(North Salem, NY): The Campaign to Keep Guns Off Campus (The Campaign) decries the loss of life and the injured as well as the immeasurable trauma inflicted upon the Florida State University community today, which brings to mind the horrific shooting in 2014 at Strozier Library. This act of gun violence encompasses many of the issues, circumstances and elements associated within the complexity of the problem, an amalgamation of young male anger and hostility, access to a lethal weapon, the random targeting of innocents on a campus and the overall toll taken when an entire educational ecosystem must meet the mania of a mass shooting.
Florida State University joins a long and unacceptable line of campuses bearing the burden of a societal nightmare across the American landscape, where gun violence continues to rank as the number-one cause of death for our youth and harm to our adolescents.
The Campaign further acknowledges the irony and contradictions inherent in the larger gun violence problem. Access to lethal weapons leading to horrific violence can come in many forms, even firearms issued to law enforcement. Responsible gun ownership, reasonable age limits, safe storage, red-flag laws and extreme-risk protection orders do not exist in a vacuum. Defining what it means to keep guns off campus goes far beyond the halls of any state capital. Ensuring domestic tranquility requires a call that not only integrates public safety for our youth as a human right but domestic tranquility, most assuredly on our campuses, as a constitutional right.
We will never accept scenarios being spun into speedy and dangerous legislative reversals, evidenced in the recent barrage of bills loosening or dismissing gun-safety zones on campuses across the nation today, for the simple remedy to the complex problem they proclaim. Today negates much of this single-dimensional thinking. Nor will we step away from the larger failure which calls on campuses, as chosen “soft targets,” to simply reinforce their environments given the prevalence and onslaught of gun violence. These are campuses not fortresses and strolling the grounds are students not soldiers.
Today, Florida State University student McKenzie Heeter was having lunch on what she described as a “normal” day on campus before she witnessed what will surely be the lasting of many memories of this moment, a shot to the back of a woman in purple by a young man exiting a luxury SUV. “It looked like a normal college white dude – khaki shorts, t-shirt, had a really nice car,” McKenzie composed herself to share. “To me, he just looked like a student – until he pulled out the gun.”
Everything can be normal until the introduction of a gun – and the guns are coming in every direction, sometimes by law itself. May we never make the gun, on any campus, normal. Days like today in Tallahassee and the memory seared into McKenzie’s mind is a “normal” beneath us all.
Founded in 2008, 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 to be carried on campuses. Through education, outreach, coalition-building, and legal action, The Campaign works to foster a safe learning environment for all and is the only national organization of its kind tasked with protecting higher educational institutions and the communities they serve.Follow us on Facebook, BlueSky, X and Instagram.
Contact: John McKenna, Executive Director, The Campaign to Keep Guns Off Campus ([email protected])
