To have a safer campus, we don’t need “walk bike” areas. Instead we need clear bike paths all the way around the UA Mall. We also need for cyclists to signal their turns and for pedestrians to stop texting while they walk.

— D.R. Ransdell,
English professor

Regarding the proposed legislation to allow those with a permit to carry a concealed weapon on campus: I was a UA student and editor of the Wildcat’s op-ed section during the shooting at the nursing college in 2002.

Following that incident in which three professors were shot to death by a disgruntled student, my favorite letter to the editor was this brief note from a fellow student: “I refuse to believe that the shootings at the nursing college actually happened. Guns aren’t allowed on campus.”

The writer’s facetious point, of course, was that the university’s gun ban did nothing to prevent those with ill intent from bringing a gun on campus and opening fire on defenseless people.

Now, allowing guns on campus back then may not have prevented the shooting, but disallowing them certainly sealed those professors’ fates.

I’d submit that allowing law-abiding citizens to carry is much safer than having only those with malicious intent armed and ready to fire on those who choose to obey the law and, as such, are rendered impotent by it. How many times must we go through this lesson on college campuses before we get this right?

— Shane Dale,
alumnus and former Daily Wildcat editor

In response to the March 5 column, titled “Scholarship applications should be universal, simple”:

I just went through your post and it really hit the bull’s eye. It would be awesome if it can be submitted as well to The New York Times.

I have been searching online for the past four days for good scholarships to apply to, and it seems like an endless journey.
The school in focus for me is George Washington, and the fee is about $50,000 for my graduate course — and boy, that is a huge amount.

— Oluwatobi Otolorin,
Lagos, Nigeria