For years, legislatures, lawmakers, and lobbyists pursued a relentless campaign to permit adults, students and professors to carry guns on campus.

Gaining tempo, gun lobbyists have pushed hard to pass legislation that would allow this reality to happen. Lawmakers in ten states, including Texas, occupied with adapting looser campus carry laws, believe that permitting firearms on campus would deter sexual assault on campus.

Arming students to prevent sexual assault, if only this concept was that simple.

On college campuses, a perpetrator with intent to commit sexual assault doesn’t linger in the shadows waiting for a student to come around the corner. They don’t hide in the bushes waiting for an attractive person to pass by before pouncing on them. Instead, these people attend parties where there’s alcohol and prey on intoxicated girls or slip a drug into their drink.

In Campus Sexual Assault study by the National Institute of Justice, only 5 percent of college students experience a completely physically forced sexual assault. According to another study, “Correlates of Rape While Intoxicated in a National Sample of College Women,” by the Journal of Studies on Alcohol, 72 percent of rapes occurred when the victims were too drunk to refuse or unable to consent.

Due to the inebriated state of mind, most of these sexual assault victims would be unable to properly handle a gun, nevertheless threaten, point, or shoot one at an assailant. The drunken victim could possibly harm innocent bystanders rather than deter his or her assaulter.

Unrestricted campus carry laws work both ways for potential victims and perpetrators. The same way legislators aim for victims to defend against predators, a predator could easily threaten a victim.

Assemblywoman and sponsor of a Nevada campus gun bill, Michele Fiore, said in an interview with The Times that “these young, hot little girls on campus” would be safer if they possessed a gun, which would ensure that “these sexual predators get a bullet in their head.”

In the United States, the criminal punishment for rape can escalate as high as life in prison, but the U.S. Supreme Court deems that a person convicted of rape is ineligible for the death penalty. While these predators represent the scum of the Earth, the Supreme Court rules that states cannot take the life of a sexual predator. Killing the perpetrator will instill a different kind of distraught and trauma in the victim, rather than solving the problem of rape.

These “young, hot little girls” would be safer if the House passed a bill that increased operations to seize, destroy, and eliminate rape drugs such as “roofies.” A bill to increase awareness of the realities of rape and programs to educate both men and women about the consequences and immoralities of sexual assault.

Texas State Representative Allen Fletcher suggests, “These gun free zones (college campuses) are some of the most dangerous places in America and Texas.”

Mr. Fletcher stands proudly as he marks gun free zones like college campuses as a dangerous area.

A gun free zone such as Southern Methodist University forms inbred, backward breeding grounds for the worst crimes in Texas. I’ve seen people jaywalk across the boulevard, crude drawings of penises on foggy windows, and sharpie marks of poop art around campus (I can’t be the only to notice these). Admittedly, college campuses do hold some serious crimes, but not enough to warrant loosen campus carry laws. I’m in college to receive an education and I would be a nervous wreck knowing that someone in my class holds the ability to end my life, my classmates’ lives, and my teachers’ lives.

Florida State Representative Dennis K. Baxley said during a debate in a House subcommittee, “If you’ve got a person that’s raped because you wouldn’t let them carry a firearm to defend themselves, I think you’re responsible.”

Mr. Baxley, in a hypothetical case, if there are children in poverty because you wouldn’t push legislation to improve their conditions, I think you’re responsible.

Now, I don’t know the name of the argument Mr. Baxley used, but I do recognize it as a fallacy. In a similar way ignoramuses tell victims that it’s their fault they were raped based on what they wore or where they were. Mr. Baxley seems to suggest that those who oppose campus carry hold the fault and responsibility of sexual assaults cases.

Guns represent the farthest solution to sexual assaults on college campuses. If one wants to reduce and prevent rape, there lies a simple answer: don’t rape. Too many times society blamed the victim for dressing a certain way or arriving into a certain situation, but not enough responsibility and attention has been thrown on the assailants.

Nobody chooses to be raped, nobody asks to be raped, so we have to stop thinking that the answer to rape lies in protecting the victims rather than preventing predators from committing the act.

I’m not saying that we shouldn’t help victims deter their perpetrators, I’m all for that. “The Defender” is a pepper spray that obviously acts as a pepper spray, but also takes a picture of the assailant and alerts the police. According to the Houston Chronicle, campus carry could cost the University of Houston and University of Texas systems $47 million. That $47 million could be better used in providing students with “The Defender”, a non-lethal deterrent to sexual assault. And if everybody possessed “The Defender,” that would certainly scare off sexual predators.

Society could improve by reducing or eliminating sexual assault overall. Rape needs to be rooted from the source, the perpetrators. Sexual assault is more than a female issue, more than a male issue, it’s everybody’s issue. But if asked about rape, many men would feel uncomfortable with the issue, stating that it’s not their problem, an observance that domestic violence activist Victor Rivers noticed. According to the National Intimate Partner and Sexual Violence Survey, 98.1 percent of female survivors of rape and 93 percent of male survivors of rape reported a man as the assailant. Now tell me whose issue it is.

In an ideal world, sexual assault rates would sink to 0. Unfortunately we don’t live in an ideal world; there will always be outliers in every case. But looser campus carry laws won’t solve the issue of rape. In an ideal world, we could pass legislation that would educate men and women on the unethical principles of sexual assault. And in an ideal world, every man and woman would fully realize and act accordingly to the wrongs of non-consensual sex.

We don’t live in this ideal world, but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t strive for one.