Gun rights and student safety have crossed paths in California, where this weekend open-carry rights for gun owners were revoked by the state legislature for the first time in state history.

Some people on campus were in support of the notion of a state wide ban for open carry rights.

“I don’t want to live in a society where everybody is armed,” said Mathew Morrissey, department chair of administration of justice at DVC.  “I’m not opposed to people having firearms… but people who are untrained and carry firearms, there we have a problem.”

But the National Rifle Association is gathering support for a bill which would allow students to carry guns on college campuses across the nation.  The new open carry ban will be a hurdle the NRA will have to face.

A public advocate for the right to carry firearms on campus, Amanda Collins was raped at the University of Nevada, Reno campus in 2007.  In an interview with the NRA Collins stated, “My inability to carry allowed [her attacker] to continue assaulting women, and ultimately he murdered one too.”

DVC’s Lt. Chad Wehrmeister disagreed: “Personally speaking, I think we are safer as a college community when we have less weapons on campus…the less weapons the safer for students.”

The right to open carry a firearm in public has been allowed in California since the state’s inception in 1850.  However, the right had not translated over to college campuses and schools. Even before the recent open-carry ban, guns could not be carried at all on school campuses, which are deemed gun-free zones.

Attacks like those at Saint Mary’s College in Moraga where there have been two unsolved cases of rape in September in a span of only a few weeks have sparked debate over public safety both on and off campus.

At DVC there has had no reported sex related crimes from 2008-2010 and a sharp decline in motor vehicle theft in the same time period. “We have found that most of our violent crimes are carry-over incidents from off campus,” said Lt. Wehrmeister

Specific laws already prohibit the carrying of weapons, including guns on campuses. “There is a much higher expectation for students and staff to be safe on college campuses and schools in general,” said Wehrmeister of police services for the community college district.

Last week, Shareef Allman shot and killed three people and injured six others at his place of employment, a limestone quarry in Cupertino, before he was shot to death the following day by police.

Some believe that if there had been citizens armed in Cupertino the shooting could have been prevented.

“If someone would have been openly carrying, they could have stopped him at the door… one, maybe two [deaths], but not six,” said Treytal Yan, owner of City Arms, a gun dealership across the street from DVC.  “It’s a right for people to carry; it’s not the wild west”

Roman Kablan, part owner of City Arms, echoed similar thoughts: “Preventing people from openly carrying guns will not reduce crime in any way, because people who carry guns are law abiding citizens.”  Kablan believes that there would be “a drop in crime” if students were allowed to carry guns on campus.

One of the most infamous shootings in school history, the Virginia Tech shooting took the lives of 32 students in 2007.  Colin  Goddard, who survived being shot four times, now speaks out in favor of tougher gun regulations for the Brady Campaign. He makes a stop at DVC on Oct. 18 to talk about this experience.

“I’m not coming in to take everyone’s gun away, I’m just advocating for background checks,” Goddard said in a phone interview.  “Once I realized what we don’t do [with gun regulations] in this country, I could not believe it.”

Other gun legislation approved this weekend by Gov. Jerry Brown calls for the same records on rifle sales as handgun sales.  This bill, along with the open carry ban, will go into effect Jan. 1 next year.

Editor-in-chief Julius Rea contributed to this article.