Abstract
This
article explores the opinions of different groups of people among the Texas
Tech University’s community about the new campus carry law that is supposed to
be in effect starting January 2016.We conducted a survey consisting of 26
questions to investigate people’s opinion, and we managed to collect a total of
148 surveys. Although our sample was not completely representative of the
community of Texas Tech University (TTU), we found out some really interesting
results, the most important of which being the fact that although majority of
the community don’t believe that more guns make the campus a safer place, they
don’t trust others with guns. This fact may have some adverse effect on the
campus, as many people will start carrying guns just to be safe around other
people whom they assume are also carrying guns. The increase in the number of
guns on the campus may eventually result in horrible incidents such as mass
shootings or deadly assaults.
Pouria Nourian
Study of the Opinion of Texas Tech University’s Community on the
Issue of the New Campus Carry law
Gun control is one the most controversial
topics in the United States. The second
Amendment of the in the Constitution of the United States of America grants the
citizens of United States the right to “keep and bear Arms” (Wikipedia).
Therefore, guns have become part of the life of the American people. On May 31,
2015, the Texas Legislature approved a bill which allows license holders to
carry concealed handguns on university campuses across Texas. The bill is known
as the “campus carry” bill, and has drawn statewide opposition from universities
across Texas (Associated Press, 2015a). Texas Governor Greg Abbott has been quoted
as saying that this bill ensures the strength and security of the Second
Amendment rights (Associated Press, 2015b).
Texas Tech University is one of the well-known
universities in Texas, with almost 37,000 students enrolled as of Fall 2014,
according to the report “Texas Higher Education
Enrollments” (2015). The campus carry law will surely affect the students,
faculty and staff. It should be mentioned that in order to be able to get a
permit for carrying a gun on campus, one must be 21 or older. This means that the
majority of students will not be able to bring guns on campus, but the rest of
students, and also faculty and staff, will be able to do so.
As a group
of students in a graduate writing class in Texas Tech University, we decided to
investigate the perception of people on Texas Tech campus by doing a survey. We
aimed to study how different groups of people on campus felt about the effect
of the campus carry law on them. We wanted to find out about the difference in
opinions about campus carry among different groups, such as undergraduate
students below 21 years old versus undergraduate students above 21 years old, faculty
and staff, or international students versus American students. We also wanted
to investigate how different parameters such as political standpoint, gender,
childhood background and personality affect one’s feeling toward the campus
carry law.
Literature Review
The campus
carry law will be effective beginning on September 1, 2016, and Texas Tech University
is already preparing guidelines for the regulation of concealed handguns on
campus by October 1, 2015 (Michael, 2015). There is already a debate going on
about whether guns on campuses will actually make them a safer place or not.
Some people believe that they actually do. Considering shooting incidents at
educational places such as Columbine High School in 1999, Virginia Tech in 2007
and Sandy Hook Elementary in 2012, it is believed if trained and licensed
firearms users had the chance of using their guns, the number of casualties
would be lower (Metzger 2015). Furthermore, the supporters of campus carry law
also argue that bringing legally owned guns on campus will not make the campus
an unsafe place since the crime rate among licensed gun owners is very low.
Additionally, supporters of campus carry law also suggest that women can bring
guns on campus in order to protect themselves, since sexual assaults have been
a problem on campuses (Reindl and Cocco 2015). On the other hand, there are
also people who believe guns will make campuses unsafe. It is believed that campus
carry law can not only be a threat to campus safety (as accidental or
intentional shootings may occur as a direct result of this law), but also can
be the cause of psychological damage to the campus community, as the anxiety of
dealing with armed people will affect people on campus (Clark, 2015). Also, according
to Virginia 21’s survey, 83% of college students across Virginia do not agree
with campus carry law (Atkins 2015). Also in another survey in 2013, 80% of
college students and 90% of faculty members said that they would not feel safe
if guns were present on campus (Kaufman 2015). According to the authors of the
article “Student debate guns on campus-cons” (Simsen and Humphrey 2015), the campus
carry law actually can make the campuses unsafe. They explain that in the case
of the Virginia Tech shooting, the shooter actually had a permit for carrying a
gun. Based on this argument, we wanted to investigate how different people on the
Texas Tech campus feel toward guns being present on campus. Undergraduate
students in Texas Tech University, who are the majority of the population on
the campus, consist of mostly Texans. Some of us believed that since guns
are a part of Texas’ culture, the majority of TTU students will not feel
threatened by guns on campus or will actually consider bringing guns on campus,
given the opportunity, and therefore, we wanted to try and find a
correlation between students’ background and their attitude toward campus carry
law.
