[Vision2020] Guns on campus

[Ron Force]

 Letter to the NY Times:



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March 17, 2011
Guns on Campus
To the Editor:

Re “School of Glock” (column, March 10):

As psychiatrists who have done extensive work in college mental health and safety, we applaud Gail Collins’s critique of efforts by several state legislators to loosen restrictions on carrying guns on college campuses.

While there have been a few highly publicized tragic shootings on college campuses in recent years, over the last 10 years the average yearly rate of homicide on college campuses has been approximately 1 per 1 million students. Colleges are extraordinarily safe places.

In contrast, suicide is 100 times as common — and suicide attempts 10,000 times as common — as homicides on campus.

We also know that suicide attempts involving firearms are dramatically more likely to result in death to the attempter and potentially others than those made by other means, like drug overdoses. Finally, 40 percent of college students report bingeing on alcohol in any two-week period, a behavior associated with both suicide and homicide risk.

Advocates of arming more college students are therefore trying to protect against an extremely rare event while potentially putting guns into the hands of large numbers of depressed, suicidal or intoxicated students who will be at increased risk, and put others at risk, too.

 Victor Schwartz
 Jerald Kay
 Paul Appelbaum
New York, March 10, 2011

The writers are professors and administrators at Yeshiva University, Wright State University and Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons, respectively, and Drs. Schwartz and Kay are co-editors of “Mental Health Care in the College Community.”




      
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