Tuesday, December 1, 2015

Gun Control

Abstract
This paper discusses the issue of the Campus Carry Law (CCL) in Texas Tech University (TTU).  Campus Carry Law is a law that was passed in 2015 in Texas, which allowed students to carry guns on campus.  I chose this topic since I was interested to know how other students and faculty felt about this new law, and whether this law was necessary on campus?  In this paper, I used several sources, which supported my hypotheses.  We also carried out a survey within the TTU campus. We had 148 respondents, which included faculty, staff and students.  This study talked about different parties and who was most likely to handle guns.  Also, it talked about how faculty and staff felt when their classroom had guns.  Moreover, we found out women and men’s feelings about safety on campus and where guns should be allowed on campus.  There were different opinions regarding carrying guns on campus.  Some of them supported the law, and others opposed it.   We learned from this survey that many people would like to support CCL, but they do not trust others who have guns on campus. -Samah         
                                 Keywords: Campus Carry Law, guns on campus,  
  
GUN CONTROL
There are many of issues that we contend with in our daily lives.  One of these problems is carrying guns on campus.  The main issue this paper wants to discuss is that Texas Tech University will permit people to carry handguns on campus, and this will be in effect starting September 1, 2016, as a result of the new state gun legislation.   The university will have some guidelines to control the use of handgun license holders (CHL) on campus by Oct. 1, 2015 (Michael, 2015).
            Plenty of controversies will arise with the adoption of this legislation among students, faculty, and staff.  Some will accept the law because they will be happy to carry their guns wherever they are, including on campus, as it makes them feel safer than when they do not have their pistol on them.  Others, on the other hand, oppose this point of view and are strict.
Some people feel safe when others have guns on them while others are horrified by the mere idea.
A very important side of this issue is how do families, who send their sons and daughters to colleges, feel about this new legislation and universities’, adoption of it?  Will the majority be in support of, or against, this new law?  How does it make them feel as they send their loved ones to campus?  According to the response of Barrett, who is one of the members in Florida state, the campus is the safest place in the nation, and it would not make sense to change it by allowing law-abiding citizens to carry guns for defense (Hawkins, 2015).  On the other hand, people who live in households in which guns are common may have a higher inclination to allow their children to carry guns on campus.
Responses to this law also are different between male and female, between students and faculty, and between American citizens or international students.  Similarly, the position on this law is different from undergraduate students and graduate students, and between people who hold Democratic views and those who are Republican.  How will carrying guns affect different people’s lives?  Will many choose to carry these guns for self-defense or not?
Opponents of campus carry argued that it is also difficult to assess the mental and psychological health of each and every person who has a gun license.  For this reason, it is potentially dangerous to allow this law to be put into effect, as some could harm others when faced with certain situations.   There are other alternative ways to defend ourselves, such as pepper spray, Taser, etc., instead of using fatal fire pistols. An increase in guns in the population leads to an increase in gun crimes, rather than a decrease.
Many businesses responded already addressing their position from an open carry policy inside their facilities. For example, Mooney (2015) mentions Whataburger CEO’s response to The New York Times; Carrying guns is not allowed inside any locations for Whataburger around the state, even if carrying weapons is allowed in different places such as educational institutes and on campus.  Businesses will have to post a sign in their locations if they are banning open carry in their locations; starting January 2016, they will be required to hold two signs.
The controversy created by this new Texas law will just grow over time; most recently, University of Texas professors announced that they would consider a suit law to ban open carry on campuses. Current law allows the university presidents to ban the open carry in selective locations on campus but not all (Eger, 2015, para.1).
Goodacre (2015) interviews Texas officers, and reports different positions; some of them think that the open carry policy will not make much difference, as in general many Texans already have guns licensed for hunting or self-protection in rural areas in particular. Others said that they have concerns about the safety of the carriers even more than of non-carriers. Alex Azar, a covered handgun license instructor, and owner of Longview hidden Handgun Licensing and Training is quoted as saying he had a significant increase in clients asking for training in the last two months.
In this paper, I use a questionnaire method to collect views on the new state gun control law and its consequences as it legally allows for carrying fire pistols on campus. The paper goes as follows; I offer a summary of literature and media articles available and covering this issue, followed by hypotheses and the method used to investigate them; I then offer the results based on the conducted questionnaire, followed by a discussion of those results, and finally the last section offers the conclusion.
