Amid much controversy, the Texas Legislature is considering SB354, a bill that would allow licensed students and professors to carry concealed handguns on college campuses. The bill has passed a Senate committee and has been referred to the Committee of Criminal Justice, where it will be up for a hearing. (Follow SB354). With support from Governor Rick Perry and more than half the members of the House signing on as co-authors, most observers think that the bill will be passed. But according to an article by Patrick Williams in the Dallas Observer, concealed guns on campus is not necessarily a fait accompli: “[Similar] legislation has failed 43 times in 23 states since Virginia Tech,” Malte says, referring to the 2007 campus mass murder that claimed 32 lives. “Every time somebody said this is a done deal over the last three years, it was defeated.”
Utah is currently the only state that allows guns on campus, but legislation is on the docket in several other states. Fox Business News reports that eight other states currently have campus carry legislation underway. These include Arizona, Florida, Michigan, Mississippi, Oklahoma, Nebraska, New Mexico, and Tennessee.
With sympathetic Republicans at or approaching supermajority status in a few of these states, the political stars are in alignment for success. Ultimately, the deciding factor may come down to the strength of student and parental support or opposition. Keep Guns Off Campus says that the American Association of State Colleges and Universities (AASCU) and 271 colleges and universities in 36 states – 189 four-year colleges and universities and 82 community colleges and technical schools – have joined the Campaign to Keep Guns Off Campus. (See Listing). On the other hand,
Students for Concealed Carry on Campus point to widespread support – not the least of which is the mighty power and deep pockets of the NRA.
Follow-on to “Guns at Work”
The spate of campus carry legislation is a natural adjunct to the NRA’s major “guns at work” legislative initiative, which has been sweeping the country in recent years to considerable success. According to the NRA, there are now 13 states that have laws permitting employees to have guns at work: Alaska, Arizona, Florida, Georgia, Idaho, Indiana, Kansas, Louisiana, Minnesota, Mississippi, Oklahoma, and Utah. While the particulars of these laws vary, such laws generally allow licensed gun owners to keep guns locked in their cars at work, including on employer-owned parking lots. In some states, certain business such as hospitals, schools and prisons are exempt. This is an issue that has pitted the rights of an employer to establish policy for their private property (employer-owned parking lots) against second amendment rights. It’s an issue that has been opposed by employer groups and associations.
For more history on the Guns at Work issue, see prior postings on the topic below.
Three new state laws limit employer restrictions on guns at work
Guns at work: coming to a neighborhood near you?
Workers with guns
Guns at work
Posts Tagged ‘colleges’
Guns on campus: things are heating up in Texas
Thursday, February 24th, 2011Injured Jocks and Medical Costs
Monday, July 20th, 2009College athletics is big business. While athletes are not paid for their efforts (well, some are), they can reap substantial benefits while pursuing glory on the playing fields of their Alma Maters. But athletes, like workers, are prone to injuries. And once injured, they may find themselves liable for the cost of medical treatment. There is no workers comp for injured athletes, but perhaps there ought to be.
Kristina Peterson writes in the New York Times that athletes are often stuck with the medical bills for sport injuries. Students may have coverage through their parents’s insurance policies, but these often exclude varsity sports, limit out-of-state treatment or do not cover much of the bill. Schools may offer supplemental plans, but these vary greatly. Athletes who play for major Division I schools often benefit from robust coverage. Big Ten athletes rarely have to pay for medical treatment. The NCAA offers catastrophic insurance for all athletes, but coverage begins at $90,000. An athlete would run through an awful lot of treatment to reach that level of medical billing.
Even in the Big Ten, where insurance coverage is robust, stuff happens. Jason Whitehead played football at The Ohio State University. He was badly injured during a practice and was airlifted to a hospital.
“The next day, when I woke up, the doctor came in and informed me that surgery went well, but this was a career-ending injury…It took a while to sink in.”
Whitehead lost his scholorship one year after the injury. He also ended up with $1,800 in medical bills not covered by his father’s insurance or by the school’s. The school valued Jason as an athlete; as an ordinary student, well, he ended up pretty much on his own.
Rowing to Oblivion
As in workers comp, medical coverage for student athletes is complicated by factors that may or may not be directly related to the injury. Erin Knauer went out for the crew team as a freshman walk-on at Colgate University. She had a cold when she took a five kilometer workout test on rowing machines. On pace for the fastest time, she suddenly felt a shooting pain beginning in her back and reaching her toes.
She eventually was diagnosed with postviral myositis, a muscular inflammation that causes weakness and pain. Colgate officials determined that this was an illness, not an injury, so financial responsibility fell to Knauer. She tapped out her student health policy at $25,000, leaving her $55,000 in debt. She is currently working two jobs and paying down the bills at the rate of $250 a month.
There is little doubt that Knauer’s illness was exacerbated, if not caused, by the strenuous workout. If this had been a work-related situation, comp would likely have picked up the entire tab (plus indemnity). But as a student athlete, Knauer has no guarantee of coverage. She wanted to row for the glory of Colgate. She ended up in serious pain and serious debt. Glorious it was not.
College athletics often involve a fundamental trade off: in return for playing sports, athletes benefit from a low-cost or virtually free education. That might be a pretty good deal, except when the sport results in a life-changing injury. As David Dranove, a professor at Northwestern’s Kellogg School of Management, puts it: “It makes no more sense to tell the athletes, “You go buy your own health insurance,” than it does to say, “You go buy your own plane tickets and uniform.'”
The rationale for mandatory insurance for athletes is similar to the rationale for workers comp. The schools benefit from the labors of their athletes. The least they can do is pay for any and all medical treatment required to make these athletes whole.
