Armed with Reason: the Podcast - Should We Allow Guns on College Campuses?

John McKenna from The Campaign to Keep Guns Off Campus explains how the push for campus carry is insidious, insane, and unwanted

Photo by Rosalind Chang on Unsplash

In our latest podcast, GVPedia leaders Devin Hughes and Caitlin Clarkson Pereira speak with John McKenna, the new Executive Director of The Campaign to Keep Guns Off Campus. McKenna delves into the trauma that extends well past the tragic immediacy of school shootings; how our educational campuses are no place to test our Second Amendment arguments; the statistical fallacies of campus carry laws; and our Constitutional right to domestic tranquility that seems to be completely dismissed by pro-gun forces.

“The push for campus carry is not coming primarily from the base of campus environment stakeholders — meaning present students, applicants to-be students, faculty, staff, administrators. Across the board, red, blue, states, purple, we're finding the data is anywhere from 80 to 90% of those stakeholders… are against this idea…. The push for campus carry is insidious. It's coming from external parties who see this environment and this demographic as a place to penetrate a market. And it goes against all statistics.”

You can listen to the podcast via our channel on Spotify as well as on YouTube, or read the transcription below.

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PODCAST TRANSCRIPTION:

Caitlin: Hello, everyone. Thanks for joining us here on the Armed with Reason podcast brought to you by GVPedia. While many of our podcast guests are booked quite a ways out, our guest this episode has, unfortunately, very appropriate timing related to current events. John McKenna is a public affairs specialist in the mass media and nonprofit space. He is the founder of Kenna Scope — a consulting company operating at the intersection of content creation and social impact. John is the newly appointed Executive Director of The Campaign to Keep Guns Off Campus, and he's taking the reins from founding executive director, Andy Pelosi, who has joined us here on the Armed with Reason podcast in the past. He also has served on the board of directors of the John Lennon Real Love Project, the Global Peace Committee of the Institution on Violence, Abuse, and Trauma, and Northwell Health's Gun Violence Prevention Collaborative Committee. So John, thanks for taking some time to speak with us today. And I was referring to the timing of you being here as appropriate, just based on some shootings that we have unfortunately experienced here in the United States recently. So to start, can you tell us what your initial response was when you first heard about the shooting at Florida State a few weeks ago, as well as the shooting at a college in North Carolina?

John: Yes, and first, I just want to express gratitude, Caitlin, to you and everybody at GVPedia, because the journalistic side of this is so vital. There seems to be fixed narratives in this complex issue of gun violence prevention. Normalization of it becomes very apparent in the storytelling. So the deep dive that you take is so critical today. So we're very, very grateful.

First reaction, yeah, Florida State. The reaction was threefold, if you will. First, what's the toll? The first reaction is always, what kind of trauma are we talking about here in terms of scale? So that's the first phase. You hold your breath and allow the details to come out. And then you go to geography for some reason in your head. You just naturally start thinking, you know, how close to home was this? If it was far away, how is that related to maybe the gun ownership climate and the bills in motion? You know, you just can't help but play with that in your head as well. And then Florida, specifically with geography, to hear that it was in the state's capital and in the very state that gave birth to the largest mobilization of young people ever in addressing this. And so all of that kind of irony struck me in real time.

And then there's the third part, which is something that we've come to train ourselves with, which is the deep breath thing. Don't overreact. You know, there's a compulsion in this movement to sometimes say, okay, well, we got to jump in there. What's our message? What's our statement? But here at the campaign, because unfortunately we've had to address this on so many occasions, we take the intentional deep breath to allow for the details and the real information to be presented in fact before we do anything that is harmful, or disrespectful, or even counterintuitive in terms of what really happened here. And then of course, you know, we did get all of these very disturbing details for the next three, four, five hours of what really happened.

