Would Allowing Students to Carry Weapons Make College Campuses Safer?

Assumptions in your premise

When you compare the probability of accidental discharges in public to the probability of accidental discharges in the home, you have included an assumption in your premise that, in my opinion, is not valid. The risk factors are completely different.

Guns in the home are sometimes in a loaded condition and sometimes in an unloaded condition, creating the potential for a fair amount of uncertainty in the mind of any individual handling the gun as well as very little control over who may pick up the gun, trained, untrained, familiar with the particular gun or unfamiliar.

A gun carried on the person will almost always be considered (and known) to be loaded. There is very little chance for confusion on that issue. There is also very little chance a person unfamiliar with that individual gun will be handling it.

Those two situational differences make for a very different statistical probability profile.

I will admit that there is still the chance for an accidental discharge from mis-handling, dropping or overheating (as in a fire), but those types of accidents are vanishingly rare when you consider only people who are trained (as most states issuing Concealed Weapons Carry Permit require). Yahoos and incompetents should be considered in a separate category, as they could be eliminated from campuses fairly easily (I am somewhat surprised at myself, actually advocating the practical equivalent of a poll tax and literacy test on bearing arms).

Another point is that the amount of handling a holstered, concealed gun in public receives is VERY restricted if the gun remains concealed. I daresay that a gun carried outside the home is handled less than one inside the home (provided you only count the time the gun is removed from the protective cocoon of the holster, from which it is almost impossible to produce a discharge, accidental or otherwise).

So, three significant differences hold: 1) The person(s) accessing the gun at home vs carried in public is vastly different, both in numbers and in degree of familiarity with the gun. 2) The degree of uncertainty of the loaded/unloaded condition of the gun is simply not part of the discussion. 3) A contained inside a holster carried on the person is far less likely to accidentally discharge than one in any container other than a locked box.

Compare like situations to like situations.