Would Allowing Students to Carry Weapons Make College Campuses Safer?

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Luke Woodham was a student at Pearl High School in Mississippi.  When he brought his gun to school one day in 1997, he wanted to kill as many people as possible.  Happily, he was only able to kill two people.  The reason was Assistant Principal Joel Myrick.  He retrieved a handgun from his truck, blocked the road as Woodham was on his way to kill some other students, and ordered him to the ground at gunpoint until police arrived.

Myrick has said he has no doubt Woodham would have killed more people if he had not been stopped since he had 36 rounds of ammo in his pocket when he was finally subdued.

A year later, a shooting at a school dance in Edinboro, Pennsylvania was ended abruptly by James Strand, who owned a nearby restaurant.  Strand used his shotgun to disarm the shooter until the police arrived 11 minutes later.  After Strand arrived on the scene with his shotgun, no one else was killed.

In 2002, two law school students at the Appalachian School of Law in Virginia used their own personal guns to stop Peter Odighizuwa’s rampage.  The students held the shooter until the police arrived.

Schools are generally gun free zones by law.  There are exceptions, the biggest being all of Utah’s state-run universities.  No school shootings have occurred in that state.  But the multiple killings that have occurred at various schools around the country have all taken place in areas which have been legally rendered as gun free zones.

The idea of firearms for self-defense in schools is gaining serious traction, however.  A Research 2000 poll found that 85% of Americans deem it appropriate for a principal or teacher to use “a gun at school to defend the lives of students” in stopping a massacre.