Editor,
I want to say that I am a supporter of the Second Amendment. But I wonder if people have thought through all the reasons for carrying a weapon - concealed or otherwise - on campus.
Carrying a weapon is not a deterrent to mass shootings. People who are going to try and stage a mass killing seem to have a death wish already. They seem to have the same mind-set of someone who will walk into a room of soldiers and blow himself or herself up. They are sure they will die as some sort of martyr and are not concerned about someone else shooting them.
Having a permit and a weapon is not the same as basic training and constant drilling in shoot or no-shoot situations that SWAT teams have to go through. Police and military personnel drill very regularly on these sorts of situations because a person's first reaction is usually to flee versus fighting.
Most people are going to freeze with the weapon they are carrying. It takes constant training to make a person's body not resort to its natural tendencies. If there is the smell of blood, vomit or feces, the body's natural reaction is to add to the vomit and feces. I am not sure of the veracity of this claim, but a former drill sergeant told me that his job was to make sure that a soldier only did that on command and not because his body told him to.
Also, friendly fire is highly likely. Most untrained people will shoot the wrong person, and highly trained people still do so on a regular basis. Adrenaline and other hormones are making sure the brain uses all its clever profiling shortcuts to figure out who to shoot.
Get content from The Daily Lobo delivered to your inbox
This means that anything that is a threat is more likely to be targeted, which could be the shooter or a student who ran into the room for cover with something that looked like a gun.
Such a situation is not helpful to the police, either. When they come into a room full of students with guns out, they will have to choose who is the real threat, and that can be anyone with a gun.
There is also the fact that if the shooter has a partner, they will go for a Columbine or an al-Qaida style attack. One shooter is going to try and force people to a safe place where the second shooter acts like one of the prey and then starts the killing. A police officer in such a situation does not have time to choose if a person with a weapon is a friend or a foe.
And if the SWAT or other police teams yell, "Drop your weapon," the high adrenaline or any close shots will most likely make the good student not hear it or react in a potentially hostile manner. At which point, the student is shot, and the SWAT team gets to spend the next six years in courts explaining over and over again in a wrongful death lawsuit why it made the wrong decision.
So, basically, I have difficulty seeing how a firearm on campus is going to help. In other situations such as assault it might, but a Taser, pepper spray and drilling in self-defense would be more effective and less likely to accidentally harm or kill someone else.
Being able to defend oneself is a cherished right but comes with it the responsibility to choose the appropriate weapon to do so.
Stephen John Smoogen
UNM staff
