For Immediate Release
August 27, 2024
(North Salem, NY) Following an apparent murder-suicide yesterday afternoon on the campus of Rice University in Houston where a young female student was found dead in her dorm room next to a deceased man during a welfare check by Rice University police, The Campaign to Keep Guns Off Campus’ Executive Director Andy Pelosi issued the following statement:
“We mourn the shooting death of Andrea Rodriguez Avila, a junior from Maryland in this apparent murder-suicide that also left an unidentified man dead with a self-inflicted gunshot wound. We also remember the families and friends of the deceased from yesterday’s shooting, as well as the entire campus community during this most difficult time. Their lives will never be the same.
According to a report by the Center for American Progress (Guns and Violence Against Women, 2022), firearms are used in intimate partner violence more than any other weapon.1 Data from the FBI’s supplemental homicide reports, from 2010 to 2019, more than 50 percent of homicides of women perpetrated by an intimate partner involved the use of a gun.2
Our country’s institutions of higher education, must be safe havens for learning. We cannot permit campus firearm incidents to be seen as normalized, nor should we allow our students, faculty, and staff to be traumatized again and again by such senseless shootings.
Rice University is a private Texas institution that generally prohibits the carrying of concealed and open firearms with minor exceptions (guns can be stored in locked vehicles on campus by certain individuals). See policy: https://www.rice.edu/campus-carry-policy
For those public officials who stand in the way of safer campuses, we implore them to abandon the gun lobby, to join the Gun Violence Prevention Movement and to fight for real gun reform in this country.”
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Citations:
1) Susan Sorenson, “Guns in Intimate Partner Violence: Comparing Incidents by Type of Weapon,” Journal of Women’s Health 26 (3) (2017): 249–258, available at https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5361762/.
2) Center for American Progress analysis of Kaplan, “Uniform Crime Reporting (UCR) Data.”
ABOUT THE CAMPAIGN TO KEEP GUNS OFF CAMPUS
The Campaign to Keep Guns Off Campus works with K-12 schools, colleges and universities across the country to oppose legislative policies that would force loaded, concealed guns on campuses. Since 2008, The Campaign to Keep Guns Off Campus is the only national organization of its kind tasked with protecting higher educational institutions and the communities they serve. Follow us on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram.
Contact: Andy Pelosi, The Campaign to Keep Guns Off Campus (914-629-6726) [email protected]
