The dominant rationale for allowing Public Safety to carry guns has been the prevention of school shootings. While these shootings are indisputably tragedies, they remain quite rare: Over the past 50 years, fewer than 20 shootings have occurred at college campuses around the country. Based on the number of past shootings and the number of schools in the United States, the chance that a shooting will occur at Princeton in a given year is less than .0001 percent. People are more than 25 times as likely to be killed in a lightning strike than in a campus shooting.
Furthermore, the argument that arming Public Safety would allow a more effective response in the event of a shooting on campus is flawed. Many previous shootings have taken place at schools that do employ armed police officers (notably Virginia Tech), but these armed police appear to have had little impact in those cases. Though it is possible that Public Safety could respond marginally faster than Borough or Township Police to a shooting on campus, it is unlikely this would make any difference in the eventual outcome.
While there is scant evidence that allowing Public Safety officers to carry guns would make the Princeton community more safe, there is substantial reason to believe that this would negatively impact campus life. Arming Public Safety would create a problematic shift in both the perception of this organization and its role within the community. Relations between students and Public Safety are already strained given last year’s decision for officers to patrol dorm hallways on weekends. Allowing officers to carry guns would cause them to be perceived even less as partners and more as authoritarian enforcers, undermining an important goal of community policing.
Arming Public Safety would also place Princeton in the distinct minority among our peers: As of 2005, only 27 percent of private colleges and universities our size employ sworn, armed police officers. Joining this small group of schools would convey the false idea that our campus is an unusually dangerous environment. Finally, at Princeton and elsewhere there is general skepticism about the belief that allowing guns on campus will make the school a better or safer place. For these and other reasons, we believe that the Princeton community will be best served by maintaining the existing policy of protecting our campus through the partnership between unarmed Public Safety officers and armed Borough and Township Police.
— Matt Halgren ’09, Ken Schwartz ’09, David Christie ’10, Will Pickering ’11 and Amanda Tuninetti ’11
See the majority editorial here.Read More
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