Guns on Campus?

This is what I find somewhat irritating about the Free Press' online edition. I have to dig a bit to find things like this: a letter from District 24B Candidate John Branstad attacking current Rep. Tony Cornish for his proposal to allow students to carry guns on campus. In the wake of the VaTech shootings last year, conservatives started to push the notion to allowed concealed carry/or just plain handguns on campus. The general theory being that if there's a person who knows how to use a gun on campus when a crazy person goes nuts and starts shooting, they could deal with the situation faster than if everyone waited for the police/security to arrive.

I'm not sure I buy into that theory. You would have to be really trained- and I'm assuming if you have a gun license you have a little bit of knowledge, but I wouldn't want this to send every Tom, Dick and Henrietta out to get a gun for 'their own protection.' And besides, if you pass laws like this, you'll get the inevitable case of a crazy person carrying a gun they're perfectly entitled to have into any given space and opening fire. (I think that happened in Texas a few years ago. Crazy guy went into a church and opened fire on Sunday morning. Was totally in line with state law because the church didn't have a sign where people could see it saying that they prohibited guns.)

So I'm going to have to say no to this. What's needed to prevent tragedies like VaTech from happening again is a combination of more training and rapid response for on-campus security and more coordination with local law enforcement to practice dealing with and responding to situations like these quickly. What struck me about the VaTech incident was that after the initial shooting in the dorm there was a time-gap before the killer moved onto to the second wave of shootings. Authorities knew some people had been shot in the dorm, but they didn't know much else. At that point, campus should have been locked down simply as a common-sense precaution until they knew who did the dorm shootings and where that person was. It wasn't.

That's a lack of training, to me. I'm not sure how allowing students to carry guns helps the problem.