I’m writing in response to Tiernan Mendes’ Oct. 3 letter to the editor, which challenged Harmen Rockler’s Oct. 1 column on campus concealed carry laws.

Gun laws are deeply personal for me: I was shot and almost killed this summer in a theater in Aurora, Colo. Getting blasted with more than two dozen shotgun pellets didn’t suddenly make me a firearms expert, but it gave me some insight into the cost of America’s broken gun laws.

I understand Mendes’ hope that things might have gone differently in Aurora had there been “a gun in the crowd,” but I know better than he just how misguided that reasoning is. The theater instantly became a warzone; as the dark auditorium filled with smoke, innocent bystanders ran about chaotically and the shooter stalked his victims with several weapons and full body armor.

I’m alive for only two reasons: The shooter’s high-capacity rifle magazine jammed and the police arrived in less than two minutes.

Allowing civilians to more freely carry concealed weapons isn’t the best solution to our country’s persistent gun violence. It’s tempting to believe a gun, in the right hands, could save the day, but the data don’t bear this out convincingly on a large scale. Studies have concluded it’s basically impossible to determine if there’s a causal link between concealed carry and crime rates.

Any police officer will tell you adding guns to a dangerous situation won’t make it safer. I’m not arguing law-abiding citizens don’t occasionally prevent crimes with concealed weapons, but I trust their ability to do so far less than that of trained professionals. Some states don’t require safety or range training to obtain a concealed carry permit, by the way.

The very people who tell me I should carry a gun to stop shootings refuse to entertain even the most basic measures to prevent those shootings from happening in the first place. Roughly 40 percent of guns are sold privately, which means they aren’t accompanied by a background check under federal law. We should require background checks for every gun sale, while also filling the massive gaps in mental health records submitted to the National Instant Criminal Background Check System.

In the words of Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, writing for the majority in District of Columbia v. Heller, “the right secured by the Second Amendment is not unlimited,” and prohibitions on concealed carry — especially in “sensitive places such as schools and government buildings” — have been declared constitutional in the past.

In a country with nearly as many guns as people, we can never fully prevent criminals from obtaining weapons, but we can make it harder by introducing common-sense regulations that don’t infringe upon the rights of law-abiding gun owners.

I may no longer be a student, but I’ll always remain deeply concerned about my alma mater. The data, as well as my own personal experience, don’t suggest that allowing concealed carry on campus will make Syracuse any safer, but improving background checks will.

Stephen Barton

Class of 2012

Published on October 18, 2012 at 2:59 am