UNC Seeks To Punish The Wrong Offenses
North Carolina House Bill 397 that eliminates some of the onerous and illogical restrictions imposed on NC Concealed Carry permit holders should NOT be stripped of the ability for permit holders to store their legal guns in their cars while on campus…either at the behest of UNC officials like its President Tom Ross, or for any other reason. The ironic gall of these officials becomes truly absurd when you consider the rampant rapes, assaults and other crimes that continue unabated on UNC campuses thanks to the refusal or inability of these officials to deal with it. This is substantiated in the following excerpt.
“University of North Carolina: UNC’s administration is under investigation by the Department of Education for its handling of sexual assault allegations. Both students and faculty filed a complaint in January alleging that the University mishandled reports from rape victims. One rape victim at UNC says she was told, “Rape is like football, if you look back on the game, and you’re the quarterback, Annie, is there anything you would have done differently?” Another victim is being penalized by the Honor Court at UNC for speaking out about her alleged rape.”
http://thinkprogress.org/health/2013/03/19/1735451/university-sexual-assault-policy/?mobile=wt
More details on the abject failures of the UNC system to address chronic crimes on their campuses is further detailed in the attached letter, similar to MANY going out from countless numbers of gun-owners and students to these school officials. (See letter at bottom of this post) On examination, these UNC officials really have very little credibility and should, instead, clean up their own houses. OUR House, on the other hand, should pass HB 397 in its entirety.
At the VERY least, allow NC citizens who have been checked and cleared and declared trustworthy to be CC holders by our government to keep their guns safely locked away in their cars….PLEASE! NOT well known because the “news” media has chosen to hide the facts of this incident is the “mass shooting” that did NOT take place at Appalachian Law School in 2002 because, unlike the massacre at Virginia Tech, this one was stopped dead in its tracks by two students who were able to retrieve their guns from their cars! This only comes from public sources such as Wikipedia:
“The Appalachian School of Law shooting was a school shooting that occurred on January 16, 2002, at the Appalachian School of Law, an American Bar Association accredited private law school in Grundy, Virginia. Three people were killed and three others were wounded when a former student, 43-year-old Peter Odighizuwa, opened fire in the school with a handgun. On January 16, 2002… Odighizuwa arrived on the Appalachian School of Law campus with a handgun…..around 1 p.m. and proceeded to the offices of Dean Anthony Sutin and Professor Thomas Blackwell, where he opened fire with a .380 ACP semi-automatic handgun. According to a county coroner, powder burns indicated that both victims were shot at point blank range. Also killed was student Angela Dales. Three students were wounded.’
‘When Odighizuwa left the building where the shooting took place, he was approached by two students with personal firearms and one unarmed student. [One version of the story is that] … at the first sound of gunfire, he and fellow student Mikael Gross, unbeknownst to each other, ran to their vehicles to retrieve their personally-owned firearms placed in their glove compartments. Mikael Gross, a police officer from Grifton, North Carolina retrieved a 9 mm pistol… bridges… retrieved his .357 Magnum pistol from beneath the driver’s seat of his Chevrolet Tahoe. Bridges and Gross approached Odighizuwa from different angles, with Bridges yelling at Odighizuwa to drop his gun. Odighizuwa then dropped his firearm and was subdued by several other unarmed students, including Ted Besen and Todd Ross.” This is marked contrast to what happened at Virginia Tech a few years later.
Out of over 100 news reports on the Law School story only four (4) mentioned at all that Odighizuwa was subdued by armed students, or even the fact that this was done without firing a shot. Clearly, there appears to be an prima facie agenda on the part of the “news” industry to not report on the role of armed citizens in stopping crime, i.e., in order to affect, if not distort, public opinion in such matters.
It is bad enough that our universities and other schools are declared “gun free zones,” which serve to provide safe havens for criminals, but not necessarily for students, as well as for wackjobs who are bent on killing human beings who have been disarmed and made helpless by their own governments. Virtually all mass shootings in the U.S. have occurred in these havens for shooters: Lubys Cafeteria in Killeen TX, Virginia Tech, a number of post offices, McDonalds in San Ysidro, CA; Columbine High School, Cleveland Elementary School in Stockton CA, Red Lake Senior High School, Binghamton NY Immigrant Community Center, Ecole Polytechnique (Canada), Ft. Hood, Killeen TX. All took place in declared gun-free zones, virtual “shooting galleries filled” with helpless targets for the criminals to gun down! The Virginia Tech massacre on April 16 clearly shows just how bad it can be when everyone but criminals are disarmed on school campuses.
I certainly hope you can put the statements of these UNC officials in the perspective they deserve by disregarding them. I am currently a student at CPCC in the Paralegal program (I’m a fairly senior 72 year old), and it is a bit nervewracking to me and other students I’ve talked to that these campuses are, by the same token, declared “gun free”. Not only does this restriction apply to students, but to campus security as well, who have likewise been disarmed by law. Of course, who is NOT ‘gun free” is any nutcase who wants to mow down human targets. And a lot of students will be killed until the police arrive. Makes no sense to me.
Sincerely,
Mel Morganstein
Charlotte, NC
**Letter referenced above:
Dear Chancellor:
Whether University of North Carolina President Tom Ross chooses to admit it or not, violent crime pervades UNC campuses. Given a rape, a knifepoint robbery and an assault within a single week, NC State University in particular seems to be a war zone.
Indeed, lobbyists for North Carolina State University and its chief of police testified to the North Carolina Judiciary A Subcommittee against House Bill 937, which would allow concealed handgun permit-holders to store guns in locked vehicles, just hours before the student was raped outside the NCSU Free Expression Tunnel.
Yet Mr. Ross says HB 937 “would increase the risk to public safety and hamper our ability to protect not only our students, staff and faculty, but also campus visitors.” Is rape your idea of “protection,” chancellor? What about the murder of UNC Chapel Hill student Eve Carson, shot five times after being kidnapped. Was she too adequately “protected?”
UNC Wilmington Chancellor Garry Miller says: “The idea of people having the time and capacity to retreat to their vehicles to arm themselves during a threat has very little chance of occurring”. Yet that is exactly what stopped shooting rampages at Appalachian School of Law and Pearl High School in Mississippi when student Tracy Bridges and assistant principal Joel Myrick, respectively, confronted shooters with guns retrieved from vehicles.
Criminals and violent sociopaths are drawn to ostensibly “gun free” zones: Controlled, multivariate studies by John R. Lott, William Landes and others have determined that concealed handgun laws are effective deterrents to murder, rape and aggravated assault. Indeed, Lott notes that of the mass shootings which have taken place in the United States since 1950, all but two occurred in places where guns are prohibited.
Moreover, visitors, students and faculty who live off campus are required to remain unprotected not only on campus, but elsewhere unless they choose to park at an often distant off-campus location before traversing it.
Regretfully, I will be unable to provide financial support for any university or other part of the University of North Carolina system until it reverses its position on a bill which deals not only with guns, but with the basic right to self-protection.
Respectfully,
Mel Morganstein
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