Devin: And kind of with the deep breath, and that's an approach we take at GVPedia as well, because we often find that in the first hours and potentially even days, like so much of what's reported as fact ends up being revised. And so there's really no way of knowing until even two, three days out what actually happened. Though in the case of the FSU shooting, one of the instant responses from the gun lobby seem to be promoting campus carry. And campus carry is one of the few things that hasn't fallen in Florida yet, from my understanding. And from what you've been able to see, does any of the push for campus carry come from the students themselves? And can we take a little bit to discuss why campus carry is a particularly bad idea?

John: Firstly, the push for campus carry is not coming primarily from the base of campus environment stakeholders — meaning present students, applicants to-be students, faculty, staff, administrators. Across the board, red, blue, states, purple. We're finding the data is anywhere from 80 to 90% of those stakeholders who have the most at stake in terms of their experience and participation on any campus on any given day are against this idea. Just as it rings true statistically with arming teachers on the primary or secondary level of education, K through 12.

The push for campus carry is insidious. It's coming from external parties who see this environment and this demographic as a place to penetrate a market. And it goes against all statistics. Campuses across this country are statistically anywhere from 500% or greater more safe than surrounding communities. So the very premise that this is a place that needs to be saturated to combat, if you will, the occurrence of these sad occasions just doesn't fit the statistics. And that's what the students intuitively know as well.

What we saw there was another example of a brazen individual who could not have been stopped in any reasonable way by any armed student walking across FSU the other day. I would say that the students are also keenly aware of how problematic it will be in the future for every campus that adopts this insane policy. For what the first responders and law enforcement would have to face if they knew going into FSU a couple of weeks ago, they would have make to a determination who are the students that are the good guys and bad guys. Because now you've introduced a whole other element into the response, whereas as tragic as it was and how unacceptable as it is that there were that many victims at FSU the other day, there's no telling what would happen if the first responders weren't able to do their job properly. And they did mobilize quickly and they were able to contain the scenario as best as they could within minutes. But the students recognize that if this means in the future, if some politicians had their way, that hundreds if not thousands of students are scrambling around FSU with brandishing weapons because they've been trained to help somehow mitigate this, uh, imagine the first responders and their duties. Which is why campus law enforcement officers, sheriffs, FBI officials, all down the line primarily are against this whole push.

Caitlin: When I was reading your bio, John, I noticed that you had mentioned something about Parkland students. So working with the survivors of gun violence in Florida is not a new concept to you. So can you tell us about your experience working with students from Parkland?

John: Yes. Thank you, Caitlin. It's a relationship that's developed over the past several years, and you asked about the first reaction of what happened at FSU. That also came to mind and hit my heart because my relationships in Florida are that deep with Parkland. In the aftermath of what happened on Valentine's Day, 2018, an organization I was serving, Operation Respect, with a non-violence project, we were invited down to Parkland within 30 days to help address trauma. We were doing on-site, in-school, trauma-informed therapy, using art therapy, music therapy, all kinds of different, if you will, unconventional methods of dealing with violence on campus. We were invited because the students and the faculty and the parents had said, Look how fast our leaders stood up. Look what's happening in our community with the kids who are taking a megaphone and are planning a march on Washington soon.

But they said there's this whole other layer of our population that has gone into shutdown. You will not find them in Washington. They are not coming out of their bedrooms. They are not willing to go back to school. They are crying daily. It's a macro-trauma zone. So would you bring your exercises down here to see what you can do? We know a lot of these kids are creative, and we're thinking that art or music might be a channel of their expression.

Well, long story short, the first thing we did with our music therapist is we said, we're not going to parachute in with songs. We're going to facilitate and get out of the way. Because it was apparent from the very beginning that these students were ready. And they wrote every song, every tune, every lyric, and composed an album called Wake Up America. And we didn't see where this was gonna go. We just went down there to do the exercises over the course of several days. But subsequently, over a year I had the profound pleasure of escorting a select group within that macro group to cover this country, and to share their stories, and to sing their songs, and to become voices for the voiceless. And that translated into so many indescribable activations across this country, including the kids going all the way out to Long Beach, California, and performing at the World's Conference, and getting the Nelson Mandela's Changemakers Award. So to see kids up on stage who are now speaking and singing months after not really being able to talk or express, it was something else.

