Women should be allowed to carry concealed firearms on college campuses. Instead, President Obama favors Gun Free Zones, which endanger women’s health.
One in five female college students are sexually assaulted or raped according to a new report issued last week by the White House Council on Women and Girls. Declaring that sexual assault “affects every one of us,” Obama picked up his pen and signed a piece of paper (a “memorandum”) calling for the creation of a campus rape response task force.
Sure, this token effort could help Obama’s party appeal to female voters during a midterm election year. Or, Obama’s memorandum could give 2016 Democrat nominee Hillary Clinton (shhhhh, nobody knows!) something to strut about as she tours the country promoting her “No Ceilings” project to bring abuses against women “out of the shadows.”
But what real good will a memorandum or initiative do if it doesn’t include arming women? Young women are sexually assaulted on college campuses in part because college campuses are “Gun Free Zones.”
An unscrupulous college student who is looking for a one night stand can easily take advantage of a drunk or high college student at a party. He knows that her sober friends or DD (designated driver) won’t be armed or able to protect her if he can get her alone for ten minutes.
Alternatively, a non-student sex offender could prowl college campuses looking for easy, unarmed targets. This is exactly what happened to Amanda Collins, a concealed carry permit holder, who was raped at gunpoint in a Gun Free Zone. Collins is a living testimony to the fact that Obama’s gun control policy renders women defenseless and more susceptible to sexual assault and rape. She told Fox News, “I was legislated into being a victim.”
During her senior year of college at the University of Nevada Reno in October of 2007, Collins was walking back to her vehicle in a parking garage after a night class. She told Fox News that she was: “less than 100 feet away from the campus police office” and parked on same level of the parking lot where the police parked their cruisers. Even so, the police were not close enough to help Collins that night; she needed her own gun.
Collins’ attacker specifically went to a place where he knew young women would be unarmed, much like the shooter Adam Landza did in the Newtown tragedy. So, while Collins was permitted to carry and trained in self-defense with a firearm, she was unable to carry her firearm where she needed it the most, her college campus.
According to the White House’s recent report, the men who commit sexual assault often take more than one victim. The report referenced a study showing that among the male college students who admitted to attempted rape, 63 percent confessed to an average of six rapes. While only 7 percent of college males admitted to attempted rape, the majority were serial offenders. This subset of serially violent men is clearly bereft of morals or respect for the law. Thus, they will only be stopped by a threat stronger than a law scrolled on a piece of paper. Serial sex offenders need the threat of lethal force.
Whether the perpetrators of sexual assault are college students or not, they appear to be mentally unstable men who have a thirst for committing repeat violence. For example, the man who attacked Collins raped her at gunpoint and then continued to hurt more women: he kidnapped and raped a second woman and then raped and murdered a third woman.
When Fox’s Megyn Kelly asked Collins: “Why do you believe that if you had a firearm on you at that time that you may have prevented the rape?” Collins responded: “To be honest, with the way I was grabbed [from behind and then her attacker placed a gun to her temple], I don’t think I would have been able to prevent my attack from starting but … had I had been carrying that night … I know at some point during my attack I would have been able to stop my attack in progress.”
Collins testified against CO Bill (HB 1226) that would have banned concealed carry weapons—even by permit holders—on public college campuses including stadiums or arenas used by public campuses. During the her testimony, CO State Sen. Evie Hudak (D) told Collins: “…statistics are not on your side, even if you had had a gun…for every one woman who used a handgun to kill someone in self-defense, eighty-three were murdered by them.”
Collins responded: “Respectfully, Senator, you weren’t there. I know without a doubt in my mind, at some point I would have been able to stop my attack by using my firearm. He already had a weapon of his own. He didn’t need mine.”
It’s time for liberals like Obama who feign to help women fight against sexual abuse to start defending women’s God-given, Second Amendment right to bear arms and carry concealed. Abolish Gun Free Zones and support conceal carry permits on campus and we’ll have fewer sexual assaults.