So it now appears that students living in the dorms will have to wear their bulletproof vests in order to prevent any life threatening injuries from random gunfire. I would like to pose this one question: How paranoid do you have to get before you start packing heat in student housing?

Sacramento State student Patrick Smith was arrested recently on charges of possessing a firearm on campus and negligent discharge of a firearm. This arrest followed an incident that left a bullet in a wall on the second floor of Sierra Hall. No students were injured.

Smith allegedly fled the scene after the incident, which took place last Friday, but turned himself in the following day with the assistance of an attorney.

The idiotic nature of this particular incident affords us the opportunity of having a larger, national, dare I say, relevant discussion about the issue of firearms in this country.

The National Crime Victimization Survey of 2003 found that 449,150 victims of violent crimes said that they faced an offender with a firearm. The FBI estimated that in that same year that 67 percent of the 16,503 murders that took place in the United States were committed with firearms.

According to the U.S. Department of Justice, evidence is mixed about the effectiveness of gun bans. Or in the spirit of the right-winger ideological mantra: “Guns don’t kill people, people kill people.”

But the Department of Justice noted that the 1994-96 federal assault weapons ban may have contributed to the reduction in the gun murder rate and the murders of police officers. The Justice Department explained that this apparent decline was due in large part to the fact that the ban limited criminal use of assault weapons.

These statistics lead me inevitably to the memory of an incident, conjured up by a reference made to it on a Justice Department website, of a local shooting that took place in 1989, very near where I grew up. I remember a man standing on top of an elementary school building, shooting a rifle at the children and teachers on the playground below. I cannot recall whether I saw these images on the news or imagined them after the fact, but the impressions of the incident were ingrained in my mind.

The incident, which took place at a Stockton Elementary School, ended with five children dead and nearly 30 others injured. The shooter, Patrick Edward Purdy, had fired off 100 rounds in under a minute before turning the weapon on himself.

Now I know the incident in Sierra Hall was no where near this serious, but I still can’t help the fact that when I hear about these incidents I find myself reacting to them with a great deal of frustration.

I find myself attempting to swallow the disgust that inevitably accompanies them. It is these incidents that make me wary of those individuals who take the goodwill of others for granted, who approach the benign communities they subsist in with dangerous contempt by undermining the safety of others.

I am not attempting to advocate any particular political position regarding the issue of firearms. I am however advocating the swift punishment and removal of any individual responsible for willfully endangering the lives of others.

This is a column of outrage.

Sac State should throw whoever is responsible for last week’s incident out of the J Street entrance, head first.

Kyle Hardwick can be reached at [email protected]