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Originally Posted by archetypal fool
1. Well, since they arrested him and made a huge deal about it, I'd assume he broke some law. He was parked inside the school, and it's illegal to posses a gun(s) within the school. Besides, I don't know about you, and correct me if I'm wrong, but the average gun owner doesn't take his gun(s), drive to a local university, park inside, put them in plain sight (e.i, on the passenger seat), loaded and ready to fire, and then go to sleep. I don't see any possible chain of events which would account for this odd behavior, so forgive me for being troubled by this.
2. Exactly. Assuming 14M adult Floridians, if ,say, 500K own guns, that's 3.6% of the adult population. Assuming it becomes legal to bring firearms to campus, and this same percentage finds itself within my university (though unlikely), where, at any given moment, there are ~5K students and faculty present, that's 180 armed peoples. I don't know about you, but I feel O.K. with that number, considering the size of our campus. And just like all the gun advocates here, I assume if you go through the trouble of buying a gun and registering for a CCW, then you're responsible and also spend time at the range practicing, in which case, I trust that you're responsible with a gun, so I don't expect you to whip it out when a cashier overcharges you accidentally, for example.
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to the first point, I don't know, but it would surprise me if texas and florida had the same carry laws. so what is legal in dk's state isn't likely relevant to what happens in yours.
secondly, it isn't very reasonable to draw a direct correlation between what happens in the general population of florida and your university. selection bias will have an affect, for one thing. it's conceivable that every person who can and wants to carry in the general population is. it's not a random distribution, so we can't extrapolate from that what might happen on campus. my suspicion is very few people would choose to carry on campus. You could start a survey, that would be interesting. I bet you wouldn't find more than the number you cited: ~180. But I'd base that number in comparison to the 40000+ students at your school...which is why I suggested earlier that no gun law, present or deleted, is going to have any effect at all on this incident or future ones. But if you wanted to draw a comparison, not that it would be much more valid, you would look at how many 28 year olds carry in the general population (should we go ahead and guess not many?) of florida, since that's the average age of your university.
so if you really wanted to know how many people would carry, perform a random survey on your fellow students. take a roster of everyone in your school, do a power analysis to ensure sufficient number of students to be surveyed, have a computer randomly generate the students to contact, if you end up with an n of 30 that should do it so shouldn't be terribly difficult to administer and come back with their responses so we can check it out. you could poll a variety of age brackets with equal responses in each cell. then you could compare those responses to who carries in the community. then you would get close to the question of who would want to carry, if they could, and whether the students were representative of florida's general population.
My guestimate is that you wouldn't get more than a 1% desire to carry on campuses, which nearly triples your 180 student estimate (1% of
students alone is 420). And then wonder whether 1% of the population carrying would make a difference in any way shape or form.
there are probably a lot of design flaws in the study I just threw together, but it's just typed up real quick with not much contemplation. you could refine it or just think about it. but assuming in the best case scenario, having 1% of the population evently distributed around campus standing overwatch in case something like this happened. and you can see that given the students who were threatened and harmed by the shooting we're discussing, only 0-1 person would have been armed and present in the best case scenario.