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El Oh El! Remember while watching this movie to take it all in as fact because it is a documentary. Don't research what really took place... People don't kill people, guns do!

No, in this case it is strictly defense. *Guy pulls gun in class* *guy is shot dead by a licensed carrier.

Everyone keep in mind, this applies to individuals who poses a CHL. They won't be passing out weapons to students at freshmen orientation.

Good luck stealing my weapon from my concealed holster. It is a concealed handgun license (CHL). You can't just walk around with a weapon in your hand. Not to mention, nobody in class will or should know that you carry, hence the concealed part. Except maybe your friend/s.

What if somebody flips out and brings a gun to a no-gun zone? Your argument is not very strong.

You completely missed the point. I was referring to stopping or deterring the situation before it came to the point of you or someone you love becoming a hostage/being at gun point. Obviously there will be situations where having a weapon on you can not improve the outcome. And my response to you was more of a blanket, referring to concealed carry and guns in the home; since apparently having the means to protect yourself with a weapon = small penis.

I guess you could always throw a game controller at a home intruder, or your cellphone at a school shooter. I just like to have an effective option at my disposal. :shrug:

I will probably go through life never having to pull my gun from its holster, but having it there in no way effects anyone else and gives me options.

/semi-tangent

Self-defense

Dr. Roth argues that "Self-defense is commonly cited as a reason to own a gun. This is the explanation given by 20 percent of all gun owners and 40 percent of all handgun owners contacted for a household survey conducted in 1979. (Decision-Making Information, Inc., Attitudes of the American Electorate Toward Gun Control, Santa Ana, California: Decision-Making Information, Inc., 1979).

But research has shown that a gun kept in the home is 43 times more likely to kill a member of the household, or friend, than an intruder.(Arthur Kellermann and Donald Reay. "Protection or Peril? An Analysis of Firearm Related Deaths in the Home." The New England Journal of Medicine, vol. 314, no. 24, June 1986, pp. 1557-60.) The use of a firearm to resist a violent assault actually increases the victim's risk of injury and death(FE Zimring, Firearms, violence, and public policy, Scientific American, vol. 265, 1991, p. 48).

Dr. Roth does cite that there may be some self-defense benefit: victims who defended themselves with guns were less likely to report being injured than those who either defended themselves by other means or took no self-protective measures at all. Thus, while 33 percent of all surviving robbery victims were injured, only 25 percent of those who offered no resistance and 17 percent of those who defended themselves with guns were injured. For surviving assault victims, the corresponding injury rates were, respectively, 30 percent, 27 percent, and 12 percent. (Kleck, Gary, "Crime Control through the Private Use of Armed Force," Social Forces, 35 (1988):1-22.)

But he goes on to argue that these statistics are "an insufficient basis for the personal decision whether or not to obtain a gun for self-protection.... First, the decision involves a trade-off between the risks of gun accidents and violent victimization. Second, it is not entirely clear that the relatively few robberies and assaults in which victims defended themselves with guns are typical of these types of crimes and that the lower injury rates resulted from the self-defense action rather than some other factor. Perhaps offenders lost the advantage of surprise, which allowed victims not only to deploy their guns but also to take other evasive action."

Research by Dr. Arthur Kellerman has shown that keeping a gun in the home carries a murder risk 2.7 times greater than not keeping one. That is, excluding many other factors such as previous history of violence, class, race, etc., a household with a gun is 2.7 times more likely to experience a murder than a household without one, even while there was no significant increase in the risk of non-gun homicides!

This study (Arthur Kellermann et. al., "Gun Ownership as a Risk Factor for Homicide in the Home," The New England Journal of Medicine, October 7, 1993, pp. 1084-1091) has been much maligned by the gun lobby, but despite repeated efforts to tar it as non-scientific, its publication in one of the most respected peer-reviewed journals in the world is just one indiciation of its soundness. For a complete and vigorous defense of the study, please see this essay by Steve Kangas.