Suffering for Art
Monday, June 8th, 2009Alan Rosenbaum is a revered professor of art at Virginia Commonwealth University (VCU). He shows students how to work with clay – at least, he used to, until he was disabled by silicosis. Rosenbaum was exposed to silica dust in the clay mixing room and ceramic studios of the university. The state Workers Compensation Commission last year found that the professor’s silicosis was caused by his exposure to hazardous dust and awarded him permanent disability benefits totaling $211,800.
Silica is a common mineral found in clay, sand and rock. The dust in the VCU’s Fine Arts Building came from the powder that students and staff mixed with water to make clay, as well as from scraping kilns clean of bits of clay and glaze after firing. There are intake vents directly above the five mixing machines, designed to take in dusty air and run it through a filter before releasing it outside the building. However,the vents failed to function properly, because for five years university staff members taped plastic bags over them, apparently to keep the dust from spreading elsewhere in the building. (There were complaints from woodworking and other shops that the dust migrated from the intake vents into work areas.) By blocking the vents, all the dust was contained in the ceramics area.
In addition to the vents being blocked, janitors swept the floors daily, causing the dust to fill the air for thirty minutes or more.
The Hazards of Sand
Ironically, VCU art classes included instruction on the hazards of silica in clay. (Here is a fascinating, if somwhat bizarre MSDS sheet on sand. It might make you think twice about heading for the beach…) It is hardly surprising to learn that students and teachers ignored the warnings.
Air-quality tests conducted by VCU staff after Rosenbaum’s diagnosis found dust levels were 98 percent below hazardous levels — but VCU did the testing after removing plastic bags that blocked the ventilation vents. In addition to activating the vents, janitorial staff began using sweeping compound to capture fine particles before they were released in the air. In other words, mitigation of the risk was readily available, but such measures were not implemented until Professor Rosenbaum became ill.
As in Julie Ferguson’s post last week on laboratory hazards, this situation in the art studio of a major university reminds us that education is not without risk. A little learning can quickly become dangerous. The budding artist working with clay and the mason cutting a cinderblock face essentially the same hazard. Dust is dust. If we are not careful, dust can speed our return to the dust from which we all come. That’s one lesson that Professor Rosenbaum is unlikely to forget.
Thoughts in the aftermath of a tragedy
Wednesday, April 18th, 2007Our hearts go out to the Virginia Tech community in their time of mourning. What a terrible event and what a sad reminder that life is short and and can be snatched from us and those we love at any moment in the most unlikely of circumstances. Perhaps the best memorial we can offer to the deceased is to redouble our efforts to live with kindness and goodwill. That, and to reach out and hug our loved ones.
Be alert for your employees’ reactions to this event. A horrible incident like this can take a psychic toll on many – even those who are remote observers with no actual connection to the event can suffer emotional stress. This is particularly true for those who have previously been involved in episodes of violence. Events of this nature can rekindle or exacerbate post-traumatic stress disorder for people unrelated to the actual event. For others, it can bring repressed fear and anxiety to the surface. The continual media drumbeat 24/7 and focus on sensational details can add to general distress.
In the aftermath of this and other horrors, we seek to make sense of senseless events. It’s natural that many would look to find someone or something to blame beyond the deceased perpetrator. Right now, many are looking to the university’s security procedures and questioning why the campus wasn’t locked down after the first shooting. That’s a valid question. Of course, it’s easy in hindsight to say what should have been done, but the reality can be more complex, so we will need to wait for the investigation to answer this and many other questions. Certainly, Columbine delivered some hard lessons about how things could have been handled better to minimize loss of life. Recommendations from follow-on Columbine investigations have been adopted by law enforcement personnel nationwide, and may already have saved lives.
The psychology of security
Can a community of 30,000 ever be securely locked down against a deliberate and cunning killer? Bruce Schneier presents a sober look at the issues of risk management and security in his excellent article, The Psychology of Risk. He points out that security is both a mathematical reality that can be calculated and a feeling based on psychological reactions to both risks and countermeasures. In regard to the latter, he notes:
* People exaggerate spectacular but rare risks and downplay common risks.
* People have trouble estimating risks for anything not exactly like their normal situation.
* Personified risks are perceived to be greater than anonymous risks.
* People underestimate risks they willingly take and overestimate risks in situations they can’t control.
* Last, people overestimate risks that are being talked about and remain an object of public scrutiny.
He goes on to present several examples of how and why people exaggerate some risks and downplay other risks, often in complete disregard to the mathematical realities. These perceptions influence our expenditures of time and effort:
“Why is it that, when food poisoning kills 5,000 people every year and 9/11 terrorists killed 2,973 people in one non-repeated incident, we are spending tens of billions of dollars per year (not even counting the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan) on terrorism defense while the entire budget for the Food and Drug Administration in 2007 is only $1.9 billion?”
Noting that absolute security is an impossibility, Schneier frames the matter of relative security as a trade-off. We measure the time, expense and inconvenience of a given security measure against our perception of the risk. If that perception is faulty, it’s an irrational trade off that doesn’t do much to increase our security.
After a tragedy, emotion often prevails over dispassionate rationality. Thus we can’t carry shampoo on planes and we strip down to almost our skivvies in airports. Does that make us safer or does it just make us feel safer? It’s unlikely that any measures can be thorough enough to guard us from a random determined killer in our midst. Efforts might be better spent trying to determine the root causes of why there are so many random determined killers in our midst.
Schneier’s article presents interesting, well-framed ideas in well-written format. Whether you work in the business of risk or just live in a risky world, it’s worth a read.
