Editor’s Note: The following op-ed was originally published on April 11, 2012.

Would conceal carry on campus prevent school shootings like Oikos?

by David Lewis

The Oikos University tragedy managed to occur just in time to coincide with the first day of the annual campus gun ban protest.

Students this week will wear empty holsters to class to symbolically represent what they see as a Constitutional right stripped away.

Members of Buckeyes for Concealed Carry feel they would be safer if they were permitted to bring licensed firearms to school. Opponents say more guns equal more gun problems, and dispute that conceal carry would prevent school shootings.

An article in the Thursday, April 5 Columbus Dispatch cited Toby Hoover, the executive director of the Ohio Coalition Against Gun Violence, saying that an armed student would be unlikely to prevent a shooting.

“Unless you’d be sitting there with your gun drawn and ready to fire the first time somebody blinks, you really don’t have a chance of saving everybody like these people think they do,” she told Dispatch reporters.

Hoover must be unaware that armed students have already prevented at least one shooting. When Peter Odighizuwa, a mentally unstable student at the Appalachian School of Law in Virginia, opened fire on Jan. 16, 2002, he killed two faculty members and a student and wounded three other students.

by Jim Shepherd

Reasonable doubt is a powerful thing. In a court of law, reasonable doubt is enough to compel a jury to issue a not guilty verdict. In the court of public opinion, however, reasonable doubt is enough to lead to a predisposition of guilt.

That is a powerful distinction. It’s a distinction not lost on the television professionals at NBC News. That distinction, coupled with a determination to defend the division from a charge of repeatedly pushing a bias, and the ability to always have the last word is generally enough to deflect all but the most dedicated critics.

Remington Arms Company, Freedom Group, Inc. and, ultimately, Cerberus Capital, are decidedly not the average critics of television news. Collectively, they have the resources to go toe-to-toe with NBC News. They also have a strong motivation to refuse to allow the inference from investigative reports first aired in 2010 and expanded in last night’s Rock Center with Brian Williams that they’ve put more than 25 million firearms into the marketplace over decades to stand.

That motivation? Along with the assets, history and heritage of any firearms company comes the liability for all the weapons that company has produced. If you’re a long-established company like Remington, that’s a ton of liability.

In Wednesday’s report, NBC began their lengthy report on Remington’s allegedly faulty trigger system with a question: “Is there a design defect….?” Starting a report with a question can be used to introduce something innocuous (Do you know who sold even more records than Elvis in England after WWII?) or to help “shape” a conclusion.

So, too, is the concept of glossing over something that might be important.

Repeatedly it was stated- although not emphasized- that several of the victims of accidental discharges of a variety of Remington firearms had admittedly violated basic rules for the safe handling of firearms. Propping a loaded gun against a vehicle is always a no-no. So, too, is cleaning or handling any firearm without verifying – visually and physically- that is unloaded. To ignore those rules is to invite disaster.

Mark Walters, host of nationally syndicated Armed American Radio opened the Easter Sunday broadcast with a bold comparison between Obama’s concern about Trayvon Martin and slain Border Patrol Agent, Brian Terry.

Armed American Radio is broadcast live from the Intelligent Talk 920 WGKA studios in Atlanta and syndicated nationally by Salem Radio Network.