Op-Ed: Campus commandos, or safer students?

Editor's Note: The following op-ed was originally published on April 11, 2012.

Would conceal carry on campus prevent school shootings like Oikos?

by David Lewis

The Oikos University tragedy managed to occur just in time to coincide with the first day of the annual campus gun ban protest.

Students this week will wear empty holsters to class to symbolically represent what they see as a Constitutional right stripped away.

Members of Buckeyes for Concealed Carry feel they would be safer if they were permitted to bring licensed firearms to school. Opponents say more guns equal more gun problems, and dispute that conceal carry would prevent school shootings.

An article in the Thursday, April 5 Columbus Dispatch cited Toby Hoover, the executive director of the Ohio Coalition Against Gun Violence, saying that an armed student would be unlikely to prevent a shooting.

"Unless you'd be sitting there with your gun drawn and ready to fire the first time somebody blinks, you really don't have a chance of saving everybody like these people think they do," she told Dispatch reporters.

Hoover must be unaware that armed students have already prevented at least one shooting. When Peter Odighizuwa, a mentally unstable student at the Appalachian School of Law in Virginia, opened fire on Jan. 16, 2002, he killed two faculty members and a student and wounded three other students.

Hearing the shots, two students who were licensed to carry a concealed weapon (except on campus) ran to the vehicles, procured their firearms, and subdued the shooter without further violence.

Subsequent news reports, while noting that students subdued the killer, notably left out the very noteworthy detail that those students were armed.

Click here to read the entire op-ed at UWeekly.com.