As mentioned earlier, advocates of the campus
carry law argue that women can use guns on campus to defend against sexual assaults.
However, it has been said that in 33% of sexual assault incidents, the perpetrators
were victims’ intimates; and therefore, to solve the sexual assault issue on
campus, other measures must be taken (Kaufman 2015). It is also said that in
case of a sexual assault, even if the victim is using a gun for self-defense,
the attacker might overpower the victim and use the gun on her. Based on this
argument, some of us were interested to find out how women on TTU campus felt
toward the campus carry law and whether they would bring guns on campus for self-defense
purposes, given the opportunity. Some of us believed that women will
actually use the campus carry law as an opportunity to carry guns for
self-defense purposes, and we wanted to try to find out whether it was
true.
The difference between the opinions of men and
women regarding the campus carry law and gun control law in general is a topic
of interest for our class. The results of a non-partisan people poll conducted
in 2012 showed a rather big gender gap on the “idea of arming teachers and
school officials”, where the idea was supported by 47% of men and only 32%
women (Gilbert, 2013). Some of us believed that men’s attitudes toward
campus carry law is governed by their concern about the possibility of a mass
shooting occurring on campus, while women’s attitudes are influenced by their
concern about individual assault; because victims of individual assault
(especially sexual assaults) usually consist of more women compared to men.
Another subject
of interest for some of us was to find out what people thought about substitutes
for guns when it comes to self-defense. We were specifically interested to know
how many people know about Tasers and whether they thought it could be used for
self-defense purposes instead of a gun. We suspected that people who were
against guns would be in favor of other options for self-defense such as
carrying a Taser or mace; and people who were in favor of carrying guns would
prefer to have guns everywhere, even on campus.
Some of us were also interested in finding out how
people from different colleges felt toward the campus carry issue. We assumed
that based on their choice of major, people may show different opinions about
the presence of guns on the campus and even bringing them on campus, given the
opportunity. Therefore, we tried and find a correlation between students’ major
and their attitude toward the campus carry law. We suspect that students
from the college of Agriculture may be more in favor of guns compared to other
colleges because they might have a rural background.
Last but not
least, some of us hypothesized that people with risk-taking personalities
are more in favor of carrying guns on campus. This is an interesting
hypothesis, and we tried to investigate it by finding a correlation between
people who smoked and people who, given the opportunity, would own guns and
bring them on campus. Smokers can be categorized as risk-takers based on their
habit, and their attitude toward gun campus carry issue can help investigate
our hypothesis.
Methods
In order to investigate the accuracy
of our hypotheses, we decided to gather data by the means of a survey. The
survey consisted of 26 questions. Most of the questions were in the form of
Yes/No questions. We agreed that each person had to collect at least 12
surveys, 6 male Americans and 6 female Americans. We also agreed that as long
as we collected the required number of surveys, we could collect more surveys
filled out by international students. We also agreed that we would only ask the
opinion of people who were in some way a part of the Texas Tech community
(student, faculty, or staff). We agreed not to pressure or influence the people
whom we asked to fill out the surveys. We also agreed to keep track of their
comments and use those comments as valuable feedback. Each one of us also
filled out one survey.
We wanted to investigate the opinion
of people about how campus carry law would affect the Texas Tech community.
Therefore we agreed to only ask the people involved in the Texas Tech
community, not the people of Lubbock. Furthermore, since the majority of the
Texas Tech campus population consists of American students, we decided to they
should be the main focus of our survey. Therefore, we agreed that each person
needed to have at least 12 American students fill out the survey.
In some cases, we found out that
people were confused by some the questions, or had problems with the choices
provided in some of the questions. We recorded their comments as feedback to
use later to improve our survey, should we decide to make other surveys. There
were also some cases where people didn’t notice the back of the survey sheet,
and did not fill it out. These cases were considered invalid data, and were
disregarded.
