Professors at colleges throughout the Midwest overwhelmingly oppose allowing concealed guns to be carried on their campuses, a University of Toledo study has found.
Authors of the study said their findings are in line with their previous research, which includes a 2009 paper that said 86 percent of surveyed university police chiefs did not think that allowing students to carry concealed guns would prevent gun violence.
"Nine out of 10 faculty members think that it's a very bad idea to have concealed carry on campus, and they feel that it would not make it a safer environment," said co-author James H. Price, a professor emeritus of health education and public health at the University of Toledo.
In a study that concealed-carry supporters dismissed as biased, co-author Amy Thompson said researchers sent questionnaires to 1,125 faculty members at 15 randomly selected state universities: three each in Ohio, Michigan, Indiana, Illinois and Wisconsin.
Ohio State University faculty members were not surveyed; those at Kent State, the University of Toledo and Ohio University were.
The results revealed that 97 percent of faculty members felt safe on campus, and 94 percent opposed concealed-carry there. And
82 percent said they would feel less safe if faculty, students and visitors were allowed to carry guns.
"We're already the safest place there is," said Thompson, an associate health education professor at Toledo. "Why would we want to disrupt that balance?"
Most states, including Ohio, have laws banning concealed guns on college campuses, but about 200 colleges in Colorado, Mississippi, Oregon, Utah, Virginia and Wisconsin allow it, according to the Students for Concealed Carry website.Mike Newbern, president of the state chapter of Students for Concealed Carry, called the study flawed.
"They pretty much set the tone for the hypothesis that they set out to prove," said Newbern, an OSU engineering student who founded Buckeyes for Concealed Carry and was among those who wore empty holsters last spring to protest the ban on concealed carry.
A grant from the Joyce Foundation, a Chicago charitable foundation that supports gun control among other causes, helped fund the research.
Newbern noted that fewer than half the respondents grew up around firearms, only 15 percent had ever been trained to use them and just 3 percent were licensed to carry a concealed gun.
"We're talking to a bunch of people who don't really understand how firearms work," he said.
He said faculty members are isolated from off-campus realities that students face daily, especially near urban campuses such as Ohio State."I'll agree that campus itself is very safe," he said. "What this study eliminates, or I guess doesn't see, as students we're not disarmed just on campus. "We're basically disarmed from the time we leave our home until the time we get back."
Joe Smith, president of Buckeyes for Concealed Carry, said emotions trumped facts in the survey, noting that 82 percent of the respondents acknowledged that they don't support concealed-carry license holders off campus, either.
"Put guns in the equation, and you get a survey like this," said Smith, a former Marine and an OSU security and intelligence major.
But the results rang true to OU Faculty Senate Chairman Elizabeth Sayrs, who did not receive a survey.
"What I hear from faculty is reflected in the survey. ... The risks so far outweigh the hypothetical benefits that it's not even worth considering," she said.
"I see those numbers holding," said professor David O. Thomas, vice chairman of OU's Faculty Senate. He also didn't receive a survey but said his peers seem to agree that permitting guns on campus would change the tenor of higher education for the worse.
"A university must be the last bastion of open, unthreatened debate," Thomas said. "That's who we are."
Copyright 2013 - The Columbus Dispatch, Ohio
McClatchy-Tribune News Service
