Gun safety, Texas-style

http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/editorials/la-ed-texas-20110222,0,6393909.story

A Texas lawmaker's contention that allowing college students and faculty to carry firearms would make them safer is a spectacularly bad idea.

When a 19-year-old sophomore named Colton Tooley opened fire with an assault rifle last fall near the UT Tower at the University of Texas, it seemed to some like a horrible rerun: In 1966, the tower was the site of what was then the worst campus shooting in U.S. history, when a sniper firing from the top of the structure killed 14 people. In some states, this kind of history might lead to government action to protect students from gun violence. But not in Texas.

Campuses are currently weapons-free zones in Texas. But the famously gun-friendly state, where many lawmakers carry concealed firearms inside the Capitol building, seems poised to pass a bill to let college students and professors do the same. The bill from Republican state Sen. Jeff Wentworth, which would allow the carrying of concealed weapons on college campuses by those with permits to do so, was passed by the Senate in 2009 but languished in the House. It has a far better chance this time around because more than half the members of the House have signed on as coauthors of a version of the bill.

It isn't very hard to get a concealed-weapons permit in Texas; anyone over 21 who passes a computerized background check and completes a 10-hour course is eligible. Wentworth thinks his bill would actually make college students and faculty safer, because armed students could return fire in the event a crazed gunman started shooting at them. Gun enthusiasts in Texas and other states believe that if students at Virginia Tech had been armed in 2007, they could have stopped Seung-hui Cho's rampage before it ended in the loss of 33 lives. They may even be right, but they're ignoring the other risks posed by gun proliferation.

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most people who go to a class to get their permit to carry a concealed weapon only attend that class and then that's all the instruction they ever take. When the shooting starts, will these one class wonders know who the bad guy is, or will it just be another shoot out at the OK Corral. I think the latter, then a lot more innocent people will be just another bystander who happened to get in the way of the Second Amendment.

this is a person who quoted a "fact" that more children died of aspirin poisoning than from gunshot. She single handedly got our gun laws changed after her parents were killed in the Luby's massacre. I always thought a much more fitting tribute would be to tighten the gun laws.

An unarmed 64 year old lady.......

Technicalities can be such a nuisance.