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Guns on Campus
By Bre Cherry

More than 75 Susquehanna University students gathered at Weber Chapel at noon Dec. 4 to
protest a new policy allowing a few public safety officers to carry guns on campus.

University President Jonathan Green made this announcement to students through email on Dec.
3. The policy will officially come into effect Dec. 14, right after the end of the fall 2018
semester.

In the email, Green said that the goal of the school is to improve safety of students by increasing
the safety measures that are already in place. He also stated while this will provide the campus
with improved resources, the campus will also still be provided traditional law enforcement help
from local and state police.

“As gun violence has bene on the rise in the U.S., concurrently, the number of universities
adding armed officers has trended upward,” Green wrote. “It’s our hope that knowledge of
armed officers will deter incidents while improving response time to save lives should a serious
event occur.”

Right before the email was sent out, Green attended the weekly Student Government Association
Senate meeting and introduced the new policy there. Immediately after introducing the new
policy, the president was confronted with a plethora of questions and comments from concerned
students.

One student said that while they understood that there were no current plans to release the names
of the students that would be armed, there were some public safety officers that students are not
comfortable with. They asked that if the number of officers who are armed increases, the student
body should be spoken with about who is actually being armed.

When asked for a concrete reason for implementing the new policy President Green said, “We
know nationally that in a public situation, the average rate of fatality is 115 seconds. 46% of
situations that have been stopped by armed law enforcement.”

Another student asked if it would just be easier to teach the state police more on campus
geography rather than bringing guns onto campus. In response to this the president state that the
university had already attempted to improve response time and had found it was already at the
best that it could be.
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That night students took to social media to voice their concerns even more and planned the
protest to take place the next day.

Students brought signs that they made to the protest. Some of the signs read things such as “who
will protect us from you” and “hands up, don’t shoot”. After meeting at Weber Chapel the
students marched down Kurtz Lane and to the president’s house where they met him with more
questions.