Shooting at Northern Illinois University

[KSig RC]

It will be fascinating to see which happens first: a gun-carrying student shoots a gunman mid-assault and saves lives, or the gun-carrying student fails to stop an assailant/makes a "friendly fire"-type mistake/exacerbates a domestic situation or whatever.

So much of this type of 'debate' is fueled by perception issues and personal beliefs on the utility of firearms. I don't really think allowing students to have "conceal and carry" permits on campuses will have much of an effect at all on the whole (in either direction), but there will certainly be an outcry and explosion of media attention on that very first situation.

If you support weapons on campuses, you'd better damn well hope someone successfully plays hero before someone else screws up in a fatal way - which is kind of a microcosm for why I think this entire conversation is low-yield and kind of silly: I don't have any information that I find credible either way, and hate being in the prognostication business without any background or foundation. I also hate that this is such a media-fueled mess, and that we fail to even investigate some of the core issues of why that's bad.

[BabyPiNK_FL]

I personally wouldn't like to attend a school where concealed weapons are allowed. I just graduated and while the atmosphere at my particular school isn't violent, we already have enough crazy people and/or behavior without guns being allowed on campus. I would honestly take the odds of a random crazy with a gun busting into glass than know that any random person could break out into gunfire at any moment. I guarantee option one will happen a million times less than option two. At least at my particular school. If we allowed guns at school I know people would go bezerk on any given day and have the gun ready to do the deed. I'll take my chances against the one shooter than the thousands that would be packing if allowed.

My heart goes out to the families, no one expects this to happen and those people obviously were not involved in his personal problems. He had no right to ruin so many lives in this way.