By Karen MacNutt,
Contributing Editor

From time to time, someone on the Internet will circulate a series of events or names that seem common to me. Many of these are unknown to a majority of Americans who were born after the events took place. After taking one of these, "Do you remember ...?" tests, I scored in the "Older that dirt category."

I Remember Mama, Clarabell, Hoppy and Mr. Ed. I also remember Stokley Carmichael, Eldridge Cleaver, and Huey Newton.

I remember bringing a gun to school in Boston when I was in the 8th grade. It was a single barrel shotgun which I carried butt down in a shopping bag. At least part of it was in a shopping bag. The barrel stuck out quite a bit. It was a prop for a school play. No one seemed to pay it much attention. The world was a different place back then.

By the time I entered college, the Vietnam War was in full swing. That was the first time I ever heard of a weapons-free zone. Cambridge, Massachusetts, by city ordinance, declared itself to be a nuclear free zone. To the best of my knowledge, there had never been a crime in Cambridge involving a nuclear device. Cambridge did not have any nuclear war heads itself. It is, of course, easy to ban things you do not have. I do remember something about the students at MIT building a warhead as a science project once. It was complete except for the nuclear material. I do not, however, think that was the reason the city ordinance was passed.

The Cambridge City Council was against the Vietnam War and against the United States having nuclear weapons or, for that matter, any weapons at all. The ordinance was one of those impossible to enforce laws that are actually political "statements." The maximum penalty was a $10,000 fine. That hardly seemed sufficient to deter anyone from dropping a 50 megaton bomb on City Hall. Even if the former Soviet Union was unwilling to violate the Cambridge City ordinance, if they had dropped a bomb on Boston, the blast would have crossed the Charles River without the slightest concern for the Cambridge city ordinance and destroyed the town.

The mid-1960s was still an age of innocence for most college campuses. Campus crime tended to consist of things such as shoplifting, underage drinking, wrapping the administration building in toilet paper, and shaving cream fights. You had to be 21 to vote or buy alcohol. Guns on campus were not an issue. We had a rifle and pistol team. Anyone could buy military surplus guns through the mail for $10 to $20 dollars. I knew of a number of students who had hunting shotguns or military "wall hangers" in their rooms. I do not ever remember there being any trouble with that in our campus community that numbered over 20,000 students.

Three forces would come together to change this. Oce was the militant civil rights movement. Another was the Vietnam War. The last was the anti-gun movement.

The civil rights movement triggered violence across the country. Passions ran high on both sides. In some cases the issue was racist, in others it was simply a turf battle. Non-violent civil rights workers were attacked. Some were murdered. Churches that advocated equality were burned. Massive riots took place in some cities. There was tremendous resistance to integration. As violence against peaceful civil rights advocates grew, a more militant black movement developed. That movement urged that blacks arm themselves. Some even advocated race war. Such people had more in common with the Klu Klux Klan than they did with Martin Luther King, Jr.

At that time, the anti-gun movement was focused on mail order military surplus rifles, such as the one that was used to assassinate President Kennedy, and "Saturday Night Specials." Like always, the leadership of the anti-gun movement claimed that they were only interested in banning one or another type of gun, not all guns. The truth is, there was never a gun that they did not dislike. They were quick to take advantage of racial fears to push for gun control. It was an era of political violence and assassinations of people such as John Kennedy, Robert Kennedy, and Martin Luther King, Jr..

As the 1960s came to an end, federal laws forced the end of legalized discrimination based on race. Courts, marshals and police officers were taking the place of demonstrators as the instruments of removing racial barriers. Even as this was occurring, another, more explosive movement, was building. That was the anti-Vietnam War movement.

We had universal military service at that time. The Vietnam War was fought with young men who had been drafted. Many did not want to serve. There was tremendous resistance to the draft. Our government was sending mixed messages. Our leaders were "fighting" a war but it was a "limited" war in which the military was not allowed to bring its full force to bear. The enemy was allowed safe havens. It made no sense. Americans were being told to put their lives on the line for a war the politicians did not seem to want to win. Those who hated the United States for their own reasons took advantage of the discontent. Protests grew in size and number.

In 1968 radical student protesters in organizations such as the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), were becoming more violent in their activism. At places such as the University of California in Berkeley, the SDS was working with the militant Black Panther organization which advocated violent civil protest and race wars. There were a number of armed conflicts between police and student leaders. In some instances, the "student" leaders were paid instructors at the schools. This was not street crime. This was political violence radiating from American colleges. Some people were playing at violent revolution.

By the end of 1968, there were massive demonstrations centered around American universities. The bulk of the protestors were against the war in Vietnam. They were not interested in violence of any kind. Within the anti-war movement, unfortunately, were a core of radicals who were very willing to use and advocate violence to alter American society.

