A.G. Gancarski
If you’re like me, you’ve heard gun control debates for decades (perhaps even since speech class in high school), and you might believe that, per Shakespeare, there is nothing new under the sun.
The one on Monday evening at the University of North Florida, moderated by UNF President John Delaney, didn’t disprove the lede. It did include the following participants:
Patricia Brigham, the Chair of the Gun Safety Committee of the League of Women Voters of Florida; Cord Byrd, National Rifle Association representative; Richard Collier, Former NFL offensive lineman; Eric Friday, Florida Carry representative; and Bill Sheppard, Criminal trial/civil rights lawyer.
These five participants run the gamut, from full-throated enthusiasts of gun rights, like Byrd (who is involved in a competitive six-way race for the State House), to Collier, whose promising career as a Jacksonville Jaguars ended in a hail of bullets on a September day seven years ago.
A topic some might have expected going in: “campus carry,” given the free t-shirts distributed outside that said “Keep Our Campus Gun Free.”
As one might expect given the biases and the level of entrenchment into their positions of panel members, the discussion tended toward the academic.
A discussion of background checks and gun registration covered familiar ground, with Friday mentioning that registries have served as precursors to confiscation.
Sheppard noted, that there are 310 million guns out there already; the buyback costs, he contended, would be enormous.
The first gun control laws in the country were passed in the post Civil War South. Blacks were barred from having guns, which summarily led to a reign of terror by southern whites.
Byrd, strikingly, took issue with the term “assault weapon,” saying that all guns are assault weapons. He also asserted that there is no possible gun law that could have prohibited the recent spate of mass murders, saying that all of those guns were either stolen or acquired legally.
Then Collier spoke.
He described the eight bullets that are still lodged in his body, and how, after such a “traumatic experience,” it takes a while, if ever, to “start enjoying life.”
The question of what good it would do a student to have a gun in a dorm room was posed to Byrd, who said that “a gun is a great equalizer” that allows for protection.
Byrd went on to contend that assaults and rapes would rise if restrictions were put on guns, arguing that “gun free zones need to be repealed” because criminals won’t attack those who shoot back.
Brigham noted the League’s opposition to “campus carry,” citing the fact that most assaults happen off campus. Regarding a gun as an impediment to sexual assault, Brigham contended that most of the time a gun is introduced into the equation, the gun is used against her.
She also said that it would cost $74 million to implement campus carry across the Florida university system.
While the mass shootings on college campuses are “horrific,” Brigham said, they are not the majority.
As well, she asserted that gun suicides are a major “risk” on college campuses, and that given the drinking and “drug experimentation,” guns are bad business for dorms.
“We don’t believe this is a second amendment issue,” Brigham continued. “This is a public safety issue.”
“How free are you going to feel… when you realize a couple of your fellow students are carrying guns?”
The campus carry bill, she added, was a product of the “gun lobby.”
Byrd, when asked about the “risk” of guns, opined that “life is risky,” comparing gun ownership to trampoline ownership before contending that there is “zero correlation” between gun ownership and homicide, and that in open carry states, you get used to seeing people with guns, and that law enforcement apparently thinks that when they see someone carrying openly, they’re probably a good guy.
The real issue, he added, is a culture that doesn’t respect life.
Continuing his foray into faulty parallelism, he wondered why the President didn’t go on TV after Labor Day weekend and call for greater restrictions on cars, because of vehicle-related deaths.
Sheppard chimed in, urging against passing a bunch of “screwball laws” against guns, adding that the real issue is people, and therefore we shouldn’t undermine the Second Amendment, motivated by “hysteria.”
Collier, who owns guns himself, noted that as a college student “not too long ago,” he wouldn’t advise that college students have guns.
Open carry, meanwhile, “freaks [him] out a little bit.”
“Being a victim of gun violence, you don’t want to be a victim… what happened to me was a guy who was disgruntled… a six time felon, he followed me and shot me.”
While he asserts that there need to be tougher laws, he also wants the right to protect his family.
“A gun in the wrong hands is very dangerous.”
Friday, meanwhile, went back to Open Carry, citing that it is legal in 45 states, and historically “open carry is a right; concealed carry is a privilege.”
He then added that, since 1987, concealed carry holders have been tracked, and that “concealed carry license holders are the most law-abiding segment of our society.”
This didn’t convince Brigham, who countered that police are best equipped to handle gun assailants.
“Why don’t we just let police do their jobs?
Byrd had a counter.
“Police react to crime, not prevent it.”
“We focus on when the bad guy shoots people,” yet the times when a gun prevents a violent crime are never reported.
Sheppard then brought up another pressing issue: mental illness, which is clearly the driver of most mass murders.
After an hour and a half of debate, what was revealed, yet again, was the lack of common ground. On one side, exponents of gun control; on the other, proponents of gun rights.
“Probably no one here’s changing their mind,” said Delaney toward the end, who hoped that at least the opposing sides had a clearer understanding of each other’s views.