Some of us were interested to find
out about women’s attitudes toward the campus carry law. We wanted to know
whether women would see this law as an opportunity to carry guns on campus for
self-defense. We also hypothesized that women’s attitude toward the law would
be influenced by their concern about individual assault. Therefore, we asked
the participants whether, given the opportunity, they would bring guns on
campus. We also asked them whether they thought Taser or mace could be a
substitute for guns when it comes to self-defense. We asked a few more questions
about their overall feeling toward the issue of guns on campus and people who
carry them.
A few of us were particularly
interested in finding out how men’s perceptions of the campus carry law differed
from that of the women. We included some questions in the survey to find out
how participants felt about the guns affecting the safety of campus during a
mass shooting incident, individual safety of a person (especially women) and
the overall safety of the campus.
Some of us were also interested in
finding out how people’s background influenced their attitude toward the campus
law; therefore, we included some questions in the survey to investigate the
participants’ background. We asked people about where they were raised and
whether they had any encounters with guns as they were growing up to see
whether their opinions about guns were affected by their past experiences. We
were also interested in finding out how people of different political standpoint
(Republican, Democrat or independent) felt toward the campus carry law and
carrying guns in general. We also asked what college they were from, to
investigate of the hypothesis some of us had (that people from the college of
Agricultural tend to be more in favor of guns), and also find how people from
different colleges felt toward the campus carry law in general.
Last but not least, some of wanted
to specifically investigate the relation between smoking and carrying a gun, as
both can be described as risk-taking personality features. Therefore, we asked
participants whether they smoked or not.
After collecting all the surveys we
could (148 in total), we entered the data into an Excel spreadsheet and used
the Excel software to analyze the data we gathered and plot different graphs to
represent them.
Results
To investigate the perception of
people on the Texas Tech campus and also investigate our hypotheses, we
collected a total number of 148 surveys from students, faculty members and
staff from different departments. Our main goal was to have an equal number of
male and female participants to study the perception of people on campus about
the campus carry better. Our results show that 51% of the participants were
male and 49% were female. This shows that we were successful in achieving our
original goal.
First, some of us hypothesized that
Texas Tech university students mostly consist of Texans, and therefore, since
guns are part of Texas’ culture, most of the students would be in favor of
campus carry law and may as well bring guns on campus, given the opportunity. We
found out that in fact the majority of the Texas Tech students are from Texas.
Our results showed that 59% of the participants were from Texas, 23% of them
were from the United States but not from Texas, and 18% of them were
international students, meaning that the first part of our assumption was
actually true. There was no question in our survey to directly ask the
participants whether they were in favor of campus carry. However, we found out
that despite their opinion about the campus carry law, the majority of the
Texan students are not in favor of guns being present on campus. We asked them
whether they would carry guns on campus if they were allowed to, and 74% of Texan
students answered with “No”.
Our next hypothesis was that women would
actually use the campus carry law as an opportunity to carry guns on campus for
self-defense purposes. Interestingly, our results indicated otherwise. We found
out that 88% of the female participants said that would not carry guns on
campus even if they are allowed to. This proves that our hypothesis can
actually be wrong. Furthermore, when asked about a proper substitute for guns, 78%
of the female participants said that a Taser could be a proper substitute for
guns on campus. This can actually mean that although women care for their own
safety, they don’t agree with the idea of guns being present on campus.
We also hypothesized that men’s attitude toward the guns would be
governed by their concern about probability of a mass shooting occurring on
campus, while women’s opinion would actually be more influenced by their
concern regarding individual assaults. In other words, we thought that men who would
think more guns make the campus safer during a mass shooting incident would also
think that more guns on campus make it a safer place overall, and women who would
think that carrying guns makes them safer in case of an assault would also
think that more guns on campus would make it a safer place overall. To
investigate this hypothesis, we tried to find a correlation between the
participants’ view of overall safety of campus after the implementation of the
campus carry law, and either their view on campus safety during a mass shooting
incident (in case of male participants) or their view on individual safety (in
case of female participants). According to our results, the majority of men who
think that guns make us safer in case of a mass shooting also think that guns
make the campus a safer place overall, that about half of our female
participants who think that carrying guns would make them safer in an assault
also think that more guns on campus would make it a safer place overall. 54% of
our male participants thought that more guns would make people safer in case of
a mass shooting, and 79% of this group thought that the campus carry law would
make the campus a safer place overall. Furthermore, 51% of the female
participants thought that carrying guns would make them safer, and 53% of this
group thought that more guns made the campus safer overall It is also worth
mentioning that only 40% of our female participants thought that more guns would
make people safer in case of a mass shooting, and 60% of the male participants
thought that carrying guns would make women safer.
