A tragic shooting at Michigan State University last week left three dead and five wounded, prompting the usual toxic political debate and demands for gun control . But one aspect of this crucial debate is going largely overlooked.

It’s long past time to let college students carry guns, in the same way similarly situated young Americans who live elsewhere typically can.

Michigan State’s campus is supposed to be a “gun-free zone,” as students and staff alike are prohibited from lawfully carrying firearms. This is meant to keep the community safe, but in reality, it only leaves its members vulnerable if evil does arrive at their doorstep. Unfortunately, in this MSU is no outlier. Many states prohibit college students from exercising their Second Amendment right to bear arms.

In fact, according to the activist group Students for Concealed Carry , only 11 states actually affirmatively allow “campus carry,” as it’s known. Meanwhile, 16 states outright prohibit it, and 23 states allow colleges to make their own rules, which usually results in campuses prohibiting firearms.

There’s a glaring inconsistency in the law here. In most of these states that prohibit college students from carrying firearms, young adults can get a permit and conceal carry elsewhere in the state. For example, in Massachusetts, a typical 21-year-old not attending college can get a permit to carry a firearm and walk around with it in public. But if that same 21-year-old is a college student at one of Massachusetts’s many public universities — which are supposed to be bound by the Constitution and forced to respect our rights — he cannot conceal carry on campus.

How, exactly, does that make sense?

It’s hard to imagine any right more fundamental than the basic right to protect your own life. And the Supreme Court has repeatedly affirmed that our Constitution establishes an individual right to keep and bear arms in self-defense. To arbitrarily strip entire swaths of adult society of that right simply because they choose to pursue higher education is both arbitrary and unconscionable.

Of course, the warnings from the anti-gun crowd about what will happen if we allow college students to exercise their rights are dire. In their telling, campus carry will turn our college campuses into bloody war zones and prompt shootouts over classroom debates. Scary stuff.

Thankfully, it’s all fiction.

Remember, we’ve already seen how campus carry has played out in nearly a dozen states. These include deep red states such as Texas and Utah, yes, but also blue states such as Oregon and Colorado. None of these states have seen the dystopian results opponents predict. Indeed, in the two years after Texas implemented its campus carry law, even liberal-leaning media outlets admitted there’s no data showing an increase in gun crime as predicted.

Meanwhile, self-defense saves lives. Firearms are used in self-defense approximately 500,000 to 3 million times per year in America, according to the Institute of Medicine. Of course, we can’t know for sure whether campus carry would stop any given mass shooting or campus attack. But there’s at least a chance. We’ve seen too many instances to count where shooters are stopped in their tracks by armed citizens, and there’s also reason to believe that killers are more likely to target places where everyday people can’t carry guns in the first place.

We don’t have anything to lose. And the status quo is untenable. For us to continue to strip college students of their most fundamental right to self-defense at a time when they are being murdered in cold blood isn’t just bad policy. It’s a moral monstrosity and a threat to public safety.

Brad Polumbo ( @Brad_Polumbo ) is a libertarian-conservative journalist and the co-founder of BASEDPolitics .