But the cherry on top was when, out of that activation, we were invited to Northwell Health in New York City, because Northwell health at that moment had just opened up their gun violence prevention center — the first health care center in the country to do so. And their chief marketing officer, along with their CEO Michael J. Dowling said, “You know, we're going to be talking about a lot of high-brow issues at this conference. We're going to have PhDs, and trauma surgeons, and all kinds of white papers being talked about. But we want one special group in that room to touch our hearts, and it's going to be those Parkland kids.”

So they made their impact there in New York City. I'm proud to say that at that moment, Michael Dowling, the CEO, was kind of a lone warrior in this space with his health care peers. He made the pitch that afternoon that, Hey, I'm the first CEO that's going to pledge a million dollars toward gun violence prevention, but I want you all to join me. And it was much of a show of hands. It was early on in the healthcare intersection of this issue. Within six months, he had 60 other co-signers of CEOs pledging this, to address gun violence as a public health priority. And for our little pocket of kids who were in that room to watch that develop in real time shows how much they played a role in raising those hands. Remarkable.

And then the last thing I'd like to share about what happened that day was one of the students, one of the singers had an episode to show how trauma doesn't go away. Now we're about 10, 12 months out from what happened. There was a fire alarm in the hotel. And it was routine. We found out in pretty short order, it was just a false alarm. And everybody went back to business in the conference, but not one of our students. She was in a fetal position in the corner because the very sound of sirens and the basic exercise of get in line and start making a motion to exit took her back to February 14th, 2018. But we were in a room with healthcare professionals, and there were counselors and mental health professionals in real time there to comfort her. But what an education back to us that we could be kind of routinely going through what we thought was the agenda for the day. So that's how deeply the Parkland group has impacted what we do going forward.

I would also like to say it's ongoing. The people that I've met there, including Manuel and Patricia Oliver, who lost their son Joaquin, we just continue to find each other across this country in different places. And Devin, Joaquín is the image on that five foot tall mural in Washington, D.C. So thank God for those Parkland kids and for how they did wake us up.

Devin: It's interesting that you mentioned the fire alarm going off at a conference, because in 2019 GVPedia held a conference in Denver at a hotel, and the fire alarm went off, and at the same time the air conditioner kicked on to create a thump-thump noise. And so we had some Parkland students there who were relatively fine. But there's other students who had gone through active shooting drills that were not fine. And so we had to bring in therapy dogs. We fortunately had trauma professionals and such there at the scene to be able to help. But it was really kind of shocking to see, and also a reminder of just like how much the trauma is, and the impact beyond the number killed and the number injured. Like these are students who like, even those who don't directly experience a shooting who are still being traumatized by our system, our inability to do anything legislatively about the issue. And it's going to be a lifelong cost that often like never emerges because there's not really hard data there to support in the conversation, but it's definitely there. So yeah, I just found it interesting that two conferences have had the same fire alarm experience. And I guess for those listening who want to do conferences at a big event, try to contact the fire department and see if the fire alarm can be turned off in exchange for having a firefighter there, because it creates issues, and it's just unfortunate.

John: Well, yeah, you're touching on kind of our macro psychosis that we have now. Upwards to a quarter million students experience shelter-in-place or lockdown. One of them being my nephew out in Utah, little six-year-old Evan. He was put in a closet for 90 minutes. [There was a] parent was in a parking lot, twirling a pistol. It's very hard for a six-year-old to understand what kind of protocol is reasonable. And 90 minutes for you and me is a long time. 90 minutes can feel like an eternity for a little kid who's being told, please don't cough, please don't sneeze. You don't want anyone to know that you're in this closet. They'll never be on a statistic chart, you know. Just like the students who we brought to Northwell are really not considered statistically damaged. We hear 17, 17 all the time from Parkland. The 17 killed, the 17 injured. We don't talk about the thousands that ran for their lives. We don't talk about the scores who saw that, that they will never ever be able to purge from their memory. The collective trauma that we are inflicting on one another is immeasurable.

