MiddletownJournal.com

Of all the proposals we've heard for improving campus security, allowing students to carry loaded guns is the worst.

Recently, students at Ohio State University and other schools around the country wore empty gun holsters to classes to protest laws that ban concealed weapons — legal elsewhere in Ohio — on campuses. A dozen students took part in the protest at Miami University in Oxford and at the University of Cincinnati.

They want the right to carry guns on campus and in the classroom. Their reasoning is simplistic: In the wake of last spring's shootings at Virginia Tech, had other students been armed, the shooter would have been stopped before he killed 33 innocent people.

Sounds reasonable, doesn't it? Not to us. It's worse than unreasonable. It would lead inevitably to disaster.

Already in this country, students killing students or teachers has become nearly commonplace. Without delving into motivations, the fact that the "normal" response of many young people to stress or perceived threats is, as often as not, an act of violence should make it obvious that allowing deadly weapons into easy circulation is a bad move.

We've already lost too many of our students in senseless shootings. Too many of them think getting drunk is the height of adult sophistication. And, in college, most of them are experiencing their first real taste of freedom without the supervision of parents or teachers.

Those two facts alone have accounted for several student deaths over the past few years. To those facts, add a gun — it's on your hip, loaded, ready to fire — and you have the makings of a deadly showdown that can happen in a split second: Drunk, angry, armed, in a crowded bar — before anyone has a chance to calm down, someone is dead.

How will police officers approach an armed student who's drunk and threatening to shoot someone, or worse, already has shot someone?

How many accidents will occur while someone is showing off that new .38 or .45? How many suicides will be made easier that, had the student not had immediate access to a gun, might not have happened at all?

Nobody can know the answers to those kinds of questions. But we know such events will happen and students will die.

Yes, we may need to beef up security on some campuses. We not only urge, we implore university and law enforcement officials to work with students to find safe ways to improve campus safety. But letting students carry loaded guns is absolutely not the answer.