One year after the incident

Gun violence is a significant feature of American society today. We want to believe that educational communities are exempt. But in 1966 a student at the University of Texas at Austin massacred 17 people from a bell tower; in 1999 there was Columbine High School with 15 deaths; and last year a freshman in Southern California killed two and wounded 13. Along the way were many other less dramatic but still fatal incidents, including one in Chapel Hill in 1995.

Last year, the veil of innocence was torn aside at Duke when a disgruntled employee with a loaded .32-caliber pistol invaded the president's office and held three women hostage before being subdued without injury by the University's police. His backpack was full of ammunition. The gunman had a history of mental illness. He said that he wanted to kill himself. My guess is that when he left home that morning, he wasn't quite sure what he wanted. Until this incident, I, too, had acted as if universities, like medieval monasteries, were places of refuge for intellectual exchange and for scholarly debate, not shooting galleries.

Educators at all levels have stubbornly defended the free exchange of ideas against all comers--politicians who intended to muzzle leftists in McCarthy's day, corporate sponsors who urge the suppression of research data, parents who condemn a science text because it presents the case for evolution. But how do we defend against a lone gunman whose access to firearms is virtually unlimited? Arm our teachers, our staff members, and our students? I think not.

The United States has about 250 million citizens and 250 million firearms. Duke Public Policy Professor Philip Cook and his colleagues, who have spent years investigating gun violence, point out that despite well-intentioned efforts to close the gaping loophole for secondary market sales, some 30 or 40 percent of all gun purchases in this country do not involve a licensed dealer. Clearly, any regulatory activity that centers only on licensed dealers will fail.

Even in the wake of the Columbine massacre, the National Rifle Association's lobbying blocked progress on virtually all legislative solutions to gun violence, except the building of more and bigger prisons. The new Congress is considering a number of gun-related proposals, though none of them go far enough. The "No Child Left Behind Act," House Resolution 1, which would require states to expel gun-packing students for a year and refer them to the criminal justice system, remains a Bush administration priority. Dozens of other gun-control bills are stalled in committee, but whatever legislation finally sees the light of day will have to engage the issue of background checks for firearm transfers by unlicensed dealers at gun shows.

It is likely that none of the proposals on the table would have prevented the incident in my office one year ago. But it was the latest in a long series of wake-up calls our society has received, and we had better get started.

In the face of these school shootings, perhaps the cool light of scholarship can move emotionally charged debates to a more rational level where people may actually change their minds about issues like gun control. I hope so. The 70 million Americans who bear arms--far more than any "well-regulated militia" envisioned by the framers of the Second Amendment--put everyone at risk when they carry those arms into peaceable civil spaces.

Most people have no trouble recognizing limits on the scope of the First Amendment, the right to free speech. One does not shout "fire" in a crowded theater when there is no fire, as Justice Oliver Holmes reminded us. Yet we have surely not found the appropriate boundaries for the fiercely cherished right to bear arms. Until we do, everyone is at risk, every day. As a nation, we must find a way to balance the constitutional right to bear arms with the realities of our modern world, or more people will die senselessly.