Devin: And then also like the active shooter drills, where it's not even like a lockdown, but like where they even get realistic. And I'm not aware of any evidence that they actually make students safer, but they do 100% cause additional trauma to those students. It's a horrible mess, and taking something that does not work and then trying to enforce that on the schools, rather than enact sane gun policy.

Caitlin: Devin, you made an interesting point there when you're talking about conferences in large spaces, and disengaging a fire protection system in lieu of having a fire watch, a firefighter, or more than one firefighter depending on the space. Fire protection and fire suppression systems came to be because people died in large public spaces and tragedy, right? Almost all of our fire code is written because something bad happened. And so we're wondering what is worse, right? The risk of somebody getting caught in a dangerous situation due to smoke and fire, or an alarm going off that is either just part of a regular test situation, or by a light smoke condition that some burnt toast caused, or whatever it might be, and the danger that that poses to individuals.

And to me, John, my day job is as a firefighter. So to think about those worlds colliding in such a way. Yeah, we've really come to a place where what we think we need to put on holds in order to keep people safe from the emotional turmoil that we have caused is just really catastrophic.

Devin: Yeah, and then even like the calls to "harden schools," only one exit, and stuff like that. It's like you're creating a fire trap then. And yeah, at the same time, there's stories where like shooters have pulled the fire alarm to get people out. And so it's these two public safety type things that clash; and it's put on the students rather than trying to actually solve the problem.

To pivot back to the numbers for a moment, one of the claims I'd like to talk through that often appears from the gun lobby — and this is part of the whole idea that guns make you safer and that more guns mean less crime, which we know are foundational myths — is that there is yet to be a single attack by an active shooter or even an unintentional shooting on college campuses that allow guns and students to carry. And now what instantly springs to mind to me is the shooting at Umpqua Community College, which did allow concealed carry. And there were students concealed carrying on campus at the time of the shooting, which refutes that. There was also one of the high school shootings where an armed guard nearly shot one of their responding officers in the confusion. And then there is also a case, it was either Utah or Idaho, somewhere up there in the Northwest, where I think it was on the first or second day campus carry passed, the professor unintentionally shot himself in the foot. But what I'm kind of curious about with these is, do you have other examples of gun-related tragedies on campuses that allow students to carry to where we see the direct harmful impact of campus carry?

John: Yeah, thank you for asking that. It speaks to the cherry picking elements of this complex issue that come into play, where people start pulling out little tidbits to make the case or the rationale for saturation. That has to be refuted, because even if you're just saying that in order to address mass shootings, we're gonna play with that particular statistic, mass shootings make up 1% of our problem. Even saying that the remedy for this, the mass shooting on campus argument is saturation of the general populace to defend yourself against it. That goes against the 60% of firearm violence that is self-harm, the 30%, which is homicidal.

I have here pages and pages of a hundred-plus incidents of firearm incidents on campuses and states that allow guns on campuses. This is everything from irresponsible kids in a dorm twirling and hurting themselves accidentally to somebody having an argument in the parking lot, brandishing weapons, and being arrested. You know, we're on the tracking side of this. So The Campaign to Keep Guns Off Campus daily, daily is getting details of guns being found, being used in irresponsible fashion on campuses all across this country. So we simply aren't going to take the bait with some of these tactics to say this doesn't equal that. The reality is that mass shooters — particularly mass shooters that do high profile kind of statement types of mass killing — they govern their own outcome, meaning they've already decided they're going down in a blaze of glory, they will not live to see the end of this. Or they've created a situation where there's going to be some kind of a surrender to the law enforcement after they do. We don't have any proof whatsoever that the rank and file public played any role in stopping these situations.

What we do have is clear indications where the most trained response could not adequately handle being on the other end of an AR-15 of someone who decides to go into a school, e.g. Uvalde. 77 minutes of mayhem, 100-plus trained officers from all branches of law enforcement, descending onto a campus, and not being able to fully understand what to do in that case. To ask a freshman who has enrolled at FSU, or an administrator who's in the admissions office, or the assistant volleyball coach to walk across FSU and to handle that in any way that's better or more safe than what we saw in Uvalde simply just doesn't add up. The students know that the saturation only creates more chaos.

