On Wednesday, 32 protesters will lie on the ground on Polk Place near Gardner Hall for just a few minutes to illustrate symbolically how little time it takes to buy a gun.
Wednesday - April 16 - is the one-year anniversary of the Virginia Tech shooting.
And one year later, not much has changed in terms of gun control, both in North Carolina and in the nation at large. Enforcement is as much as a problem as some of the regulations themselves.
N.C. laws
To purchase a handgun in North Carolina, one needs a permit from the county sheriff. Rifles and shotguns require no permit whatsoever.
An N.C. handgun permit is considered a valid substitute for the National Instant Check System, which means it includes a criminal background check.
No official registration of gun owners is kept, though the sheriff keeps a list of permits issued and dealers must keep a list of sales.
People can obtain long arms without a waiting period. With a permit, handguns require up to a 30-day waiting period. Assuming people have a safe passage of their criminal background check, they become a proud new gun owner.
But even with these restrictions, it is still easy for people to fall through the cracks. A registration system of all firearms is long overdue, and in-depth background checks need to be kept on record in order to have a database that can be used to aid investigations when gun deaths occur.
No experience necessary
One major point, however, is missing from the entire process: training. Going through gun familiarity and gun safety classes should be mandatory before being issued a deadly weapon.
After all, in order to get a driver's license, extensive training and a proficiency test are mandatory steps in the process, and a car is not designed to kill.
There are only two courses mandatory for gun owners in the state.
First, a hunter education course is required before being cleared to hunt. This class includes weapon safety, wilderness survival and other field specific skills taught or supervised by Wildlife Enforcement Officers.
The second course is the concealed carry course, which has curriculum dictated by the state and is usually given by a state-certified instructor.
This means that in order to simply own a firearm, as long as you are not carrying it concealed or going hunting with it, there is no mechanism that forces you to show that you are able to safely handle your weapon.
North Carolina needs to require all gun owners to convince the state of their competence. If the state won't let you drive to Wendy's if you can't do a three-point turn, it should make all gun owners show they at least know where the safety is.
Legal enforcement
It's important to have strong restrictions on who can obtain a firearm and how long they have to wait before getting one, in order to ensure that qualified individuals are the only armed members of our community.
Unfortunately, gun control laws can go only so far toward preventing gun crimes. Studies have found that it's illegal gun availability, which is not directly controlled by increasing legal restrictions, that has the greatest effect on violent crime rates.
Based on this fact, it seems that legal status isn't the only issue - enforcement is, too.
This means that police officers need to have to tools to crack down on illegal gun availability. This is a tough task, given that 80 percent of prisoners who own guns did not purchase their weapon legally, instead getting it from a friend or family member or buying it from a nonlicensed source.
The sad fact is that no matter how strict gun control laws become, it is impossible to completely eliminate all gun crimes.
However, through ensuring that all legal gun owners have proper training, maintaining a database of all buyer backgrounds and enforcing the laws governing firearms, we can cut down on gun crime as much as possible.