One of our more interesting hypotheses
was that students from College of Agriculture would be more in favor of the
campus carry law and owing a gun in general because they might have rural
backgrounds. Unfortunately, we only had 3 participants from the College of
Agriculture (meaning only 2% of the participants), which was not nearly enough
to investigate the accuracy of our hypothesis. However, out of these 3
participants, two said that they would not get and/or carry guns on campus
after the implementation of the campus carry law. We tried to modify our
initial hypothesis and investigate it further. Since the majority of our participants
were from the college of Art and Science and the college of Engineering (29%
and 28%, respectively), we decided to see whether there was a noticeable
difference in the opinions of students from these two colleges. We found out
that the majority of students from both colleges were not in favor of guns. Only
17% of the participants from college of Art and Science and 19% of the
participants from college of Engineering said that they would carry guns if
allowed to. It seems that in this particular issue (the campus carry law),
choice of major does not have any influence on the people’s opinion.
Lastly, we hypothesized that smokers
can be viewed as people with risk-taking personality; and therefore, they will
be more willing to own and carry guns on campus. Although only 10% of our
participants were smokers, our results indicate that smokers seemed to be more
likely to own or carry guns. 33% of the smoker participants said that they
would own and/or carry guns on campus if they were allowed to. compared to only
19% of non-smokers who also said that they would not own or carry guns.
Furthermore, 66% of the smokers said that they could handle a gun under
pressure, compared to 56% of the non-smokers who said the same. Although these
data are somewhat inconclusive (meaning that the low number of smoker
participants makes any conclusion that we derive from this data doubtful), we
can say that it seems that our initial hypothesis may actually be correct, and
in fact smokers can have a higher tendency to carry guns. However, it is
possible that not all of the participants have answered this question honestly,
which would affect the outcome of the survey and will be discussed in the
Discussion section later.
Discussion
We conducted a survey of 148 participants in order to investigate
the perception of Texas Tech University’s community about the campus carry law.
Our main objective was to conduct a survey that would be representative of the
Texas Tech campus community, and while we managed to achieve this goal
regarding the gender and nationality, our survey was not able to be
representative in other cases. For example, we only had 3 participants from the
College of Agriculture, which means only 2% of our participants were from the
aforementioned college. We know that the ratio of college of Agriculture
students to the total number of students in the Texas Tech University is
definitely higher than 2%, and therefore we acknowledge that our survey was not
representative in this regard. Furthermore, we only had 148 participants, while
Texas Tech has roughly about 37,000 students. This means that our participants
consisted of only 0.4% of the Texas Tech community. If we include the number of
faculty and staff, then this number will be even lower. This is the evidence of
the biggest limitation of our survey, which is the fact that it was not
representative of the whole Texas Tech community. Despite this fact, we managed
to find very interesting results about people’s perception of the campus carry
law. Conducting a more rigorous survey about the campus carry law in the future
can be really beneficial to the Texas Tech community as the results we found
indicate interesting facts about the community that need to be further
investigated.
We hypothesized that since most of the students of Texas Tech
University are Texans and guns are big part of Texas’ culture, our participants
would be mainly Texan students and they would mostly be in favor of the campus
carry law. Although it was true that most of our participants were in fact
Texans, we found out that the majority of them were actually not in favor of
the campus carry law. These results were surprising for us at first, but after
finding out more about the role of guns in Texas’ culture by talking to people
who were raised in a family that valued Texas’s culture, we found out that
although guns are a rather big part of the aforementioned culture, Texans also
learn to handle them responsibly, and contrary to our previous belief, they
don’t think anyone can be trusted with a gun. In the case of the campus carry
law, although they believe that teachers and security guards should be armed,
they don’t think it is a good idea to arm everybody, especially young students.
