As all the Preview skits would have you believe, freshman year of college is a stressful time. While the course load is the easiest during those first few months of college, the amount of mental and emotional turmoil can be taxing on 18- and 19-year-olds who are adjusting to adult life — or, at least, a practice run for adult life. The newfound freedom and access to alcohol, drugs and casual sex contributes chaos to the freshman experience, especially for the many first-year students who choose to live in residence halls.
Obviously, firearms have no place in undergraduate residence halls whose population is overwhelmingly freshmen. UF’s policies on guns in residence halls are made very clear in its 2013-14 Community Standards document: No weapons of any type are allowed to be stored in an on-campus dorm room; not even water or Nerf guns. Since residence halls are arguably safer than most Gainesville apartment complexes, the ban of weapons on campus doesn’t seem out of line.
Dangerous weapons have no place in a volatile environment in which first-year students are experimenting with alcohol, dealing with complicated relationships and battling stress. And according to the University of California Berkeley, one in 10 college students has considered suicide, and suicide is the second-leading cause of death among college-age students. Adding firearms to the mix simply doesn’t make sense.
Right now, a gun advocacy group called Florida Carry has filed a lawsuit against UF for banning guns from residence halls, arguing that since students define their dorm rooms as their homes, UF violates those students’ civil rights by forbidding them from storing the guns in their rooms.
Florida already has absurdly loose gun laws: Although you need a permit to carry a handgun in Florida, anyone aged 18 and older doesn’t need a permit or license to purchase a handgun. Gun owners in Florida also aren’t required to register their handguns.
While it’s possible that UF could implement a registration process or required test for students to store guns inside undergraduate dorm rooms, the outcome is questionable. Many students may not feel comfortable sharing a room with a stranger who owns a gun, and the reality of college freshmen acting rashly during times of stress or anger looms as a possible danger.
To be fair, it’s not the university’s job to tell students they can or can’t own guns. However, the university does have a responsibility to protect its students, especially those who live on campus.
Adding guns to an environment of stress, anxiety, depression, homesickness, drug experimentation and alcohol abuse puts the lives of on-campus residents in danger. And as high-profile public shootings make weekly headlines — think Tampa, New Mexico and Maryland — it’s clear that deregulation of gun ownership, especially among young adults, makes no sense.
[A version of this editorial ran on page 6 on 1/28/2014 under the headline "Trigger happy: Guns shouldn’t be allowed in dorms"]
