CCRKBA SUPPORTS COLLEGE STUDENTS AND ‘EMPTY HOLSTER’ PROTEST

BELLEVUE, WA – The Citizens Committee for the Right to Keep and Bear Arms today endorsed the upcoming Oct. 22-26 “National Collegiate Empty Holster Protest” being sponsored by Students for Concealed Carry on Campus, a grassroots organization that formed in the aftermath of the Virginia Tech tragedy last April.

CCRKBA Executive Director Mark A. Taff met with Michael Flitcraft, an SCCC chapter leader at the University of Cincinnati during the recent Gun Rights Policy Conference. The fledgling student organization is a non-partisan group that believes legally-licensed students and instructors should be able to carry defensive handguns on campus, providing another layer of defense against the rare, but deadly occurrence of a campus shooting.

During the week-long event, students across the nation will be wearing empty holsters to classes in protest of various state laws and university policies that disarm them while not preventing the kind of crime that happened at Virginia Tech.

“It is absurd to disarm legally-licensed citizens just because they happen to be on a university campus,” Taff said. “These are the very citizens who have demonstrated their clean background, and in many cases gone through mandatory training, to qualify for a concealed carry license. They are not the people who perpetrate outrages like Virginia Tech. Indeed, they are the kind of people most likely to stop such incidents before they become massacres.

“The time has long since passed when the term ‘gun-free school zone’ should have been erased from the national vocabulary,” Taff continued. “Such areas amount to victim disarmament zones where would-be killers enjoy a target-rich environment in which they have no fear of an intended victim shooting back.

“We believe the National Empty Holster Protest will bring attention to a situation that anti-gun university administrators want to ignore,” he stated. “So-called ‘gun-free zones’ have been complete failures, and everyone knows it. It is time for a different approach, one that restores the right of every student and faculty member to fight back. That’s why we support this student-led effort to create responsible, sensible policies where there is now a moral and rational void. Students and teachers at higher institutions deserve better than to continue living in the deadly environment of political correctness.”