While the failure of “gun-free zones” to prevent shootings has been demonstrated time and again, a shooting Monday at Wayne Community College in Goldsboro, N.C., suggests that “mostly gun-free” zones may not be any better. 20-year-old Kenneth Morgan Stancil III, a former student at the college, killed print shop director Ron Lane with a rifle inside a campus building restroom. Stancil had been a work-study employee in the print shop before recently being fired by Lane.
In 2013 North Carolina passed a law allowing right-to-carry permit holders to store firearms in locked vehicles in campus parking lots—a good law indeed. But it’s unlikely that an onlooker could have made it down several flights of stairs, out to the parking lot to retrieve his or her legal firearm, and back up the stairs in time to have prevented this tragedy.
