The recent shooting that happened in Florida is far from the first time a gunman has entered a school and victimized defenseless students. It has become a disturbing trend and has many wondering if they can feel safe from such a threat at Colorado Mesa University. The short answer is no.
That doesn’t mean we should crawl under our beds and hide from the world. Nor, does it mean that CMU students need to fear for their lives every day. The truth is that we reside in an area where we are far less likely to experience gun violence as others.
This is the western slope of Colorado. We still have places where roads get blocked from cattle drives. In a lot of respects, the wild west still exists all around us. Part and parcel of the wild west is the plethora of guns.
That’s right. Guns are everywhere in this region, this county, this city and even this campus. Every day we walk past, bump against and sit beside people that have guns on their person or in their bags.
Now is when we start to panic, right? So many guns around us mean that it would be easy for somebody to begin a terrible shooting spree and fill the campus with violence and heartache, doesn’t it? Not at all.
The abundance of guns on campus makes CMU a very unlikely target for gun violence.
For those who are struggling to understand why more guns equal greater safety, I will break it down. Nearly all violent psychopaths who want to go on a killing rampage are cowards. They don’t want to go to a place where anybody else has a gun.
Since shooters don’t want people shooting back at them, they thrive on attacking gun-free zones. Such places are soft targets where they can get the maximum amount of victims before being taken into custody where they achieve fame and have their faces plastered all over television and newspapers.
Even if they get shot and killed by police rather than arrested, or continue with their cowardice to the point of ending their own life at the end of their shooting spree, these unbalanced individuals still get to rack up their body count. That can’t happen if their intended targets start putting rounds in them shortly after they open fire.
This results in a low-to-no body count and very little media coverage. Stories about armed citizens shooting would-be mass killers somehow manage to miss the national broadcasts after all. Such stories don’t help people be terrified of guns.
Yet many shootings have been stopped in just that way. Last April, a gunman was shot by a gun owning citizen in Chicago after opening fire on a crowd. In September, a Tennessee church shooter was stopped by a gun owning citizen. In November, a gun-owning citizen used an AR-15 rifle to stop a church shooter in Texas. The list goes on.
Those who contemplate mass shootings are familiar with these kinds of stories and consequently typically shy away from places where they aren’t going to be the only person armed. Those stories, when they are actually told, glorify the heroic citizens rather than the psychotic killers.
However, to circle back around to the statement at the beginning, the abundance of guns does not necessarily ensure safety. People still died or were wounded even when somebody was there to stop the shooter.
Guns in the hands of good people did limit the amount of tragedy but they didn’t stop the violence from happening in the first place. That is why, regardless of the reasons why CMU is an unlikely target for a shooter, it can’t be said the campus is completely safe.
The sad truth is that there is no such thing as being safe from shooting threats and it has very little to do with guns. It has everything to do with evil people. The 2014 knife attack in China that claimed just as many lives as a mass shooting is ample evidence of that.
Evil can’t be regulated, banned or picked out of a crowd. It hides in plain sight, within the hearts of people who look like everybody else. Those people can be anywhere at any time.
We can arm ourselves with self-defense methods and make plans for responding to evil. We can limit the impact made by evil. But we can’t stop evil from happening, so we can never say with certainty that we are safe.
So, again, the answer is no, CMU is not safe from an active shooter scenario. However, it is probably as close to safe as a university can get. This is because of roving police, as well as many the students and faculty that have concealed carry permits.
Whether a person likes guns or trembles at the very thought of them, they ought to take comfort from the fact that they are surrounded by people who carry guns responsibly and know how to use them. Though it’s unlikely they’ll need to, those responsible gun owners just might save lives someday at CMU.