We hypothesized that women would use the campus carry law as an
opportunity to carry guns on the campus for safety purposes. Contrary to our
speculations, the majority of our female participants were not interested in
carrying guns on campus. The majority of them also thought that Taser and mace could
be proper substitutes for guns for self-defense purposes. In case of an
assault, a gun can actually provide more danger for a female victim as they can
be overpowered and their gun can be used against them. We believe that this
might be the reason why women are not interested in guns as tools for
self-defense. In other words, women either do not trust themselves with a gun (because
they are afraid of being overpowered when using a gun for self-defense) or they
believe in non-lethal methods of self-defense, such as using a Taser or mace.
We believed that men’s attitude toward the guns would be governed
by their concern about the probability of a mass shooting occurring on campus,
while women’s opinion would actually be influenced by their concern regarding
individual assaults. What we found out was that in fact the majority of men who
think that guns make us safer in case of a mass shooting also think that guns
make the campus a safer place overall, and about half of our female participants
who think that carrying guns would make them safer also think that more guns on
campus would make it a safer place overall. An interesting result we found
while we were investigating our hypothesis was that 60% of our male
participants thought that women would be safer when they are carrying guns. We
believe that it actually shows that men trust women with guns, and it is
ultimately up to women to decide how they want to behave in regard to making
sure that they are safe. In other words, we think that whether women want to
carry guns or not does not have anything to do with whether men think that
women can be trusted with guns or not.
We tried to find a correlation between people’s choice of major and
their opinion on guns. Some of believed that students from College of
Agriculture would be more in favor of the campus carry law and owing a gun in
general because they might have rural backgrounds (and the rural background is
actually a major factor in their decision-making process about their major). As
mentioned earlier, our survey was not representative with regard to the number
of participants from different colleges. Therefore, we only had 3 participants
from College of Agriculture, and two of them said that they would not get
and/or carry guns on campus. Furthermore, we also looked at the opinions of
people from other colleges (mainly college of Art and Science and college of
Engineering, since the majority of our participants were from those two
colleges). We found out that in case of those two colleges, majority of our
participants were not in favor of the campus carry law. Therefore, we can say
that our initial hypothesis may be wrong, or maybe in case of the campus carry
law, the choice of major is not in any way correlated to one’s opinion of the aforementioned
issue. It may be worthwhile to investigate this hypothesis further by
conducting a more rigorous survey as it can shed more light on the correlation
between people’s choice of major and their background.
Last but not least, we had an interesting hypothesis that smokers
would have a higher tendency to own and carry guns relative to non-smokers, as
smokers can be described as people with a risk-taking personality. We only had
15 participants who said that they smoked. Out of these participants, one-third
of them said that they would own and/or carry guns, compared to only 19% of the
non-smokers who also answered the same. However, some participants may have not
answered this question honestly, mainly because they either felt ashamed or
felt that this question was too personal. It is also possible that the
participants misunderstood the question, thinking that the survey asked them
whether they smoked illegal substances. If we are to assume that all the
participants answered all the questions honestly, then we can say that our
hypothesis may actually be correct, meaning that smokers can more easily
neglect the dangers associated with carrying guns. Our assumption for the
reason behind such behavior is that smokers have a sense of bravado, meaning
that they think that bad things won’t happen to them, such as the dangers
associated with carrying a gun or even smoking itself.
Conclusion
In summary, we conducted a survey to
investigate Texas Tech’s community and their attitudes toward the campus carry
law. Despite some flaws in our method and our survey, we managed to find out
some really interesting results. We found out that most of the participants thought
that guns would help us be safer during an individual assault or a mass
shooting, but overall they believed more guns on the campus actually would not
make it a safer place. It seems that people trust themselves with guns, but
they don’t trust each other with guns. If that is the case, the campus carry
law can actually be a dangerous risk to the Texas Tech community, as it will
lead to an escalation of the behavior of carrying guns on campus, meaning that
people who initially were not interested in carrying guns on campus would
eventually do it because they don’t trust others with guns and they want to be
safe around people whom they assume are carrying guns. The increase in the
number of guns present on campus as a result of such escalation may cause
horrible incidents such as mass shooting or deadly assaults. We hope that these
findings would help Texas Tech’s campus to remain a safe place after the
implementation of the campus carry law.
References
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Metzger, B.
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Michael, K.
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Reindl, J.
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