Larimer County Sheriff James Alderden will work to prevent implementation of Colorado State University Concealed Handgun Ban

Alderden is an amazing guy to stand up on this issue. There is a poll in the news article and right now the vast majority of respondents are supporting the sheriff.

The Colorado State University Board of Governors voted unanimously Tuesday to place students at both of its campuses in harm’s way with a sweeping weapons ban law-abiding citizens will obey and criminals will ignore.

Larimer County Sheriff James Alderden, outraged by the ban, told The Gazette’s opinion department he will undermine it in the interest of student safety. . . .

Alderden said ban advocates have been unable to cite a single study or statistic to show that students will be safer as a result of a weapons ban. He’s convinced they will be much less safe as a result of the ban, which will leave most students defenseless. The ban establishes the campuses as “soft targets,” meaning armed criminals will have a reasonable expectation their intended victims aren’t armed.

“There are volumes of statistical and anecdotal data that show populations are safer when law-abiding citizens are permitted to carry concealed weapons,” Alderden said.

Six years after Alderden began issuing permits, he noticed the homicide rate in his jurisdiction had dropped.

At CSU-Fort Collins, the ban includes pepper spray, in quantities greater than an ounce, and Tasers.

“This ban, which is broad and encompassing, basically denies students at the Fort Collins campus any defensive capacity at all,” Alderden said. “It’s a weapons-free zone for law-abiding people, and it won’t do a single thing to keep armed criminals off of campus. It will only ensure them a lot of defenseless victims. The people who did this are lost in their own world of ideological liberalism. You would think people involved in academia would want to deal in data and experience, but this has been all about emotion.” . . .

Greg Campbell over at the Huffington Post concurs:

The near-tragic irony of the Board of Governor's decision was that it was taken the same day a gunman opened fire at Deer Creek Middle School, injuring two children before teachers tackled him. It's a different situation, of course, because guns are banned at K-12 schools under state law -- but it serves to underscore Alderden's point. The suspect in the middle school shooting is reported to have heard voices and struggled with anger issues. That guns are banned on middle school campuses obviously means nothing to people who are unhinged and bent on violence -- why increase their odds of inflicting mayhem on yet another defenseless population, college students? . . .

I would go one point further. If someone is planning on killing people, does the three year prison sentence for violating a gun free school zone really deter the crime? Take a university setting where the penalty is expulsion. Would the VT killer who would have faced 32 death penalties or 32 life sentences had he lived said that it was the threat of expulsion that would deter him? It seems a joke to even ask, but a law-abiding citizen who was expelled would have had their life truly altered. There is almost no way that they could have gotten a college degree any place else in the country with a firearms violation on their record. Similarly for a professor or staff member who was fired. A professor who was fired for a firearms violation would see the end of his academic career. The point is that these penalties are much more likely to deter the law-abiding than a criminal.