Ashley Cowie was a sophomore at Florida State University when she was murdered by a drunk gunman last January. The shot, which was fired accidentally, went through her chest and killed her instantly, despite her twin sister’s efforts to revive her.
Cowie’s father gave an emotional testimony at a Florida Senate committee hearing in opposition of a bill (SB 234) that would allow students, faculty and staff to carry weapons on college campuses.
“Allowing guns in an atmosphere of college parties puts everyone involved at increased and undue risk,” Cowie told senators.
Against the wishes of people like Cowie, seven states are currently considering legalizing ownership of concealed weapons on college campuses, including Arizona, Nebraska, Nevada, New Mexico, Oklahoma, Tennessee and Texas.
Why?
Self-defense, argued Texas Governor Rick Perry. “I don’t ever want to see repeated on a Texas college campus what happened at Virginia Tech, where some deranged, suicidal madman goes into a building and is able to pick off totally defenseless kids sitting like ducks.”
But wouldn’t the right to bear arms on a college campus only increase the number of shootings, both planned, like Virginia Tech, and accidental, like in the case of Cowie?
“People want to be the hero, I understand that,” said Colin Goddard, a man who was shot four times by Virgina Tech gunman Seung-Hui Cho. “They play video games and they think they understand the reality (of gun violence). It’s nothing like that.”
None of us at Marquette understand the reality of a shooting on our campus, and hopefully we’ll never have to. Here, our safety is so well-protected that the idea of sitting in a desk next to someone armed with a gun seems more daunting than the actual threat of a shooting.
Even outside the classroom, it’s hard to find a place where college kids could put a gun to good use. Anyone who’s seen a bar fight at closing time or a fist fight at a frat party knows how quickly drunken conflicts escalate, and that’s without the presence of firearms. As college kids, our lives have just barely begun, and fatal mistakes like Cowie’s gunman’s can guarantee they never will.
To put it simply, guns have no place on college campuses.
The focus of lawmakers should center on the prevention of gun-related violence, but in the seven aforementioned states, it seems to be elsewhere. A bullet couldn’t have saved Cowie’s life, or the lives of the victims of the numerous school shootings of the past decade or so. In fact, that’s exactly what claimed those lives.
Paranoia is a pest that’s hard to keep out of our minds, and those in support of SB 234 seem to be in the midst of a struggle between fear and faith.
Fear is paralyzing. We can’t always be looking over our shoulder in anticipation of being wronged, nor can we look to protect ourselves by hurting others. Instead, we should invest our confidence in police and build a community strong enough to embrace outsiders who might otherwise turn to violence.
Faith is freeing, and we’re lucky to have no shortage of that at Marquette. Hearing stories about Florida senators who bypassed Cowie’s father’s testimony (“I haven’t really stopped and thought about it,” said one) reminds me exactly why I go to this school, where faith is just as valued as excellence. I have no doubt that, although our politics may differ, each one of us will go on to assess the world with our hearts in the right place — something our lawmakers are proving is no small feat.