David Burnett, one of the coauthors of the CATO study, has dedicated as much time and energy to promoting campus carry as anyone alive. In 2007, I gave David his first position on the Students for Concealed Carry on Campus media team, and in 2008, I was one of two SCCC board members to nominate him for an at-large position on the board. About a year after I resigned as SCCC's national media coordinator/director of public relations, he took over the position from my successor. He later went on to serve as SCCC's second president, all the while maintaining his role as the head of SCCC's media team. Though I have moved on to other pursuits, David is still fighting the good fight. He is a good speaker and a great writer, and his dedication to the cause is without question. However, like all of us, he can sometimes be blinded by devotion, and I believe that his insistence that crime on college campuses has skyrocketed in recent years is an example of such blind devotion.
I haven't read the full CATO study, but the first paragraph quoted in this discussion thread was originally part of an essay David published on the SCCC website (ConcealedCampus.org) in June 2010. At that time, I took issue with David's claims about college crime rates, in an article on CampusCarry.com. Here is an excerpt from my article:
SCCC skillfully makes the case that college campuses cannot be secured by the same means as primary and secondary schools and then goes on to impugn its own credibility by suggesting, “One of the most disturbing trends is the dramatic rise in crimes in recent decades. The survey spanned 108 years, yet 60 percent of incidents were recorded within the past 20 years. The number of documented incidents has risen every decade since 1900.”
Is it possible that the discrepancy between the data from 2000-2008 and the data from 1900-1910 could have something to do with the fact that enrollment in post-secondary degree-granting institutions has increased by more than 5,500% in the past 100 years? Could the fact that 60% of recorded incidents occurred within the past twenty years have something to do with the fact that the Clery Act, which requires colleges to report and maintain records of crimes committed on and near campus, didn’t take effect until 1990—twenty years ago this November?
Yes, SCCC gives lip service to the possibility that increased enrollment might be a contributing factor (“One factor may be rising college enrollment, but clearly a collegiate population influx carries worse pitfalls than just crowded dormitories”), but the acknowledgment is nothing more that a throw-away statement designed to cover their backsides if and when one of their opponents picks up on the essay’s fundamental flaw.
When campus carry proponents suggest that colleges are exceptionally dangerous places and/or that the recent advent of campus “gun free” zones has led to a dramatic influx in campus crime, they make us all look silly. The crime rate on a college campus is typically comparable to that of any affluent neighborhood in the same city.
College campuses are not war zones. But they’re also not crime-free zones. Just like those nearby affluent neighborhoods, college campuses play host to assaults, rapes, murders, and every other type of violent crime found in the rest of society. And there is no pragmatic, fact-based reason why trained, licensed, carefully screened adults (age 21 and above) shouldn’t be allowed the same measure of personal protection on a college campus that they’re already allowed virtually everywhere else.
The case for campus carry can be made on the basis of solid facts. There is no reason to contort reality to suit our ends. Those types of tactics are best left to our opponents.