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Abstract
Should individuals on American college campuses be permitted to carry concealed weapons? This issue positions second Amendment liberty guarantees against personal safety concerns and learning environment interests. Current policy prescription has yet to appropriately balance these competing demands. Accordingly, this article reviews and comments on three key dimensions of the concealed carry ban controversy. This includes a presentation of the governing case law, a recounting of the relevant social science findings, and a discussion of the societal forces and human dynamics that both inform and influence this public policy debate. We argue that these forces and dynamics constitute cultural impediments to achieving meaningful consensus-building legislation. The manuscript concludes by proposing several justice-based reformist directions with relevancies for academic researchers, political officials, and policy-makers.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes
1. We also note that jurisdictional boundaries are likely to be relevant here. For example, some colleges utilize student parking lots that are owned by the city. If a crime occurs there, the city rather than the campus police are called. Therefore, the crime is not reported as having been committed at the college or university. Likewise, crime occurring at student ‘off-campus’ housing is not considered crime ‘on-campus,’ even though some off-campus housing is only populated (at least a majority population) by students at the university. Arguably, these jurisdictional issues help to account for the dark figure of crime in the DOE data.
2. The significance of these personnel data is confounded by the limited evaluation research that has systematically examined the effectiveness of these alternate campus security methods (Bromley, Citation1999; Hummer, Citation2004). Thus, any suggestion that campus law enforcement agencies have limited abilities and scarce resources to ensure the safety of all citizens on or near university campuses is a notion that warrants more probing data-driven analysis.
3. However, the controversial work of Lott (Citation2010) is particularly noteworthy. He relies on complex statistical modeling derived from economics to empirically demonstrate that more gun possession equates with less crime in those jurisdictions that permit the concealed carrying of firearms. To our knowledge, Lott has yet to specifically examine the generalizability of his findings to the public college or university venue.
4. Fox and Burnstein (Citation2010) recently commented on the breath of this ‘renewed discussion’ within public education. As they noted, ‘over 80 percent of the peer-reviewed journal publications uncovered from searching for “school violence” in the Social Science Abstracts dating back to the mid-1970s were published between 2000 and 2008. The growth in interest and concern has also been reflected outside the academic literature. A cottage industry has developed for school security hardware, technology, guidebooks, and consulting’ (p. xiv).
5. Our focus first on rights-claiming (law), followed by constituency perceptions (science), and then stakeholder interests (structural-, institutional-, and individual-level factors) is deliberate. Indeed, as the subsequent analysis and commentary argue, both the approach to policy-making and the process of consensus-building are linked to under-examined cultural dynamics. These dynamics both shape and constrain law’s doctrinal imperatives and science’s research directives. The conceal-and-carry ban controversy on American college campuses is one case in point. This article, then, reconsiders these imperatives and directives by reviewing the relevant cultural dynamics at issue, and it proposes a justice-based framework for re-thinking the legislative process of consensus-building on matters of contentious public policy.
6. The legal (i.e. constitutional and doctrinal) issues in the Utah case explored the inherent tensions that follow when university autonomy and academic freedom are balanced against second Amendment protections and concealed-weapons authorization (Wyer, Citation2003). For the development of these legal issues and for commentary on why legislation like Utah’s violates the academic freedom of those institutions that want to remain gun-free see, Lewis (2011).
7. Wasserman (Citation2011) concluded his analysis by offering several recommendations for creating a college campus weapons policy. In brief, he noted that policies should address the functions, capabilities, and integrity of university security personnel, and an institution’s strategic course of action should clearly state the punishments for violating the gun control policy. Moreover, since neither the Heller nor McDonald Court established the level of review for Second Amendment challenges, campus policies should plainly enumerate the institution’s interest in restricting weapon possession, in order to pass strict legal scrutiny. Additionally, if campuses choose to allow the carrying of concealed weapons, then policies should be established that prevent those who have been convicted of a criminal offense, have shown irresponsibility with firearms, are dangerous to others, or are mentally ill from exercising a right to possess a firearm while on school grounds. Wasserman (Citation2011) suggested that institutional or state policy-makers who implement firearm regulations supported by science will unlikely violate Second Amendment rights. Ultimately, however, he reasoned that the issue of firearms possession on college campuses will be determined by the side that exhibits more political strength, because ‘politics is king’ (p. 52).
8. On the pro-gun side, SCCC was founded by a college student in the wake of the 2007 shootings at Virginia Tech in an effort to pressure policy makers to allow students with concealed carry permits to possess firearms on public campuses (Miller, Citation2011). On the gun control side, SGFSs was founded by survivors of Virginia Tech and victims’ families who lobbied policy-makers to enact or protect strict gun control policies on campuses (Miller, Citation2011).
