I Don’t Support Campus Carry

and I Don’t Support Rape

This is in reply to the inflammatory article and headline in the Gainesville Sun (Aug. 23, 2015), written by Rebekah Hargrove, graduate student at Florida State University and president of Students for Concealed Carry at FSU.

Here’s the headline: Do You Support Campus Carry or Do You Support Rape?

The stark stupidity of that headline vies with the New Hampshire license plate (“Live Free or Die”) for top award of the century in absolute silliness. The black-and-white logic of the headline, however, is mirrored by that same “logic” in the article.

Life is not black and white. Life is many shades of gray. The implication that if you don’t want students packing guns on campus, then you support rape—that is too ridiculous to need refuting. But some of the other assertions of the writer should be refuted.

Ms. Hargrove reports statistics from the National Sexual Violence Resource Center. According to this organization one in every five female college students is raped, and one third of those rapes occur on college campuses. “If gun-free zones and whistles worked (she asks), why are so many women still being raped?”

Her answer is that women are being raped because they are not carrying firearms. “I must surrender. . . my right to keep and bear arms and of self defense to get a college education.” Ms. Hargrove is shocked that some women fight to make decisions about their own bodies but “then turn around and lobby against allowing women to choose to carry a firearm to protect their bodies from rape and violent assault.”

There’s the rhetoric; now let’s try to look at this issue with at least a modicum of logic. There is rape, and then again there is rape. Rapes on college campuses, in large part, are fueled by alcohol and carried out by acquaintances. In other words, the situation does not work like this: a rapist with a gun accosts a female he does not know, drags her off into the bushes. True, this sometimes happens, but statistically speaking, this is by far the least type of rape occurring on college campuses. So ask yourself this: if a female college student is drinking with a male friend or acquaintance, and if one thing leads to another, is the female at some stage of the lovemaking likely to draw a weapon to avert rape? To shoot the male acquaintance? Hardly likely. Unless she’s some kind of fanatic who holds a pistol to the head of a male friend in the act of love.

What about the girl being dragged off into the bushes? If armed, will she have time to draw her weapon? Maybe, but it’s unlikely. The element of surprise takes that option away from her. Let’s look at a different scenario. Say a rapist crawls through an open window in the middle of the night, accosts a female student in bed while she is sleeping. Will she have a chance to get to her weapon and shoot him? Would that it were so, but unless she has that pistol duct-taped to her leg while sleeping it is highly unlikely. Even if the handgun is under her pillow.

In other words, in almost any scenario you can think of (unless, say, the rapist knocks at her door and kindly informs her that she better get to her weapon, for he is about to rape her), there is little likelihood that a female will access a firearm to avert rape. So why arm every coed on campus?

There is one absolute truth that gun-advocates never want to hear: having people walking all over America armed to the teeth is much more dangerous than having nobody, even good citizens, armed at all.

The Gainesville Sun recently ran an article about how a sixteen-year-old girl was killed by a shotgun blast. Her father had bought her the shotgun to protect her while he was away at work. During a gathering of teenagers at her house a sixteen-year-old boy found the shotgun, began playing around with it, and accidentally killed the girl. Now, what were the chances of that girl being killed by an intruder/rapist? Slim. Statistics show irrefutably that if you have a firearm in the household the chances of someone in the household being killed by that firearm are much greater than the chances of someone being killed by an intruder.

Why are gun-advocates so oblivious of statistics? Heaven forbid that we arm the students on our campuses, thereby multiplying exponentially the chances of more accidental deaths or murders by people in a rage. Here’s a much better idea: why not think of ways of disarming the citizens of our country? Taking guns away from people? Deaths by firearms in America are a national disgrace. We are the only civilized country in the world that allows such a situation to persist. Why?

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