And the untold part in all this is what we were talking about just a few minutes ago, which is the immeasurable anxiety, the immeasurable cost to wellness and to a sense of what we like to refer to as domestic tranquility. We should not have to live this way. And the states that are pushing for this — and we saw a couple of states go down just in the last few months, South Dakota and Wyoming — you have campuses now that are going to be going into the fall with a whole new playbook, something they never saw before. These are hardly liberal states, and yet community colleges, University of Wyoming, they're all taking meetings now with that legislation passing, and they're saying, How do we migrate through this? And I'll be happy to talk to you about some of our ideas of how we can help environments post-poor law being passed. These aren't just hard wins and losses, but we're being sold on the idea that the win is just to allow for open carry, campus carry, concealed reciprocity across this country. But that's going to translate into heightened anxiety, and really, a fundamental loss for what we consider to be tranquility.

Devin: And also one thing as well, or a couple of things as well. Like one is that I don't think people tend to recognize how much open and concealed carry provide cover for people seeking to do harm. And there's a case in Colorado, like a decade or so ago now, where they had recently passed open carry, I believe. A woman saw a guy carrying an AR-15 across his back, and it just did not feel right to her. She called the police and they're like, Sorry, ma'am, but he's allowed to carry. And he went on to shoot multiple people with that AR- 15. And so it's like, how do you tell a good guy from a bad guy until the bad guy opens fire? You can't.

And allowing more guns just makes it easier for people to carry until the moment they seek to do harm. And there's cases as well with mass shooters where they will stockpile like thousands upon thousands of rounds of ammunition. And you hear pro-gun people be like, Oh, that's completely normal. It's like, well, it shouldn't be. If you're stockpiling thousands of rounds of ammunition, in any sane society that would be a red flag that something's wrong. But given that it's "normal" in the United States, that provides cover to somebody who wants to stock up and arm themselves as heavily as possible.

And then the other thing I kind of want to return to is like the narrative around campus carry, concealed carry reciprocity, and stuff — and it's been as GVPedia has talked about multiple times in the past — the gun lobby's firehose of falsehood, a decades-long disinformation campaign. And we've argued from the outset at the Armed with Reason platform that disinformation should be seen as a root cause of gun violence. Because why do people purchase guns? It's because they think it will make them safer. And the overwhelming majority of the evidence shows that that is not the case. And we're seeing that narrative play out in schools and campuses as well. And it's part of kind of the same myth from the same authors carrying through. And in Wyoming, for example, John Lott himself was called to testify. And he's one of the original authors of the "more guns, less crime" theory, the idea that mass shooters target gun free zones, that there's no problems with guns on campus. And I would love to see that list that you have as well because that'd be quite helpful.

John: And it's not a complete list. It's only the information that we're able to glean. I think it's a sample size of what's happening daily out there in terms of the presence of firearms and what it means to the overall, you know, breach of tranquility. You touch on something that's critical here. And I think it’s important to emphasize. The Campaign to Keep Guns Off Campus is a long title. When I think about our title, Campaign, campaigns have an end, you know, at least a perceived end. I think we all are realistic enough to know that this is a very long, long campaign.

Now the other part that I like to emphasize is the last word in the title, which is Campus. Now why are we that? Why are we a campaign that's focused on campuses? That is critical for us because we have recognized that there are certain pockets in our complex, violent society that we owe our strongest obligation to uphold in terms of peace, tranquility, and well being, particularly for our young and developing people. Our citizens who deserve to have certain places where they can feel the adults in the room and the leaders of this nation are saying, These places are off limits for what may be happening, you know, in multiple other locations across our society.

We do it all the time. We do not allow for airplane flying to have the same kind of access to guns as what might be happening a mile from the airport. The State of the Union address has gun control. There are places all through our society where we say this just doesn't fit. This is a violation of the spirit of what we're supposed to be doing here. That's how defensive we are for campuses. We are lockstep with the leadership in these schools across this country who are saying, not here. Whatever has to be argued on the Second Amendment and in the state houses and at the Supreme Court level, take it up. We're paying attention. We're all Americans. But for 200-plus years, these spaces have been incubators for tranquility, thought, expanded ideas, social development — they're just those types of spaces that don't deserve to have the test of our second amendment brought to them.

