaga deserve to be punished for breaking Gonzaga University’s weapon policy.
The details surrounding them garnishing the gun are not material.

They broke a rule by keeping a gun in their university domicile, and by breaking that rule, they put themselves and fellow students in danger.

If you have a gun in your home, you and everyone within that household are more likely to die or be seriously injured by a gun than if you lived in a non-gun owning household.

Twenty nonfatal gun self-injuries occur daily by their own gun, which is around 7,300 self-injuries a year.

You may look at this example at Gonzaga of how a gun might have saved these students.

Clearly leeway is needed in order for self-protection. Someone breaks into the students’ apartment.

They have the wherewithal to find their gun and scare away the perpetrator, hooray guns.

However, this is the exception to the rule, according the director of the Harvard Injury Control Research Center, who says “fewer than 30 percent of burglaries in the United States (2003-2007) occur when someone is at home.

In the 7 percent of burglaries when violence does occur, the burglar is more likely to be an intimate (current or former) and also more likely to be a relative or known acquaintance than a stranger.

Although people typically spend most of their time at home, only 5 percent of all the crimes of violence perpetrated by strangers occur at home.”

This is coupled with the findings in an Emory University study that for everyone one incident of a gun being used in self-defense, there are seven criminal assaults or homicides, 11 attempted or successful suicides and four accidental shootings.

This reinforces what most policy experts agree.

You are legally allowed to have a gun in your private residence, but you are less safe for it.

So despite this Gonzaga success story, we should not start reconsidering campus gun bans or pardon the students for breaking the campus policy by which they put themselves and the other residents in danger.

— ctshaw@indiana.edu