9. This study was conducted in 1996 and 1999 through random digit dialing by the Harvard School of Public Health. The samples were stratified proportionally according to the 1990 census population sizes. In addition to college campuses, respondents were also asked about restaurants, sports stadiums, bars, hospitals, and government buildings. For each location, no more than 10% of respondents indicated that they thought ordinary citizens should be allowed to carry firearms.
10. More specifically, the authors recommended a three-tier prevention plan. Primary prevention involves measures intended to stop conditions from occurring that would lead to firearm violence. Secondary prevention consists of measures that result in early detection of and intervention into existing conditions where the likely outcome is forecasted to be firearm violence. Tertiary prevention includes measures that limit trauma to and rehabilitation of the community following firearm violence.
11. For instance, the NRA’s PAC contributed $178,000 in the first six months of 2013 to candidates supporting gun rights, and New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg’s PAC, Independence USA PAC, spent 2.2 million to support a Chicago democrat in a special election (Wollner & O’Brien, Citation2013).
12. This notion may be best exemplified by the media messaging and manipulation of Rupert Murdoch, CEO of NewsCorp. Murdoch politically aligns himself and his company to the corporate ideology that will be most beneficial to NewsCorp at a given time (Arsenault & Castells, Citation2008). For example, Murdoch supported Tony Blair and the New Labor party as exhibited through Murdoch’s print media publication efforts, which had an impact on the 1997 British Prime Minister election outcome. Ultimately, Murdoch’s strategic involvement in the election benefitted NewsCorp, especially given the New Labor party’s position on media regulation. Additionally, Murdoch’s Fox News Channel saw a 288% increase in audience viewing during the beginning of the Iraq War in 2001 when the channel helped to bolster the public’s approval of President Bush’s administration and his initial handling of the crisis (Arsenault & Castells, Citation2008).
13. The moral panic literature is robust, and it consists of various strains of critical inquiry as well as ongoing dispute (David, Rohloff, Petley, & Hughes, Citation2011; Garland, Citation2008; Young, Citation2009). As we subsequently and very tacitly suggest, reliance on the proposed justice-based framework further amplifies the theoretical grounding of the construct.
14. Legitimate concerns for judicial activism and legal moralism figure prominently into this analysis. For a pertinent review of these matters based on the proposed justice-based framework, see Bersot & Arrigo (Citation2015).
15. Several data-driven studies of constitutional, state appellate, and statutory law help to substantiate this claim. Examples include a review of the empirically derived ethics that informs the US Supreme Court’s policy prescription on juvenile waiver, cognitive impairment, and adjudicative competence (Sellers & Arrigo, Citation2009); that informs state appellate court decision-making on solitary confinement, mentally disordered offenders, and cruel and unusual punishment (Bersot & Arrigo, Citation2010); that informs Congressional gridlock regarding juvenile immigration, criminalization, and human rights (Trull & Arrigo, 2015); and that informs current case law on sex offenders, civil commitment, offender registration, and community notification (Bersot & Arrigo, Citation2015). Each of these studies considered how (and for whom) justice was normatively administered given that the judicial and/or legislative reasoning was not derived from or based upon virtue ethics.
16. As we previously explained, empirical evidence about the actual effects of campus carry is very thin. This is a gap in the literature that, if addressed, would clearly make a significant contribution to the overall literature. For example, licensed carry has been the practice at all public colleges or universities in Colorado since 2010, with the exception of the University of Colorado, where licensed carry went into effect in 2012. Licensed carry has been in effect at the public institutions of higher education in Utah for nearly a decade. So there are now a good number of campuses from which data could be gathered. Important criminological studies thus come to mind: How many instances of legal or illegal gun use by licensed carriers have there been? Has licensed carry on campus had any discernible effect on campus crime rates? What the data would likely indicate is that the actual numbers of anything which people emphasize in the gun debate (e.g., successful or unsuccessful defensive gun uses by carriers; gun misuse by carriers, such as students threatening a professor for a bad grade, etc.) are statistically not significant. If this is the case, then endorsing an ethics of justice argument as developed by PJ and as applied to campus carry is made all the more compelling. To do anything less, would support the moral panic of gun violence.
17. One potentially useful mechanism that could monitor and enforce such compliance would be the completion of mandatory continuing education units as a condition of maintaining legislative office. In particular, participants would receive essential skills-based training in how to grow and to achieve consensus-building public policy informed by the justice-based framework and moral reasoning of PJ. The successful implementation of this training as a further condition of maintaining elected office could be yet another ethical accountability measure. Recommendations such as these suggest a nascent basis for requiring congressional members to hold a license in order to serve the people while in public office.