And that's why this is insidious. Over and over and over again as we track these bills, we're finding that the introduction of campus carry is never coming internally. That's not the push. It's an external voice that has been funded and fueled to say, Hammer it through. And South Dakota was the most recent, you know, freshman legislator who was clearly propped up, Michaela Vojta, to tell South Dakota what she thinks all the campuses need to be. And as far as I can tell, she's never been seen on a campus. The only quote we got as she introduced that bill was, I grew up around guns and everyone else should have them. Tell that to a professor. Tell that to a head coach who has to play in front of 40,000 fans and wonder how many of those thousands might be holding a gun.

So what we're doing here is when we do lose in the state houses, it comes down to this word, keep — Keep Off. What do we tell the student leadership and the faculty in South Dakota and Wyoming who just saw their states tilt after scores and scores of decades of safe campuses and gun-free zones go the other way. We're saying we're gonna provide sample questions to your base through our new initiative, and we're calling it Armed with Knowledge, which means what's the obligation of schools now to pose the questions of how do you live on these campuses with new laws? If you have a 17-year-old who's applying to the University of Wyoming, does your website say these are now the new rules of engagement on my campus? Does that student have the right to ask, What are the policies if I'm to enroll in the fall? Do I get to know if my roommate that you're assigning me to is going to be bringing a gun? Does a professor have the prerogative to open up his classroom teaching, you know, old English literature, can I get a raise of hands of how many students here have decided that they will be the ones that defend this classroom today? What are the rights of the entire ecosystem now that this has shifted?

For those who are saying, Oh, we're still going to be proponents of safe storage, who pays for it? Who's buying all the biometric security boxes that are supposed to go into these dormitories? These are questions we feel are not provocative or unfair, we feel that a population should have at their disposal a range of questions that they have the right to the answers to now that their climate has been fundamentally shifted by certain laws. So this will be when reality meets kind of twisted ideology.

We've even had some, there are meetings happening today in places like Gillette Community College in Wyoming where they're saying, are we gonna have residents that are armed and then some that aren't? Do we get to choose what dorm we live in based on which ones will have weapons and which ones won't? We have colleges now debating what departments are we going to exclude guns from. You can bring a gun into English literature, but we don't want you bringing it to the science lab, because there're explosive chemical elements involved. We have coaches who are asking, when a visiting team is coming from Massachusetts, do we have to pick up the obligation of escorting them safely from the hotel to the arena? Because when they scheduled the game six months ago, they didn't have that concern. They do now. So, these laws can't be passed without reality kicking in. And that's what the students knew at FSU two weeks ago, and that's why they marched to Tallahassee State Capitol there, because they know what it really looks like when these laws kick in.

Now, where it gets ugly is we have to ask ourselves, why would this imposition be on steroids? And, you know, that's up to any of us to conclude. I think penetrating these, dare I say, sacred spaces of education is a way of instilling that this is the new way that you will live, and that you are a marketed demographic that needs to be coached into anticipating becoming a gun buyer, purchaser, owner. I think that these tranquil spaces are threats. Through a movement that says saturation is the answer. One little bit of commentary along those lines, I was at a primary school in East Harlem last year with kids. One young lady, she said, "I don't know why it's all so complicated. I know what the adults are asking of us. They're saying either everybody gets them or let's start really reducing to the point where hardly anybody has them." She knew the ballgame. You know, it's either saturation or not. And that's why our campaign says we're going to always, always push for what James Madison and Thomas Jefferson said about the University of Virginia when they founded it over 200 years ago — that there will be no firearms on the university campus.

