"Beer, Brotherhood, and Guns"

That's the title of an article in the July 23, 2007 Inside Higher Education about gun violence (much of it while drunk) in college fraternities. I wish that I could say that it is all made up, but the fact is that a lot of college students have alcohol problems, and I don't find it hard to believe that the problem is worse in fraternities:

A few weeks ago, Yale University undergraduate David Light showed his collection of 11 guns to Christopher Keefer, who was visiting with his brother at the off-campus Beta Theta Pi fraternity house.

Then, at about 3 a.m. on Friday, July 13, gun shots rang out in the house. Keefer, who is in the Air Force, rushed to the living room, where he’d heard the shots. There, according to police reports, he found a visibly intoxicated Light with a gun in his hand and shell casings on a nearby table. Light responded to Keefer’s requests to put the gun down by firing two rounds of blanks at the ceiling and when Keefer tried to convince Light that blanks could also be dangerous, Light allegedly responded, “Why don’t I point it at your head to find out?”

When Light was arrested, a student who had stayed in the house for a few days and who had seen Light with suspicious-looking guns told the Yale Daily News, “it fell into place … I felt foolish that I didn’t tell someone.”

Yale police arrested Light last Monday, charging him with unlawful discharge of a firearm, two counts of illegal possession of assault rifles, reckless endangerment in the first degree, threatening in the second degree and breach of peace in the second degree.

Since the April murders at Virginia Tech, politicians have been talking about the danger of mentally ill students on college campuses. Receiving less attention has been the issue of guns in fraternities, and in some cases, the results have been tragic.

...

Over the last few years, fraternity members at Dartmouth College, the University of California at Berkeley and the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor have gotten in trouble for shooting BB guns at members of their fraternities or unsuspecting people on campus.
Fraternity members are not the only undergraduates who own guns, but Greeks are more likely to own them.
While 5.2 percent of fraternity and sorority members surveyed in the 2001 Harvard School of Public Health College Alcohol Survey owned guns, 4.1 percent of non-Greek undergraduates were gun owners.
Matthew Miller, an assistant professor of health policy and management at Harvard University and the primary author of the study , said that “the kinds of behavior that students who have guns exhibit are also the kinds of behavior that students in fraternities often demonstrate,” listing binge drinking, driving while intoxicated and “general aggression” as behaviors associated with fraternity members.
“There’s a decent chance that at any school where students have guns, members would be more likely to have guns than other students,” Miller said. “And they’d probably be engaging in riskier behavior, maybe with their guns.”

My response is very simple: What do the following situations have in common?

Guns plus alcohol sometimes yields accidental shooting. Fists plus alcohol sometimes yields drunken brawl. Cars plus alcohol sometimes yields drunk driving accidents. Penis plus alcohol sometimes yields rape.
If there is something that colleges might want to seriously considering fixing, maybe it is the alcohol? Alcohol (and many of the illegal drugs) reduce inhibitions and impair judgment—both of which are in short supply among many young people. Focus on the real problem: alcohol.