Earlier this week, Students for Concealed Carry gathered for their annual conference at the nation’s capital. As the story in Townhall.com explains, one of the panels included women who had been mercilessly stalked by dangerous men. One panelist who stuck out was Dartmouth student Taylor Woolrich. The stalking began when she served the man at the coffee shop she was working in. The stalker’s pursuit of Woolrich spun out of control into a terrifying situation for the college girl. After being followed and contacted on multiple social networking sites, after he hired a private investigator to find her personal information, after showing up at her sorority, on her college campus, and finally at her parents’ house a plane ride away, her stalker was finally arrested.
Woolrich explained, “When he was arrested by the police, they found what they like to call a rape kit in the back of his car. It consisted of a sweatshirt, firewood, maps of the area, duct tape, a rope tied into a slip noose, hunting knives and various other items.”
The nearly 60-year-old man is in custody now, but after experiencing such a horrific ordeal, it is not surprising that a young girl will feel unsafe in her own community. When Woolrich asked if she could carry a concealed weapon on campus, the response she got was, “No way.” Evidently, the university maintains this rule to keep students on campus safe. She was told that when she felt unsafe, she could call campus security for a security escort to her destination. However, it wasn’t long until her calls to campus security were seen as a nuisance, and she began getting responses from the security officers such as, “You can’t keep calling us all the time.” Woolrich says, “At Dartmouth if a restraining order and law enforcement can’t guarantee my safety, then I’m asking for the right to do so.”
Last year, Concealed Nation received a letter from a young woman who found herself in a very bad situation. She made the decision to arm herself on her campus that allowed concealed carry, and it ended up saving her life.
What do you think about this situation? If security officers don’t take situations such as this seriously, should students on college campuses have the right to protect themselves when need be?