Devin: And before we wrap up, like, well, it might be a somewhat old fashioned idea, like I still do see universities as a marketplace of ideas where people should be exposed to challenging views from across the spectrum, and to really hash out arguments and go further in the pursuit of knowledge. And having a gun in that setting is the same reason why guns at protests are so problematic, because it's like my speech matters more than your's because I have the threat of violence behind mine. So it's no longer the best idea will prevail. It's whoever has the latent threat behind it. And it's also just a direct imposition and repudiation of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, as many of these kids that are coming out of these situations see. Like they're losing their lives; they're not as free anymore to go into public spaces due to the trauma, like that is an imposition on somebody's mental freedom; and they're going to live with it for the rest of their lives. And their pursuit of happiness is going to be profoundly reduced. And so it is extreme violation of the basic principles that the United States was founded on. Unfortunately, the violation of those principles seems to be in vogue in today's political environment.

John: That's why there is a patriotic side to this campaign, and we are holding on to the preamble, ensuring domestic tranquility. Those are not trite words of choice by our founders. You know, the Cambridge definition of tranquility is a peaceful, calm state without noise, violence, or worry. And domestic tranquility is stabilizing an environment for social well-being. And if that's not campuses, I don't know what is. And our founders were wise enough to know that places like the University of Virginia would be gun-free zones. I would also just like to add before we close out here that keeping guns off campus is not in a vacuum. It's a recognition that irresponsible or carelessness with firearms or the sheer access with the mental health challenges of our youth today and the suicidal ideation that's in play — all of these factors we take seriously.

And we recognize that young people, particularly 18 to 24-year-olds, are in position where that cocktail of challenges, and development, and anxieties, and the introduction of an armed weapon can result in tragedy regardless of where it is. And if we could play a role of limiting how that can happen on campuses, all the better, but we lose students all the time on or off campus. And so that data is there. And just in the last week, I would encourage people when they can to go to gunmemorial.org. It gives you the pictures, and the stories, and the people behind this epidemic.

And in the past couple of weeks, we lost Todrick McGee, Missouri State University safety, preparing for his last year of eligibility, All Conference safety on the football team, someone whose mom is quoted as saying, I want everyone to know he was a good kid. And by accident, he shot himself and he's dead. And then the other day we lost Daisy Johnson, 19 years old, Long Beach City College. Daisy played Nina in The Heights. She was a theater queen amongst her peers. She was studying at the Lee Strasburg School of Drama. Called everybody my heart. That's how she was known, because she would introduce herself and say, How are you my heart — and she took her life with a firearm near her the other day. We don't want any of this to happen off campus or on campus, but if we can play a large role in making sure that we're limiting that from happening in spaces that we do have more governance than others, then we will. And we will always be proponents for domestic tranquility.

Caitlin: Yeah, your comment about students and the transition that going to college is, right? 18 to 24-years old is what we consider the typical college-age student. We in the United States, we give people a pass to essentially leave society for four years, academically, willing that they can be excused from the workforce. Now, this is a little romanticized because now we know what tuition and costs associated with that most students have to work. But in some cases, they can leave the workforce to go to this place, to be filled with all of this knowledge and these opportunities to learn and to network, to be the best citizens they can be when they walk across that stage of graduation. We know the transitional issues that happen. We know the isolation that happens, whether intentionally or unintentionally, depending on abilities to make and keep relationships. We know, the stress these students are under, the anxiety they face. I'm going to be pre-med, but I'm failing my biology class. I want to get to the pre-nursing program, but I didn't get invited for an interview. I applied to XYZ law school, but they denied me, whatever. And we know that access to a firearm can be a very impulsive decision to say, I'm in a lot of pain, I want the pain to stop, and this is a way for the pain stop. And so if we have these students in vulnerable positions with access to firearms, even if they never intend on hurting anybody else, we certainly would like to prevent as many opportunities as possible that they might have to hurt themselves. Because unfortunately, attempted suicide with a firearm is very effective, and there's no turning back from that.

