When Kansas passed a law recognizing lawful concealed carry on college campuses, anti-gun faculty predictably cried foul. One professor, Kevin Willmott, even made a show of wearing a bulletproof vest to class. “Try to forget that I’m wearing a vest,” he remarked, “and I’ll try to forget that you could be packing a .44 magnum.”
Yet statistics from the first six months of campus carry at the University of Kansas demonstrate how silly all this hysteria has been. The university’s Office of Public Safety reported no weapons violations in 2017, whereas 14 such violations occurred between 2008 and 2016. So much for the predictions of gun-toting students disrupting classes and threatening their instructors.
In fact, campus carry might be making a positive impact on the university’s crime rates. According to The Sentinel, there were 671 criminal offenses reported on campus in 2017, down 13 percent from 770 in 2016. Additionally, 2017 saw only 56 reported thefts, compared with 213 in 2016.
While it’s impossible to draw firm conclusions from the case of one school, the results at the University of Kansas provide further confirmation that campus carry does not bring about the apocalyptic effects that its anti-gun critics promise. In fact, it just might be making everyone on campus safer and more secure.
