Just ran across these guys. Newsweek recently featured Students for Concealed Carry on Campus, and gives a good capsule of the group's mission and work:

The group, whose 12,000 members nationwide include college students, faculty and parents, champions legislation that would allow licensed gun owners to carry concealed weapons on campus, in the hope that an alert and well-trained citizen could stop a deranged shooter before he or she could do serious damage. According to the National Conference on State Legislatures, 13 states are currently considering some form of "concealed carry" legislation aimed at campuses. Utah is the group's model; after a state Supreme Court ruling found that the state university had violated a law allowing permit holders to carry concealed weapons, the school agreed that guns could legally be carried on its grounds. Some states, like Colorado, do not explicitly ban licensed students and faculty from carrying hidden weapons onto school grounds, though most universities in such states impose restrictions of their own.

There are signs that the "concealed carry" group was making headway even before the tragedy at Northern Illinois. Earlier this month the South Dakota House of Representatives voted overwhelmingly to force state universities to allow students to carry weapons on campus, according to GOP state Rep. Tom Brunner. The bill, which Brunner sponsored, recently died in the state senate, but Brunner said he intends to bring it back as soon as he can. "It's not an issue that's going to go away," Brunner said. "We feel pretty passionate [that] students and teachers should have a right to defend themselves, and weapons on campus should be a part of the plan."

[...]

W. Scott Lewis is a board member and spokesman for Students for Concealed Carry on Campus. Lewis argues that states with the most relaxed concealed-carry laws also happen to be among the safest. He points to Colorado State University, which has allowed concealed weapons on campus for 10 semesters without incident; the same is true for nine state universities in Utah's system, where concealed weapons have been allowed in university classroom buildings since 2006, Lewis said.

NEWSWEEK's Suzanne Smalley spoke to Lewis about the bill, the tragedy at Northern Illinois University--and his fears that it could happen again. Excerpts:

NEWSWEEK: Why do you think it would help matters if students were allowed to carry guns on college campuses?

W. Scott Lewis: We're talking about licensed individuals age 21 and above, in most states, who have gone through extensive background checks, training, testing, etc. Basically, these are the same individuals who are licensed to carry in virtually all other unsecured locations in these states. By unsecured I mean anywhere where there are not metal detectors and X-ray machines. So you're saying that individuals who are licensed to carry in office buildings, movie theaters, grocery stores, restaurants, shopping malls, churches, banks, etc.--they're currently not allowed to carry on college campuses for some reason ... College campuses are unsecured locations. Anybody can walk onto a college campus carrying just about anything they please. So what happens is these state laws and these school policies that prohibit concealed carry on college campuses stack the odds in favor of dangerous criminals who have no concern for following the rules.

There's a lot of statistics out there that show that concealed handgun license holders are five times less likely than nonlicensed holders to commit violent crimes. You can look at the 40 right-to-carry states with liberal concealed-carry laws, where they have not seen any escalation in gun violence, gun accidents, etc. as a result of allowing concealed carry. There are currently 11 U.S. universities that have for a combined total of 60 semesters allowed concealed carry on campus without an incident. You haven't seen an incident of gun violence, an incident of gun theft, no gun accidents … Although you can't say in any particular situation whether or not concealed carry might have prevented or mitigated a school shooting or a sexual assault or anything of that nature, you can say that allowing concealed carry would even the odds. And that's what this is really about: evening the odds and taking the advantage away from these dangerous criminals.

Surely the baseline requirement for exploring and debating the issue of guns on campus ought to be informed opinion derived from facts--and not the sort of censorious anxiety manifested by, for example, Central Connecticut State University.