There's also the Clery Act that comes to mind -- mandated reporting by any universities that receive any sort of federal financial aid related to violence that happens on campuses. And I wonder — as more colleges and universities face this predicament of having students come to campus, or coaches, or administrators, or professors, or anybody else that come to campuses with guns — if there was a way that they were mandated to report when something happened with a gun on campus, just like you said. I am I 17-years old, and am I able to Google what incidents have happened at the University of Connecticut with guns? If somebody was required to keep track of that and publish it every year like the Clery Act says for sexual assault and armed robbery and those sorts of things, maybe there's a little bit more of liability there. So I commend you for the the work that you're doing. It sounds like in states on campuses where unfortunately these things have come to fruition because we have to hold the gun lobby has to be held responsible some way or another; and universities certainly do not want it published that they had 26 incidents of gun violence on their campus. These are ivory towers, and we know that these institutions will risk a lot to maintain that sort of status. So unfortunately, if the legislative bodies won't make the right choices, maybe school administrators will figure out how to do that.

John: Yes, and we're going to be working very closely with so many of the noble universities across this country that have incredible medical schools, and allow that to also be part of the mitigation of this madness of introducing firearms to campuses because they have really stepped up. This generation of medical students and professors is really embracing this issue as a prerogative. Um, so I think you're right, Caitlin. I think we're going to see kind of the, uh, whatever playbook needs to be had in the aftermath of this kind of reality. What will that look like? Hopefully there will be a combination of voices that come together to say, Okay, look what you introduced, and now look how it's altered the environment, and what do we do now? And I think in time, you're going to see some sort of common sense reversal. Let's hope so.

Unfortunately, I think there's going to be tragedy that brings people to the fore, but there's also going to the fundamental shift in how you do your job. I mean, you have, as you said, 18 to 24-year olds who have a lot of pressure and different types of anxieties in their development. What does a professor do when he or she has bad news to convey?

Caitlin: It's hard to hold young adults accountable when you are unsure what the end game is.

John: So you may have cases now where professors say, I am relinquishing that part of my job. I graded the paper. I know what the grade is for this particular student. You tell me who conveys it to the student. Because you put me in a position where I got to hold office hours, where I am, you know....

Caitlin: It's publicized when I'm going to be sitting in my office. It's right outside my door. I'm going to be here on Mondays from three to five.

John: Well, I will close it with some sort of a silver lining, wherever we can grab it. You know, you do have the Supreme Court the other day struck down Wade vs. The University of Michigan. I'm not sure they struck it down for anything more noble than they said, we're just not going to hear it. So we'll take the wins where we can them, but we will also always stand with universities, colleges, community colleges, and high schools to say, There're lots of ways to convey that we think this is a bad idea. And if that means we have to do it with our messaging, with our orientations for freshmen, if we have convey stuff on our website, there's lots of ways to still discourage — even if you have the right as an 18-year old to go to your science class with a gun — we wanna convey to you that it still is probably not the best thing to do today. The best thing do today is to have breakfast with your classmates, to sit under a tree and study, and go to the ball game on Friday with your friends. There is no restriction on what can be done on the culture shift side of this until we start winning more on the political side. So keeping guns off campuses is not a one-dimensional campaign.

Caitlin: Absolutely. John, just for a final thought, can you let our audience know where they can find the Campaign to Keep Guns Off Campus?

John: KeepGunsOffCampus.org. You'll find all kinds of state-by-state detail, a real good picture of what's happening across this country where, you know, obviously it's been an influence on the state level in many ways. And then, you now, we are on all the social media platforms, and we put out a pretty wonderful, dynamic newsletter every month. And I'm gonna do my best to get across this country as much as I can, go to conferences and visit schools. So let that be a standing invitation — if anybody would like us to come and introduce what we're calling the Armed with Knowledge Initiative, we'd love to speak.

Caitlin: Absolutely. And if we can help facilitate that in any way, we are always happy to do that. Whether it's further podcast discussions or on our written component of our Armed with Reason site, we can certainly discuss and continue to make this country as safe as we possibly can.

John: That's right. So rest in peace. Daisy, Todrick, the over 100-plus Americans we lose every day to this scourge, and maintain your right to domestic tranquility. Remember, you've got James Madison and Thomas Jefferson agreeing with you.

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