Obviously, there is a problem with criminals having access to guns, which is why so many people feel they, too, need a gun for self-defense. But this is a vicious cycle: FBI Crime Reports sources indicate that there are about 340,000 reported firearms thefts every year. Those guns, the overwhelming amount of which were originally manufactured and purchased legally, and now in the hands of criminals. Thus, the old credo "when guns are outlawed, only outlaws will have guns" is silly. What happens is many guns bought legally are sold or stolen, and can then be used for crime. If those 340,000 guns were never sold or owned in the first place, that would be 340,000 less guns in the hands of criminals every year. Part of the reason there are so many guns on the street in the hands of criminals is precisely because so many are sold legally. Certainly, there will always be a way to obtain a gun illegally. But if obtaining a gun legally is extremely difficult, the price of illegal guns goes way up, and availability goes way down. Thus, it is much more difficult for criminals to obtain guns.

he Lott report

Recently, a study published by John Lott (a Law Professor at the University of Chicago) and David Mustard (a U. Chicago graduate student) has indicated that recently enacted laws in states allowing the legal carry of concealed weapons has reduced violent crime in those states. However, there are numerous problems with this study that have not been addressed, even when directed to Professor Lott himself.

For example, when asked under the rubric of causality, how the falling crime rates affects their study, Lott said "The general changes in crime rates is not a problem for our paper since we control for individual year dummies which take out any year-to-year changes that are occurring in crime rates." What this ignores is that the year-to-year changes are precisely what is important, and if crime rates are already dropping, then adding the laws they defend and pointing to their success in lowering crime rates begs the question of causality, which they never demonstrate.

Another difficulty in his figures is population motion. For example, he claims that Florida's violent crime rate dropped dramatically after the passing of CCW laws, but he does not take into account the enormous migration of the elderly and retirees into that state during his examination period. Such an influx of elderly citizens (not usually violent criminals!) would certainly push the crime rate down, as the population of law abiding citizens rose dramatically.

Furthermore, they admit right in their study that "Using county level data has some drawbacks. Frequently, because of the low crime rates in many low population counties, it is quite common to find huge variations in the arrest and conviction rates between years." So, their solution is "to limit the sample to only counties with large populations. For counties with a large numbers of crimes, these waves have a significantly smoother flow of arrests and convictions relative to offense." Thus, the limited sample also limits the accuracy of their study. They say that "an alternative solution is to take a moving average of the arrest or conviction rates over several years," but then go on to say that this "reduces the length of the usable sample period, depending upon how many years are used to compute this average. Furthermore, the moving average solution does nothing to alleviate the effect of multiple suspects being arrested for a single crime." These are real problems which Prof. Lott did not address, even when directly asked via e-mail.

More criticism on the Lott report from Johns Hopkins University Professor Stephen Teret can be found here.

Other weapons

"People kill with knifes, too. Do you want to ban knifes?" From Dr. Roth's study: The overall fatality rate in gun robberies is an estimated 4 per 1,000--about 3 times the rate for knife robberies, 10 times the rate for robberies with other weapons, and 20 times the rate for robberies by unarmed offenders. (Cook, Philip J., "Robbery Violence," Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology, 78-2, (1987):357-376.) For assaults, a crime which includes threats, the most widely cited estimate of the fatality rate is derived from a 1968 analysis of assaults and homicides committed in Chicago. The study, prepared for the National Commission on the Causes and Prevention of Violence, reported that gun attacks kill 12.2 percent of their intended victims. This is about 5 times as often as in attacks with knives, the second most deadly weapon used in violent crimes.(Newton, G.D., and F.E. Zimring, Firearms and Violence in American Life: A Staff Report Submitted to the National Commission on the Causes and Prevention of Violence, Washington, D.C.: National Commission on the Causes and Prevention of Violence, 1969.) With one exception, more recent studies have generally concluded that death was at least twice as likely in gun assaults as in knife assaults. (The exception is Kleck and McElrath, "The Effects of Weaponry on Human Violence.")

An offshoot of this argument is the old classic "cars kill more people than guns, but we don't ban cars." The response to this irrelevant argument is that cars have other usage, whereas guns basically just kill, or threaten to kill. Their one potentially valid use, self-defense, is undercut by the statistics by Kellerman and Zimring previously cited, as well as fatal weaknesses in the arguments of Lott and Kleck.

Honestly the most retarded thing I have ever heard in my life. The fact that students are going to be able to carry guns around truly baffles me, even with the whole Tucson stuff happening a few weeks ago. To be honest, the scenarios with school shooters, if a person has a gun, people will die whether there are guns or not, because the actions are too fast, and a lot of times people are very tentative with guns. However now we just add more guns to the equation, fighting fire with fire in this case just creates a culture of violence which to be honest is retarded.

