This piece argues that allowing responsible adults to carry on college campuses addresses threats that laws alone cannot stop, pointing to Parkland and Old Dominion as examples and insisting policy should focus on real-world deterrence and accountability rather than blanket restrictions.
College campuses mix ages and life experience in a way few other institutions do, from 18-year-old students fresh out of high school to retirees taking classes for fun or career reasons. That blend means many campuses already host mature, law-abiding adults who carry the same responsibilities and instincts for self-protection they practice off campus.
For decades, tens of thousands of Americans have responsibly carried firearms for personal safety and hunting, and some of those people attend or work at small colleges. When policy forces those adults to disarm on campus, you make victims out of people who would otherwise deter or stop violence.
Florida’s move to expand campus carry answers a practical need on campuses where younger people mingle with older adults with real-world experience. Opponents inevitably point to tragic incidents like Parkland, but law changes after one tragedy do not erase the underlying failures that allowed killers to escalate.
For some people, this debate is theoretical. For many Floridians, like myself, it hits far too close to home. In 2018, I lived a 15 minute drive from Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School. For me, this day is not one marked by love, but by the deadliest mass shooting at a high school in U.S. history.
The terror that day left a trail of anxiety and heartbreak that lingered long after the shooting at the high school in Parkland ended with 17 people killed. My husband’s colleague ran out of work and raced to the scene, frantic to check on his daughter, a freshman at that high school at the time. So many other parents did the same. And too many were met with gut-wrenching news.
After Parkland, Florida lawmakers took meaningful action to protect students and educators. Some reforms followed, including raising the minimum age to purchase long guns to 21. Yet eight years later, the Legislature approved a measure that moves in the opposite direction — expanding where guns can be carried and who can carry them.
This is unconscionable and signals a troubling shift to expanding access to firearms instead of preventing gun violence.
That quoted grief deserves respect, but it does not answer the practical question of how to stop determined killers. The Old Dominion University shooting shows how a criminal can obtain a gun illegally and then bring it into a gun-free zone without legal restrictions stopping him. Bad actors will break laws; good policy recognizes who will comply with rules and who will not.
In the Old Dominion case, a man with a felony conviction and ties to gun traffickers acquired a weapon through illegal channels, then used it on campus. The legal restrictions on law-abiding citizens did nothing to prevent that trajectory, and the initial containment of the threat came from armed students in the ROTC program, not from the regulatory framework.
Gun-free zones are a blunt tool that assumes criminals will follow signs. They do not prevent motivated attackers from acquiring weapons or from exploiting institutional softness. If the goal is to reduce casualties when an attack occurs, letting trained, responsible adults defend themselves and others is a commonsense option.
Accountability failures, not legal carry, often explain mass violence. In Parkland, warnings and prior incidents were missed or minimized by local authorities. When violent behavior goes unpunished and warning signs are ignored, even the strictest gun rules cannot stop what could have been prevented.
Punishing law-abiding people for the actions of criminals only makes campuses softer targets. Lawful adults who follow rules and undergo background checks become disarmed by policy, while criminals who ignore laws face no new barriers from those rules. That imbalance is what truly endangers students and staff.
Practical safety policy should focus on deterrence, rapid response, and enforcing consequences for violent behavior, not on symbolic gestures that create disarmed zones. Empowering trained, vetted adults to carry responsibly on campus shifts the balance back toward protection instead of passive risk.
Those who resist campus carry tend to speak in abstract moral terms rather than address how to stop killers in the act. The plain truth is that laws only matter when people respect and enforce them, and when those who would do harm are held accountable before tragedies unfold.
As lawmakers craft safety measures, the debate should center on real deterrents and real accountability, not reflexive restrictions that leave the innocent exposed. Recognize where regulations fail and empower the responsible majority to keep campuses safer while pushing for better enforcement against those who never should have had a chance to hurt anyone.
