For all the national, regional and local media attention surrounding Students for Concealed Carry on Campus’s empty holster protest this week, the vast majority of students will not notice the protestors. Because you won’t find us waving signs or handing out flyers. You won’t hear us chanting catchy slogans or lying down en masse in public places. You won’t see tables covered with our materials.
Actually, if anything, the protest is almost about what you don’t see. I have a leather holster attached to my belt, tucked in my waistband underneath a t-shirt. When I’m anywhere else in Minnesota but on the Winona State campus, the holster has a pistol in it and a spare magazine in a pouch in my left pocket. So far, nobody’s noticed the holster, empty or not. The pistol has not caused any casualties, been stolen, accidentally discharged or shot innocent bystanders like it would in the direst and shrillest warnings of concealed carry opponents.
I haven’t gotten into drunken fights and resolved them with gunshots. I haven’t gotten into traffic altercations and turned them into gunfights. Students in classes I’m in don’t notice my empty holster worn openly, much less concealed. Their learning isn’t affected by the presence or absence of my holster.
Professors are not afraid that if they give me poor grades I’ll snap and get violent. Police officers haven’t accidentally shot me in the confused midst of a mass shooting. Even though I have through this column publicly declared my possession of a carry permit and firearm ownership, people I see on a day-to-day basis don’t connect those statements with reality. The fact is, even though I have a permit and a pistol, no one notices. Not police officers, not friends, not family.
Ever walked around downtown Winona during the day? Statistically speaking, one or two out of every hundred people there is legally carrying a gun. What’s interesting there, like with the empty holsters on campus, is what hasn’t happened. In Utah and Colorado, where most states let carry permit holders to carry on college campuses, there’s silence. No thefts, no accidental injuries or deaths, no psychotic Wild-West gunbattles.
My gun, holster and permit haven’t caused me to commit suicide. They haven’t caused me to be violent. They haven’t caused others to fear me.
So what has the carry permit and the gun and holster caused, then?
Well, when I’m hanging out with friends who are drinking and I’m carrying my gun, it’s caused me to not drink, out of respect for the power of alcohol to cloud my mind and respect for the need to be clearheaded when exercising the right and responsibility to carry a gun.
It’s caused me to be more aware of my surroundings, more calm in dealing with other people and more careful when handling my guns. It’s caused me to see other points of view and exercise discretion over valor in confrontation.
Carrying a gun and having a permit have caused a lot of things to change in my daily routine, none of them negative. But the best argument for the ability to carry on campus may just be what carry permits don’t cause.

Reach Sam Keane-Rudolph at SKeaneRu4088@winona.edu