Issue date: 4/20/09 Section: Opinion

I wholeheartedly disagree with last Mondays gun legislation editorial. And to bring up the sniper at the University of Texas is completely irrelevant to the issue. I agree allowing student or faculty concealed handgun license holders to carry would most likely not have done any good in that instance, considering the criminal was trained to kill in the Marine Corps. Let's put a more relevant example in place - Virginia Tech. If student or faculty CHL carriers' had been able to carry on campus, would they have been able to prevent Seung-Hui Cho from killing 32 people? If the professor who sacrificed his life to guard a door leading to even more students had a gun, would he have been able to prevent the murder of himself and others? Take a look at the Department of Public Safety Web site, which publishes conviction rates of CHL holders vs. total felony convictions. Of 61,260 convictions in 2007 in Texas, 160 were committed by CHL holders. I believe Virginia Tech and similar incidences could have been minimized if CHL carrying students and faculty had been able to carry their weapons on campus.

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