Amanda Collins blames a state ban on concealed handguns on public-college campuses for leaving her vulnerable to the stranger who raped her in a parking garage eight years ago at the University of Nevada at Reno.
In recounting the incident in testimony before state legislatures there and elsewhere, Ms. Collins has argued that she would have been much better equipped to fend off the man who jumped her had state law not required her to leave at home a pistol for which she had a concealed-weapons permit.
“Had I been carrying that night, there is no doubt in my mind that at some point I would have been able to stop my attack,” Ms. Collins, now a director of the advocacy group Women for Concealed Carry, says in a video produced by the National Rifle Association. Noting that her assailant went on to kill one woman near the campus and to rape others, she says she speaks out about what she experienced because “it is imperative that the legislatures see this isn’t all theory.”
The idea that allowing concealed handguns on campuses would protect female students has gained currency as a result of heightened attention to campus sexual assault. As The New York Times reported on Thursday, lawmakers in 10 states, so far, are hoping that concern about sexual assault at colleges will help them win passage of measures allowing concealed weapons on campuses.
One of those legislators, State Assemblywoman Michele Fiore of Nevada, a Republican, has argued that the threat of being shot will deter potential sexual predators on campuses. She has invoked the victimization of Ms. Collins by calling her measure “Amanda’s Law.”
It’s unclear, however, whether allowing concealed handguns on campuses would deter sexual assaults or perhaps even render them more likely, by making it easier for potential perpetrators to arm themselves.
A big complication is that the sort of sexual assault Ms. Collins suffered—by force at the hands of a stranger—appears to be much more the exception on campuses than the rule. Although researchers on campus sexual assault may sharply differ in their estimates of its prevalence, they generally agree on these two points: The perpetrators are most likely to be men that the victims have known and trusted, and are much less likely to have overcome a woman by pure physical force than they are to have taken advantage of one incapacitated by alcohol or drugs.
Kids, Guns, and Alcohol
The idea that such crimes will be reduced on campuses by letting women carry concealed weapons “ignores what we know about when and where sexual assault happens among college students,” said Christopher P. Krebs, who has studied the subject extensively as a senior research social scientist at RTI International, a nonprofit research group. Although women can be sexually assaulted by strangers on campuses, he said, “those types of situations are relatively rare.”
United Educators, an insurance and risk-management firm, examined 305 claims from 104 colleges it insures involving alleged sexual assaults of students from 2011 through 2013. It found that 90 percent of victims knew the perpetrator, 84 percent of the perpetrators were students, 78 percent of the assaults involved alcohol, and one in three victims were drunk, passed out, or asleep.
Mr. Krebs was the lead author of one widely cited study, based on a survey of 5,446 undergraduate women at two large public universities, that found that women were less than half as likely to report being sexually assaulted through physical force than as a result of being incapacitated by alcohol or drugs.
The women on a campus most likely to need to defend themselves from sexual assault, it appears, are not those attacked by a stranger while walking about the campus, but those drunkenly trying to fend off a formerly trusted male friend in his or her bedroom. It is not a situation in which they would be likely to have a pistol within easy reach or to summon much will or capacity to use one.
“Kids, gun, alcohol is not a good mix,” said Erin Thornley Parisi, interim executive director of the Rape Crisis Center for Dane County, which has an office at the University of Wisconsin at Madison. She said her center teaches women to defend themselves without using weapons because “if you have a weapon, the weapon can be taken and used against you.”
Katherine Whitney, director of Women for Concealed Carry, said in an email, “We don’t advocate for concealed carry in situations where a woman is intoxicated.” She argued, however, that her organization advocates for concealed carry on college campuses not as a preventive measure against “acquaintance rape,” but “because of the protection it offers against stranger attacks.”
“The conversation should be about what makes college campuses unique from other places where permit holders are already entitled to carry,” Ms. Whitney said, alleging that “most folks that are anti-campus carry are anti-concealed carry (regardless of location).”
Underage, Unarmed
Three states—Colorado, Idaho, and Utah—have enacted measures allowing concealed handguns on public-college campuses, according to Armed Campuses, a project of the Campaign to Keep Guns Off Campus and the Coalition to Stop Gun Violence. Five others—Arkansas, Kansas, Mississippi, Oregon, and Wisconsin—have laws allowing concealed handguns on campuses but let colleges restrict where the weapons may be carried, according to the project, whose work tracking legislation is respected by advocates on both sides of the debate. Assessing the impact of such measures is difficult, however, because most are fairly new, and colleges generally have resisted complying with them or taken steps to restrict their reach.
Mississippi’s Board of Trustees for the Institutions of Higher Learning, for example, prohibits anyone other than security or law-enforcement personnel from possessing weapons at any of the state’s public universities. The University of Wisconsin at Madison prohibits the possession of weapons in any of its buildings.
Nine other states allow guns on campuses, but only in locked cars in parking lots. While nearly half of the states leave the regulation of such weapons up to higher-education institutions, practically speaking, few colleges interpret the laws as reason to allow concealed firearms.
Federal law prohibits the transfer of a handgun to anyone under the age of 21, which helps ensure some minimum maturity level among those who would be carrying a concealed handgun. But that age restriction also precludes a large share of undergraduate students from being able to arm themselves. Nearly three-fourths of the victims in the campus sexual assaults examined by United Educators were attacked in their freshman or sophomore year.
Michael Newbern, a spokesman for the advocacy group Students for Concealed Carry, said he was not aware of any case of a student who had used a concealed handgun to prevent a campus sexual assault. He argued, however, that focusing on what happens on campuses measures the impact of campus bans on handguns too narrowly, because such bans deter people who have to visit a campus from carrying guns with them en route elsewhere, such as traveling to a job. “They are disarmed from the time they leave home until they go home,” he said.
Peter Schmidt writes about affirmative action, academic labor, and issues related to academic freedom. Contact him at peter.schmidt@chronicle.com.