Literature Review
People with different political positions are expected to have different standings towards the open carry policy. Democrats and Republicans are known to have conflicting positions on this particular legislation.  According to Sen. Rodney Ellis, who is a Democrat, this law will increase more forces instead of the opposite (Mooney, 2015).  However, Sen. Craig Estes, who is a Republican, has a strong faith that people who carry guns are dependable about their guns.  Gov. Andrew Cuomo, a Democrat, requires strong policy about this new law. Even Mary Jones, a reporter for the New York Times, agrees when she wrote, “We do not need to carry guns in places that are full of children, we are not in the Wild, Wild West” (Mooney, 2015, para. 9).  According to Texas politics, Texas political culture and ideology is the combination of classical liberalism, social conservatism and populism, ideologies found in Republican views (Texas Politics, 2015). Hence, I form the first hypothesis as:
Hypothesis 1:  Texans are more likely to say they will carry guns, because Texas is primarily a Republican state, and most Republicans are pro-guns. 
According to Moreno, “Faculty members were predominant throughout the meetings and their main concern was almost unanimous­—no guns in the classroom” (Moreno, 2015, para. 5).
 Patrick Timmons, a political science professor, said that he often feels unsafe when he discusses controversial topics, because some students do not agree with his opinions.  Therefore, he said he would feel unsafe if these students had guns (Moreno, 2015).  160 professors from the University of Texas signed a petition declaring that they would not allow students with handguns in their classrooms (Schallhorn, 2015).  Like Timmons, Dr. Joan Neuberger, a history professor at UT Austin, fears that debating controversial issues will no longer be possible because opposing views may be met with violence from those who have guns (Schallhorn, 2015).  According to McGaughy, professors from UT Austin have formed the largest group in the nation against guns on campus, and want the university president to ban guns in classrooms and other places on campus (McGaughy, 2015).  Scanlon, who signed a petition in UT that she is a graduate student in the school of social work and she feels unsafe for her and other students on campus about this law, is quoted as saying, “Please stop helping people carry weapons” (Shallhorn, 2015, para. 20).  Based on this discussion the second hypothesis is:
Hypothesis 2: Faculty and staff will be generally against the open carry policy on campus.
    Women carry guns, not just for protecting themselves, but also it is their right as American citizens.  There is a woman from rural Idaho, who was shot by mistake by her two year-old son because she had an armed handgun in her purse.  This happened not because she was careless but because of the carelessness of the culture to allow guns in the first place (Rosenwald, 2015). Jenna Conwisar said, "As strong, intelligent, college educated women, we will not be provoked by fear or ignorance into endorsing unconscionable politics. And out of respect to our professors, faculty, and community, we should preserve the sanctity of a secure learning environment in a way that allows people to feel comfortable and safe. Let’s stand up for safety and get guns off our campus" (Conwisar, 2015, para. 9). Mariana Prieto, a public relation major in University of Texas in El Paso, said, “Right now we are against guns on every campus and it does not work, we still have shootings, so why do you think more gun control would work?” (Moreno, 2015, para. 10). Scanlon, who signed a petition in UT and were a graduate student in the school of social work and she felt unsafe for herself and other students on campus about this law, is quoted as saying: “Please stop helping people carry weapons”(Shallhorn, 2015, para. 20).  Based on this discussion the third hypothesis is:
Hypothesis 3:  Women are less likely to support the campus carry law than men.
According to Butski, “A major benefit of Taser use was a decrease in lethal force deaths” (Butski, 2004, p. 2).  Butski argued that more lives are saved as a result of using Tasers rather than guns.  There are other self-defense methods rather than guns such as mace.  According to DeVoe, a particular brand of pepper spray would be able to work from up to 10 feet away, and could squirt 25 short times before running out (DeVoe, 2015).  According to Mayer, students at Oklahoma University are allowed to have Tasers and mace as weapons for self-defense instead of using guns (Mayer, 2015).  According to Lamb, who is a student in Oklahoma University said, he understands why people need to carry a defense with them on campus because the lack of the security.  Lamb said, it is common to listen to female when they talked about if they had an emergency situation, especially in the late night.  Most girls prefer to ask someone else of their friends for dropping house or walk with a partner on campus or at late night. (Mayer, 2015). According to advertising freshman Anna Linn said: “I guess I don’t really carry it around a lot, but sometimes, really late at night, I do”.  She said that she carries both mace and a Taser gun with her, and she had a friend who borrows her mace before (Mayer, 2015, para. 8).  Based on this discussion the fourth hypothesis is:
Hypothesis 4:  Carrying of guns on campus is not necessary because there are other forms of self-defense that can be used.
Most professors will not allow their students to have guns in their classroom even if students have permits.  In spite of the new law of allowing permit holders to carry guns on campus, there are more than one hundred and sixty professors have signed a petition that refuses to allow guns in classrooms.  Furthermore, these professors list their names in a Google document list to show their objection to the law that was signed by Governor Greg Abbott (R) in June. Dr. Neuberger said that people reaction would be confused if they know there are other students with guns in the classroom.  Moreover, this issue will be debatable and controversial (Schallhorn, 2015).  Based on this discussion the fifth hypothesis is:
Hypothesis 5: Students believe that a classroom is an inappropriate place for open carry.