It was the massive student protests to government policy, not crime that led to the federal ban of guns on college campuses. Those federal laws were followed by similar laws in various states. The gun laws were not passed to protect students, but to protect college administrations and the government from protestors That is why all persons, including professors and visitors, were prohibited from having guns. In many instances professors were deeply involved in the student protests. Often agitators, some students, some not, would travel from one campus to another.

At that time, 18-year-olds, as a class, were not seen as being irresponsible. This was a time when large numbers of 18-year-old Americans were becoming combat veterans. They were taking advantage of the GI bill to go to college. There was a drive to lower the voting age. People were saying, "If he is old enough to die for his country in Vietnam at the age of 18, he should be old enough to vote and buy a beer." The age of majority was dropped across the country from 21 year to 18. That is, the consensus was that people were mature enough at 18 to assume the responsibilities and benefits of citizenship.

The political forces that led to the banning of guns on college campuses no longer exist. It is time to re-examine those laws in light of current realities.

The chief argument to continuing the ban on all guns on college campuses is that students in college are too young to be trusted. Even if the maturity argument worked as to younger students, what about the older students?

Not all students are immature. Many colleges have graduate student and doctoral programs. Many police departments pay officers more money if they go back to college to get a degree in criminal justice. The armed forces require their officers to have college educations. They have special programs within select universities to train senior officers in strategic studies to prepare them to be promoted to the rank of general or admiral. Clearly these are very responsible people. A member of my law school class was a retired ballistics submarine captain. Why should such people, if they are properly licensed by the state, be prohibited from having a gun on a college campus?

If the argument is student immaturity, why does the ban apply to professors? If the argument is that professors are too radical, one might wonder why we would allow such people to teach at all. If the professors can not be trusted, then what about the janitors, secretaries and administrators? These are hardly a violent class of people and have no history of aggression against students. If you feel you cannot trust any university employee, perhaps they should all be fired.

The law bans everyone from coming onto a campus armed. Plumbers, electricians and construction workers who are contracted to come onto campus to ply their trades are prohibited from having guns even if they are licensed to carry a gun by state authorities. Plumbers are very important people. They, unlike doctors, make house calls. Many are armed because they never know when or where an emergency might take them. They are not a threat to society.

The immaturity argument does not apply against any of these people. It is a bogus argument. To the extent it is valid, it can be addressed by a more tailored law.

There is a further consideration. Not every college is a traditional college with a bucolic campus. Many colleges are located in large urban areas. College towns have a problem with universities buying up commercial and residential buildings for school use. The commercial building across the street or the apartment building next door, could easily be bought by a college. Without any visible change in use, the building now qualifies as a part of a "campus." The bookstore you enter from the public street may well be a college bookstore. The bench you sit on in what appears to be a public pedestrian walkway in the middle of some city's commercial zone, could well be private property owned by a school.

Boston, for example, has a large number of urban schools. Boston University owns extensive land along Commonwealth Avenue. Northeastern has large holdings on Huntington Avenue. Suffolk University is on Tremont Street. New England School of Law is in Park Square. Then there is Wentworth Institute, Bentley, New England Conservatory of Music, Massachusetts College of Art, Emerson, Tufts, and the entire Longwood Avenue multi-complex of combined medical facilities and schools. Is the teaching hospital you visit a school, a hospital, or both? Yesterday's car dealership is a college "campus" building today. That is not even addressing the growing number of evening "colleges" that cater to night students. Many of those schools simply rent space in other buildings for classes.

The blanket restriction on guns on college property makes no sense. There are inner city kids who work their way through college as security guards. While not in class, they carry a gun and provide contract security for others. When they get off work, the "no guns on campus" rules prevent them from providing security for themselves. Many have problems balancing work and school because they have no way of storing their service gun when they have to go directly from work to class.

Just as the City of Cambridge's declaring itself a "nuclear free zone" gives its citizens no protection from an ICBM with a nuclear warhead, making any area "gun free" has no impact on someone who is determined to commit violence within a school. Indeed, it can be argued that the general knowledge that an aggressor will meet no effective resistance in a "gun free" zone is an attraction to people looking to create terror amongst the helpless. After all, these mass killers do not attack police stations where someone has the ability to fight back.

Disarmament has always served to empower those who are willing to resort to violence. People who are properly licensed to carry guns in their community do not suddenly become less trustworthy because they walk across an imaginary line that separates a school from the rest of the world. Those imaginary lines provide naive people with a false sense of security. In reality, those lines broadcast a message to others that the "gun free" zone is, in essence, a free fire zone in which there is no force capable of stopping someone intent upon hurting others.