It is notable that virtually everyone who came to support taking your gun rights away used the tragic murders at Columbine High School as an explanation for why this bill was needed. None would explain what that ridiculous example had to do with taking gun rights away from persons with concealed handgun licenses. Many suggested that armed civilians were not capable or equipped to respond to a school shooting and that job should be left to the highly trained police. None mentioned that the school shooting in Pearl Mississippi was stopped by an armed civilian. None mentioned that at Columbine, the highly trained police stayed outside while children and teachers were gunned down.

Because we really need more Columbines....
Oh America...

Honestly the most retarded thing I have ever heard in my life. The fact that students are going to be able to carry guns around truly baffles me, even with the whole Tucson stuff happening a few weeks ago. To be honest, the scenarios with school shooters, if a person has a gun, people will die whether there are guns or not, because the actions are too fast, and a lot of times people are very tentative with guns. However now we just add more guns to the equation, fighting fire with fire in this case just creates a culture of violence which to be honest is retarded.

With this argument, most people will be aware if you have a concealed gun, generally there are various signs people could tell that you are. Even if people couldn't, what good does it do? Now all you have are people carrying more guns. In a lot of school shooting cases, criminals' records were expunged/not regarded as serious (Jared Loughner had a non "serious" mental disorder) so now you are basically just giving people guns, and on campuses.

This is true too. Honestly, instead of pushing for more guns, why not push for less through heightened security? How many cases have you seen where having more guns have actually helped in a shooting such as this compared to cases where buying a gun was just too damn easy?

Look at the stats, states with more guns have more gun deaths, it's statistics, and those my friend do not lie. In New England with more cities and less guns, there are less gun deaths.

So now my friend please just stop trying to argue with me because to be honest, any argument saying more guns leads to less gun deaths is plainly retarded.

Because we really need more Columbines....
Oh America...

Do you not understand what a CHL is? Do you understand the requirements to obtain a CHL? For starters, you must be 21 years of age or older...

No, in this case it is strictly defense. *Guy pulls gun in class* *guy is shot dead by a licensed carrier.

Yes and 21 is also the convenient age where people can legally get drunk... College students+beer+guns? yeah...

edit: expanding on this, you can only defend yourself if you see the person shooting at you... How many shooters do you see walking up to someone and say I'm going to shoot you now, run? Besides if you care concealed weapon, meaning people don't know you should have one? You might say it's concealed but you can't hide something as large as a gun 100% of time.What happens when someone sees it and decides you're the shooter and shots you instead? Or you shoot someone because they are doing the CHL thing? Maybe you just don't like them and use it as excuse?

my argument is guns make it easy to kill people... Young adults are shown to be tempermental and illogical at times...

Do you want to provide someone like that with a gun? Look how frequent fist fights occur now... and if you give them guns?

Gang fights in early days was fist fights, then moved to sticks because they needed an edge, and now they shoot every kind of gun under the sun...

I'm going to continually ask this until someone answers:

What is the difference between an adult student with a CHL who carries all the time in public and an adult student with a CHL who carries all the time in public and to class (if it was allowed)?

Anyone going to address any arguments I made? And @ Evga, you basically accepted the argument that more guns leads to more gun deaths, which is bad... Also the concealed guns allows guns to be stolen etc. and the CHL's background checks are consistently going to be undermined by fake IDs, and expunged records (see VTech and Loughner). Now please answer my other arguments too if you want any standing point.
Cell's argument is also true.

What is the difference between an adult student with a CHL who carries all the time in public and an adult student with a CHL who carries all the time in public and to class (if it was allowed)?
one can get into a shitload of trouble if they forget to stop at home and deposit their sidearm before going to school, the other wont...

It'd prevent Columbine cause everyone's packing, they'd just kill the shooters.

am i the only one thinking:
WTF A GUN DOES NOT BELONG ON A SCHOOL?
you need books for god sake, not guns.

My point was: College students with conceal carry licenses carry responsibly in public places all the time. A college campus is no different.

Because we really need more Columbines....
Oh America...

How much will it end up costing you to get that CHL permit, I am going to be 21 next year and am fairly interested in it as well ( have never really looked into it but is something I know I what to do ).