Method
We were looking for specific data about people who prefer to carry guns or not on campus. So I did a survey with my classmates and during the discussion; we prepared a set of questions that addresses the open carry policy and the consequences of its implementation on campus discussed. We consulted with our instructor about the appropriateness of the survey and then we collected responses, obtained 148 responses in total.  Our sample included participants of both genders, both International and American nationalities, faculties and students, and for the students we included graduate and undergraduate students.  They were asked about their backgrounds and whether they were raised seeing guns. Our class has been subdivided into groups with different tasks. The first group’s task was to investigate the relation between attitude towards guns and being addicted to smoking.  Another group’s task was to distribute the survey and to collect responses from different departments at TTU. 
We excluded the responses where students did not complete all of the questions.  We chose dichotomous questions.  We chose the questions that related to the hypotheses. 
The survey included questions; we needed to know how did they identify themselves politically, by asking which party did you identify with?  To answer the question, we provided the following options:  Republican, Democrat, other, or independent/NA.  I asked them about which places should not be allowed guns in.  Responses included places such as any place on campus, daycares, schools, workshops, etc. and generally in crowded regions where there are a lot of people of different ages including children.  Also, we asked them about which places they felt it was appropriate to allow guns to be carried.  The answers varied between classroom, dormitory, student centers, none, faculty offices, recreation centers, and dorm cafeteria. 
To investigate the second hypothesis, we asked people about whether the women would be safer if they carried guns? And we received diverse answers.  For the question about whether you let your family members carry guns on campus, their answer was between Yes and no.  Another question was in the case of a mass shooting; Did carrying gun make us safer?  There were different percentages between yes and no answers, a few participants did not answer in some cases.  They probably did not like the question, or they did not feel comfortable.  To address the third hypothesis; we asked the following question, did you think a Taser could be a substitute for allowing gun carry on campus?  Another follow-up question was which of the following weapons such as a gun, mace, or Taser was best?
Because guns are dangerous, I disagree with carrying guns on campus.  However, I would like to know as much information as possible about people who agreed to carry guns on campus and about people who did not. Moreover, I would like to know the percentage of people on TTU campus who supported it, and if they would change their opinion after this study.
Results
After we had collected the data for the survey for carrying guns on campus, we compiled the results and then we investigated our hypothesis.  88 respondents (which is 60%) were from Texas, 33 (22%) participants were from other US states.  27 (18%) participants were international.
I suspected originally is that people who were Republican were more likely to carry guns, and therefore, the first hypothesis suggests that Texans, being dominantly Republicans, would be pro open carry policy.  Our results showed that of those who participated, 76% of Republicans said yes for carrying guns. On the other hand, 24% of Republicans opposed the campus carry law. 
In the second hypothesis, I was interested in the faculty and staff’s position against the open carry. 79% of faculty participants said that they would be more nervous in general, 14% of them said that it did not bother them, and 7% said that they felt safe with campus carry.
In my third hypothesis, I was interested in knowing whether women were be safe if they carried guns.  I predicted that women would not be safer if they carried guns, and I was wrong. 55% of people said yes and agreed that women would be safer if they had guns on them.  Only 44% disagreed, and 1% were not sure.  However, a majority of female respondents did not think that carrying guns on campus would make it safer (65%) and 31% thought that campus carry would make the campus safer.  4% did not respond.
As for the argument that guns are necessary for self-defense purposes, I looked at responses in favor for a particular self-defense method, as there are other ways of self-defense, which can be used instead of guns to investigate my fifth hypothesis.  In the survey, we asked participants whether a Taser could be a substitute for guns on campus?  71% of respondents agreed that Tasers could be a substitute while 28% disagreed.   
In my last hypothesis, I suspected that there were some places on campus that would be inappropriate for carrying guns.  In this survey, we asked respondents that places they felt it was appropriate to allow guns to be carried on campus.  24% said faculty offices, 15% classrooms, 14% said dormitories, 13% said recreation center, 12% said the student center and 10% said the dorm cafeteria.  However, 12% responded that none of these places should allow guns.
Discussion
The result of our study showed that various percentages of males and females responded about the carrying of guns on campus.  That would be a fair survey since we had a good percentage of both genders and different opinions from them.  We found in this survey is a few people, both males and females, would not mind if Texas Tech allowed the campus carry law.  From what we got from the results, we found that they would feel safer if they were armed.  But they would not trust other people around them who were armed as well. Also, it was easy to attain one; anyone could buy a gun from any store without a difficult process.  This made it very easy to carry a firearm legally.  However, more than half the percentage of males and females would not like to carry a gun on campus, even if it was allowed.   We obtained from the result section that these people were not comfortable with the idea of having guns in their daily lives or classes. They did not think most people needed to have guns. Most students and faculties knew that the campus was safe and had good security, so they would not need to carry a weapon themselves.  Also, they did not want to make the arrangements to get one.
