[DTD Alum]

Originally Posted by AOII Angel

Tell that to the mother of the FSU Chi Omega who died at the hands of a 21 year old fraternity member. http://www.greekchat.com/gcforums/sh...d.php?t=117709

And let's not forget the 22 year old who shot a shotgun at firefighters from his fraternity house.
http://www.statesman.com/news/local/...d-1254335.html

Wow...turning 21 just flips a switch on maturity.

Funny, I was coming in this thread to post these two stories. Let's do the math here. Tragedies on the scale of Columbine and Virginia Tech are extremely rare. So rare that while Virginia Tech was only in the last few years, when people try to show that these events happen all the time and invariably throw Columbine in the mix, they neglect the fact that Columbine was so long ago I was in sixth grade...I'm now a couple years out of college.

Tragic? Absolutely. But hardly commonplace. And I won't even get into the fact that I agree wholeheartedly with the multiple people who are saying that very few people can even responsibly handle themselves with a gun during a real emergency.

On the flip side, you have incidents like those above. Frankly I think it's a wildly bad idea to give college students permission to carry concealed weapons given the fact that they are drinking all the time! Even if nobody manages to pull a Plaxico and shoot themselves accidentally on the walk to class, you are talking about significantly increasing the number of deadly weapons lying around in environments where people are binge drinking, blacking out and stumbling around knocking things over. Let's be real, with the amount of posturing and one-upping that runs rampant in fraternities, there are some chapters where a large number of brothers will probably invest in a handgun if made legal, just to show they can. It's a ticking time bomb situation.

To be honest, like so many anti-gun control propositions, I think the idea just sounds good and patriotic in people's heads without having any sort of base in reality. The idea of a fraternity man saving the lives of dozens of his peers by shooting down the renegade shooter is just an ideal, not a representation of anything that would actually happen in such an event (once again, many people have already made this argument convincingly, there's no need to go into this more at this point). But what you can count on is an increase of drunk accidents like the ones posted above.