A debate on gun control takes place Wednesday evening at Jamrich Hall at Northern Michigan University. From left are John Lott Jr., a Fox News columnist; moderator Steve Nelson, an NMU political science professor; and Mike Weisser, who has published numerous articles on guns. (Journal photo by Christie Bleck)

MARQUETTE — The February mass shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, and Saturday’s March for Our Lives, organized by Parkland students in reaction to that shooting, has put discussion and debate on gun control at the forefront.

A debate on the issue took place Wednesday at Jamrich Hall at Northern Michigan University, moderated by NMU political science professor Steve Nelson.

Discussion on both sides of the topic came from John Lott Jr., a Fox News columnist and president of the newly formed Crime Prevention Research Center, and Mike Weisser, who has written more than 1,000 articles, published seven books and writes blogs on guns for The Huffington Post.

“I think the topic of this debate is very important and it’s very timely,” Nelson said.

Both experts were given about 25 minutes for an opening presentation, followed by a question-and-answer period with the audience.

Lott said that with gun control, people have to ask themselves: Who’s most likely to obey the rules?

“If it turns out that it’s the most law-abiding, good citizens who obey the rules relative to the criminals, you may unfortunately actually make it relatively easier for criminals to go and commit crimes, and therefore increase things like the homicide rate,” Lott said.

He pointed out that concealed carry permit holders have been found to be “incredibly law-abiding.”

“There are about 17 million concealed carry permit holders in the United States,” Lott said. “The revocation rate for permit holders for any reason is between tenths of hundredths of 1 percentage point. The revocation rate for firearm-related violations are about thousandths or tens of thousandths of 1 percentage point.”

He also believes certain population groups would be better served by owning a gun.

“There are couple of things that my research convinces me over time, and that (is) it’s the most vulnerable people who benefit from the most from owning guns,” Lott said. “There’s two groups of people: women and the elderly. People relatively weaker physically benefit much more than men do from having guns.”

With a female victim and a male attacker, there’s a larger strength differential that exists, he said, and the presence of a gun in a female’s possession represents a much bigger relative change in a woman’s ability to resist an attack, he said.

Even poor blacks in high-crime urban areas represent a vulnerable group, Lott said.

“It’d be great if the police could be there all the time to protect them, but they can’t, and so you find, I would argue, is that having a gun is by far the safest course of action for someone to take when they’re having to confront a criminal by themselves,” he said.

One of Weisser’s concerns in the gun issue focuses on violence in general in American society.

Weisser, who belongs to the National Rifle Association, mentioned a 1981 incident in Skidmore, Missouri, in which the town bully was gunned down, with no resident coming forward to provide law enforcement with information on the crime.

“This became known as the modern example of what we used to call in the Old West ‘vigilante justice,’ but in fact what it really is is something that we refer to as ‘virtuous violence’ — the idea that violence can be used to achieve a positive end,” Weisser said.

He agreed with Lott in that concealed carry permit holders tend to be law-abiding.

“The point is that we have a culture which increasingly not only validates the idea of using violence against violence, but does it through what we call the idea of ‘Stand Your Ground,'” Weisser said.

He explained that in many states, if people are charged with an illegal response to a threat that results in injury or death, the prosector has to prove that action was wrong.

So, for Weisser, the issue comes down to what guns ultimately represent.

“The point is that we have to ask ourselves whether we want a community in which the idea of using violence against the threat of violence is a good thing to do,” Weisser said, “because I think personally that what that does is it tends to devalue other ways of dealing with threats, and most of all, it devalues the necessity to learn and to teach children how to deal with behavior that scares them, or threatens them, without feeling that the only thing they can do is show up at school with a gun.”

Wednesday’s discussion also brought up other factors in the gun control issue.

“I think police are the single most important factor for reducing crime, but when you’re talking about a terrorist-type mass shooting, they have an almost impossible job,” Lott said.

If the sole person in a school with a gun — an officer — is killed, the shooter has free rein to shoot others, he said, and people having concealed carry permits make the officer’s job safer.

Weisser expressed concern over the types of guns people in the United States may obtain.

“We are the only country, the only industrialized country, which allows civilians to buy the same weapons that we produce for the military,” Weisser said.

Neither Weisser nor Lott, however, believe a ban of the AR-15 — the weapon used in the Parkland shootings — would make a difference.

The debate was made possible through the NMU student organization Platform Personalities and the school’s student activity fee.