Kristi Bayless
Janiece Luper
English 102
4/16/14
Gun Control on College Campuses Pens, pencils, textbooks, and laptops are among the many items you will find in a college students’ backpack. With school shootings currently on the rise, many people concerned about the safety of students, think that it should be legal to carry guns on campus. While there are some who are in favor of this idea, others believe strongly in tighter gun control. I believe there should be gun control on college campuses because of the hazardous behaviors associated with college students, diminished shooting accuracy of everyday students, and increasing gun control laws will decrease the crime rate.
College campus shootings, sadly, have scattered American history for many years. Currently there have been a total of thirty- nine college campus shootings. This number of shootings accounts for twenty eight percent of all school shootings combined, including school shootings at public and private schools. This leaves the total amount of students and teachers that have been killed due to college shootings at one hundred and one. To this day, the deadliest mass shooting in American history took place on a college campus. In 2007, college senior Seung- Hui Cho shot and killed thirty-two people on campus prior to taking his own life. The shooting that took place at Virginia Tech seemed to have a ripple effect that spread throughout the United States. Within just four years, there were ten shootings that took place on a college campus. Unfortunately, over the last decade, campus shootings have been occurring more frequently. With this rising statistic, people are becoming more and more supportive of gun control laws, especially regarding public venues such as college campuses. Controversy relating to gun control has been an issue for many years. When America created the Bill of Rights in 1791 it included the second amendment which gave American citizens the right to bear arms. It wasn’t until 1837 when the state of Georgia considered the law to be unconstitutional and threw the law out but was unsuccessful eight times. This incident in Georgia took place nearly one hundred years before the United States would finally decide to pass the first federal gun control law. Shortly after the Civil War, several Southern States did everything they could to inhibit blacks from owning and carrying guns. This law did not last and was thrown out in 1868 when the Fourteenth Amendment’s citizenship guarantee and equal rights clause was put into action.
The deaths of John F. Kennedy, Martin Luther King, Jr. and Robert Kennedy in the 1960’s, all of which were shot and killed with a firearm, shocked the entire nation. Not long after their deaths, President Lyndon Johnson accomplished opening the Gun Control Act of 1968. At the time this was the most widespread federal gun law that was put into action. Parts of this law still remain in effect to this day. It currently prevents convicted felons and mentally ill people from being able to purchase a gun. On March 30, 1981, President Ronald Reagan and White House Press Secretary James Brady were shot on a street in Washington, D.C. Shortly after Brady’s recovery, he made proposed a new law that would make purchasing guns a little more difficult for people, and eventually, the “Brady Bill” finally grew into a law in 1993. It forced a waiting period to buy a handgun by requiring any buyer to undergo a background check. Although some of the details of the Brady Law have changed since then, many believed that it had several benefits. South Carolina’s district attorney David McFadyen even stated, “It did have a positive effect in that with legal transactions, there are thousands every year of legal transactions where individuals, who are prohibited from acquiring firearms, try to acquire firearms”. It seems that America has made an effort to make gun control laws stricter but only after a substantial amount of damage and many