I usually don’t debate on the topic of gun control. It’s not that I don’t have strong feelings on the issue, it’s that people who are for unlimited gun rights don’t care.

If you’re looking for reasons to restrict access to guns, there are about 89,000 of them (the number of homicides from handguns from 1990-1997). Still, that doesn’t convince the defenders of the Second Amendment that there is a problem.

To put it less tastefully, if someone is willing to take the chance of having his or her kid splatter his brains across the room because it’s their constitutional right to own a gun, what chance does some pinko journalism major have of persuading them that guns should be regulated?

But I draw the line at bringing guns onto campus. There is no way I’d feel safer, and there is no way I’d be safer. For all the research I’ve done on the matter, I think I’ve found a good thing in being in a place where guns are not around. The statistics back me up.

For the sake of this argument, I’ll be using handgun stats. This is because handguns are easily concealable, and thus would be the weapon of choice for people concerned enough about their “safety” to bring a gun on campus. I’m using stats from the Violence Policy Center, (VPC.org) so you can check them out at your leisure.

Since the argument about bringing guns on campus has always been about students using guns to defend themselves, I think you should take a look at the numbers on defense. For every time a handgun in America is used in a justifiable way that the courts call “self-defense,” there are 1.3 unintentional deaths – there are also 4.6 intentional deaths, but the courts call them homicides.

So what’s all this noise about guns being a safe self-defense tool? At the very least, there’s a pretty big cost/benefit ratio.

The weirdest thing is that gun enthusiasts often say that the way to bring these violent crimes down is – you guessed it – more guns. The logic behind this is that criminals would think twice about robbing Granny if there was a bigger likelihood of her packing heat. Well, that logic is flawed.

Louisiana, a state where 46 percent of households have a gun, has a gun death rate of 19 out of 100,000 people. Massachusetts has a rate about a fifth of that. Only 13 percent of households here have guns.

Some argue that these statistics are meaningless, because the Bill of Rights clearly states that people have the right to bear arms.

Well, maybe. The Second Amendment is an oddly worded sentence that says states need armed militias to stay safe. That was at our county’s birth, when we had no standing army. Today, the U.S. has an army with tanks, stealth fighters, tactical nuclear warheads and dolphins trained to navigate mined harbors. If those fail to stop an invasion of the U.S., a militia of firearm enthusiasts will not turn the tide.

But more to the point, the whole Bill of Rights is violated on a daily basis. When police search your dorm because of a suspicious smell, that’s a violation of the Fourth Amendment. If you want to complain about your Second Amendment rights being violated because you can’t bring a gun on campus, get in line with the hippies and Bush-haters.

Here’s the thing. I think I know why some people still would want to bring guns to campus, even after knowing all of this.

I remember Virginia Tech too. I remember that rainy, awful day. I remember watching the news for hours without getting up. And I remember feeling angry. I felt like if there was a way I could have stopped that, I would have.

But guns on the campus would not have solved that. I don’t think that many of us could bring ourselves to kill another person, no matter what the outcome. And if someone found the fortitude to raise a gun and shoot at the killer, what would happen if they miss? What if another innocent person was hit and had to die because of some misguided notion of safety?

Most people, thankfully, will not need to deal with something as horrible as that. But we all need to deal with life. Sometimes people get heated, get crazy. It’s part of being a human. Can anyone really say that guns will make us safer in those situations?

The tragedy at Virginia Tech makes any person ask questions. What could have been done to avoid this? Should people have been more vigilant?

Am I safe?

Having guns on campus is not the answer to any of these. Keep things the way they are.

Ted Rogers is a Collegian columnist. He can be reached at [email protected]