Our respondents were either from Lubbock, a small town, people who grew up on a farm, people who were from a large city, people who were from the suburbs, or people who grew up in many places.  This allowed our survey to have different opinions on various areas. We found data about people who grew up in a home with guns.  We got very close to having equal halves of participants who had grown up seeing guns and people who had not.  We found from this data that people who grew up with guns were more likely to carry guns on campus.  But people who did not rise with guns were more likely to avoid carrying guns.  Also, we found from this data that less than half of the percentage of people said that concealed gun carry permission would make the campus safer.  On the other hand, the rest of the people were against concealed gun carry. From those results, it could be shown that it would not be fair for people on campus if someone was carrying a gun and other people would not know. Sometimes this could create dangerous and bad situations for students and faculty.
There was more data about students' feelings if a classmate was carrying a gun.  Some people said they would feel safe, some stated it would not bother them, some were neutral about the subject, but the majority would feel in danger and nervous if a classmate was allowed to carry a gun. We obtained from their responses that most students would not be comfortable or relax when other classmates had guns. This would in turn keep them from paying full attention in class.
From my first hypothesis, I thought that Republicans were more likely to support the new law.  In fact, from the data that we had, they were more likely to carry a gun, since three-quarters of Republicans surveyed said they would carry a gun if it were allowed.  They were not more likely to support the CCL. Another hypothesis that I was interested in was if faculty and staff would be more comfortable with the campus carry law.  However, from the data that we found, they said that they would be more nervous in general. We found that three-quarters of faculty and staff would be more nervous.  We observed that faculty were more opposed to the gun law; it could be due to the following reasons.  First of all, they spend most of their time at the university finishing their work.  Secondly, they could have angry students due to low grades. Because of this, faculties are much more opposed to the campus carry law.  Moreover, some students hate their professors just because they did not like their class or lessons, and knowing a student in their classroom has a gun could make the faculty more nervous.
For another hypothesis, how women feel about saving when they carry guns.  From the data that we found, women did say they would feel safer if they carried guns.  More than half the people polled believed women would be safer if allowed to carry guns. Yes, we know that women would be safer if they were armed, but, on the other hand, women would not be safe if others were allowed to have guns, as well.  In this case, most people would be in danger since all people would have guns. 
Another hypothesis that I had been that people would say that a Taser could be used for self-defense better than guns on campus.  Indeed, from the data that we found, they did say a Taser could be a substitute for guns on campus.  Three quarters of respondents agreed that Tasers could be a substitute, while less than half disagreed.  I thought that the campus-carry law would make people comfortable with guns anywhere on campus.  However, from the data that we had, most people said that there are specific places that should not allow the carrying of guns. 
The data on places that people agreed should not allow guns were faculty offices, classrooms, dormitories, recreation center, the student center, and the dorm cafeteria.  However, a few people responded that none of these places should allow guns. We found from the data that most places that people did not want to allow carrying guns were places that have a large number of people, such as on campus, in dorms, gyms, hospitals, churches, and any public areas.  These places are for all people to have fun with their families, and they would like to be safe.  For the dorm area, it is a home, and everyone would like to live in a safe environment.  For the recreation area, this is a place for people who would like to be doing their exercise and have fun with their friends.  There are a lot of people who do not want to be hurt in these crowded areas.
One of the limitations of this study was that we did not have enough data on the views in each department.  We can improve on this study by making it for each department.  This will help us to find out the views of students who are from sciences and art majors.  Another limitation of our study was that the religion of the respondents was not taken into consideration.  This would be useful in finding out whether views are different across different religions.  Another limitation was that the study was conducted on only one campus.  In the future, we will do other studies for different campuses in Texas.  This will make our study valid for the whole state of Texas.
In conclusion, we recommend that TTU considers our paper for a position against campus carry law as we survey different opinions.  TTU campus should think carefully before allowing students to have guns.  We learned from this paper that carrying guns on campus would increase the number of victims instead of decrease it.  Since there are people who have different mentalities and multiple personality disorders, which should not be trusted with guns, and permit laws can not necessarily identify them.  The interesting thought is that most students from this study would like to be armed but not other people around them, which of course will not because the law will be applying for all people not to a certain group. Finally, we got the data from this survey, and we are thankful for all people opinion’s that helped us to present these surveys.        
Posted by at

No comments:

Post a Comment

Subscribe to: Post Comments (Atom)