Guns On Campus Essay

From finals to graduate school applications, college can be a stressful place for students. College is the place where teenagers and young adults are supposed to find out who they are, where they belong, and what they want to become in life. The emotions involved with making these tough decisions should not accompanied with the fear of guns being allowed on campus. A once safe haven for students to learn and grow may become the next crime scene for a mass school shooting. Colleges are already stressful and tense and allowing guns on campus will make them even more stressful. Guns should not be allowed on college campuses because they will increase the number of suicides by college students, take away from a safe and educational environment …show more content…
Currently the “…highly favorable relative suicide rate is the result of firearms having been effectively banned from campuses” (Schwartz, 2006). By allowing guns on college campuses, this once favorable suicide rate will increase. There will be more suicides as guns become more accessible. While there are few successful suicides, the number of suicide attempts is very large. The most common method of suicide is by overdose which is fatal three percent of the time while gun suicides are fatal more than ninety percent of the time (Miller, Azrael, Hemenway and Lippmann, 2007). Guns on college campuses will increase the chances that these suicide attempts will end in death. In a study done by the Harvard School of Public Health, states with low gun ownership were compared to states with high gun ownership. The study found that over the course of five years, the states with the higher gun ownership had about two times as many gun suicides compared to the states with the lower gun ownership. This study was “consistent with the hypothesis that the availability of lethal means increases the rate of completed suicide” (Miller et al,