Written by: Joe Adgie

Let’s not kid ourselves. We live in a very high-stress environment here at college. Between the pursuit of grades that serve as the official yardstick for whether or not we’re worth people’s time or not and the various obligations that all of us must serve to on top of that, it’s a lot to handle and maybe too much for some.

On more than one occasion, we—and we’re not just speaking as editors of the Spectator here, but rather VSU students—have seen students completely snap. They collapse under the pressure of the college life and sometimes in very explosive, dramatic and violent ways.

And incredibly, some lawmakers in Atlanta want to make it legal for students to conceal firearms on their person on college campuses.

Here at the Spectator, that scares us. A few of us can recall a time just before class one morning where a student suffered a full-blown nervous breakdown. That student, who shall remain nameless, started to throw chairs, scream at everybody, drop the class while in class and storm off in tears.

Now, what if that normally sane person was armed? What would have happened then?

A good number of us probably wouldn’t be here right now, and the front page of the Spectator would have told the tragic tale of the students going into class just like any other day when someone completely lost it, and nowhere near in his right mind, he took the lives of several innocent college kids—kids with tremendously bright futures.

But he would have been fully within his right to carry.

There are those that will contend that “of course others would be armed, they would have stopped him before he could have taken anybody out.”

This, of course, assumes that everyone will remain calm and in their right mind when one of their classmates is shooting at them and could possibly end their lives.

This also assumes that we’ll actually hit our target that we’re trying so hard to aim at. Considering that the New York Times pegged the New York Police Department’s accuracy rate at 34 percent in 2008, that doesn’t really bode well for the general population trying to defend ourselves.

If individuals trained to use a firearm only hit their shots, on average, one third of the time, what does that say for us?

This isn’t Call of Duty. This isn’t Half-Life. This isn’t Grand Theft Auto. This is real life. There’s a good reason that every school president in the University System has stood up against this. There’s a good reason you see people like Katheryn Grant standing up against this. There’s a good reason it’s being discussed in the SGA meetings, and there’s a good reason we’re against this.

Put guns in the hands of students and you’ve got a terrible atmosphere of fear. Could that person walking by me have a gun? Is he on the verge of a nervous breakdown?

That’s no atmosphere suitable for a learning environment, and we here at the Spectator surely don’t want to report about an avoidable tragedy that occurred because someone who absolutely should not have had a firearm had one and exercised their second amendment rights on several innocent human beings.