Dear Governor Snyder,
I urge you to veto Senate Bill 59, recent legislation permitting Michigan gun owners to carry concealed arms in public places.
I teach at Grand Valley State University, and
in no way will I feel safer with armed amateurs around me--I'll instead feel more
insecure. The eight hours of extra training proposed in the legislation hardly eases my mind. The undependable benefit of an armed
amateur stopping a mass slaying, itself a minute possibility, does not match
the costs of multiplying the chances of accidental or intentional gun violence
on campus (I'm thinking: alcohol + irritability over grades or noisy neighbors or
just the angst of youth + gun = possible horrible result).
A 2011 New York Times article surveyed the data on the relationship
between crime and concealed weapons in states with permissive laws: “...Ian
Ayres and John J. Donohue, economists and law professors, concluded that the
best available data and modeling showed that permissive right-to-carry laws, at
a minimum, increased aggravated assaults.”
As well, the article further reports, loose oversight of the law in
places such as North Carolina has resulted in a spate of violence by
permit-holders with records of felonies, substance abuse, and mental illness
(Michael Luo, “Guns in Public, Out of Sight,” December 26, 2011).
More generally, this law means we both succumb to fear and
increase it, hardly the basis for a healthy civil society. I agree with Jill Leporte's
point made in an April 2012 New Yorker piece ("Battleground America"):
Gun-control advocates say the answer to gun violence is fewer guns. Gun-rights advocates say that the answer is more guns: things would have gone better, they suggest, if the faculty at Columbine, Virginia Tech, and Chardon High School had been armed. That is the logic of the concealed-carry movement; that is how armed citizens have come to be patrolling the streets. That is not how civilians live. When carrying a concealed weapon for self-defense is understood not as a failure of civil society, to be mourned, but as an act of citizenship, to be vaunted, there is little civilian life left.
Please, Governor, do not give in to those who think
the answer to social ills is a gun, to those who have twisted the ideal of
liberty into a right to assuage their individual, and often exaggerated, insecurity with
concealed weapons, and thereby contribute to public insecurity.
Sincerely,
Andrew Schlewitz
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