Pro-campus carry students add new dimension to arms debate
September 1, 2008

by Joseph P. Tartaro
Executive Editor

There’s a promising new dimension to the age-old battle over the right to bear arms for personal and community defense. The prevailing wisdom about disarming the law-abiding in gun free colleges and universities is being seriously contested by a group of some 30,000 college students, faculty members, parents of college students, and concerned citizens called Students for Conceal Carry on Campus (SCCC).

Approximately 90% of those who have joined SCCC in just its first year of operation are students currently enrolled in college and graduate level studies and 10% are a mix of faculty, parents, and concerned citizens. They have joined together to fight for legalizing concealed carry on college campuses, not just by students, but faculty, administrators and even visitors.

Their position is that trained and qualified adults who are legally authorized to carry concealed firearms by the states should be able to carry concealed wherever they go, included college and university campuses.

What is very encouraging is that the public face of this new generation of firearms rights activities is young, bright, serious and much more sophisticated than some might imagine. I attended their first annual conference which was held Aug. 1 at the National Press Club in Washington, DC. Then non-partisan, not-for-profit SCCC sponsored the conference with support from the Second Amendment Foundation.

I had met a few of the SCCC members at past Gun Rights Policy Conferencess. They are the folks who have sponsored and held the “empty holster” demonstrations on campuses around the country during the past year. On Aug. 1 about 100 of these students—young men and women—made their way to DC from campuses all across the country. I met with them and listened to their message.

Let me tell you that these are not the “college kids” you see on movies or 11 o’clock local news reports about campus mayhem. Most of them seemed to be between 25 and 30 years old, a few younger, a few older. Many of them are veterans of military service in Iraq and Afghanistan. They didn’t take kindly to the position espoused by Paul Helmke, president of the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence, whom the SCCC had invited to discuss “gun-free zones” with Dr. John Lott of the University of Maryland, author of More Guns=Less Crime and other books.

Helmke used the event to unveil a new “study” published by the Brady Campaign called “No Gun Left Behind,” which lays out the gun control group’s position against guns on college campuses. Helmke claimed one of the reasons the Brady group opposes licensed carry on campus is that students are socially unstable, binge drinkers, drug users and often violent.

Among the featured speakers at the SCCC conference were two state lawmakers who have already sponsored concealed carry on campus legislation in their states. They were state Reps. Jason Murphey of Oklahoma and Ernest Wooten of Louisiana. Neither of their bills had won final passage in their respective lawmaking bodies, but both promises to continue to press for such reforms. Wooten, a former sheriff, was particularly passionate in encouraging the young activists to pursue their agenda.

Alan Gura, the attorney who argued the Heller case at the Supreme Court, also was invited to speak and discussed how that decision on an individual right to the means for self-defense will impact future cases, including challenges to mandated policies of “gun free” campuses.

Ted Gest, president of Criminal Justice Journalists, a project of the University of Pennsylvania and John Jay College, and I discussed the media bias about the guns on campus issue, and G. Gordon Liddy, a national talk radio personality, closed out the conference program.

However, from my perspective, among the most engaging speakers were Michael Guzman, president of SCCC, and a panel of students that includes Jeremy Schwab, a student at the University of Texas Dallas, Ken Stanton, a graduate student at Virginia Tech, and Andrew Dysart, a student at George Mason University.

The student panel offered a unique perspective on the issue. They reported much greater support than has been available through the general media.

SCCC is represented on some 500 campuses and has 300 chapters around the country. They maintain a website at: concealedcampus.com. And they are using other new media approaches.

Perhaps one of the most important reasons for holding the first annual SCCC conference at the National Press Club is that it helped educate the media and the general public. C-Span covered the entire conference live and rebroadcast it several times the same weekend. (It is still viewable on the archives section of C-Span’s website.) It also attracted many reporters from major newspapers around the nation, and not just in Washington, DC. In addition, other print and electronic media covered the conference and got the key message of SCCC to the public at large.
Return to Archive Index