In just the last year alone, Arizona’s legislative and executive branches have led a number of emerging trends by passing precedent-setting legislation. Unfortunately, however, the direction they are [mis]leading is backward.

In April 2010, the Arizona legislature passed and Gov. Jan Brewer signed Senate Bill 1070, which mandates that police officers stop and question people about their immigration status if they even suspect that they may be in this country illegally, and criminalizes undocumented workers who do not possess an “alien registration document.” Other provisions allow citizens to file suits against government agencies that do not enforce the law, and it criminalizes employers who knowingly transport or hire undocumented workers.

Just one month after passing this country’s most restrictive and punitive anti-immigration law, the Arizona legislature passed House Bill 2281, signed into law by Gov. Brewer, targeting public school districts’ ethnic studies programs. Arizona Superintendent Tom Horne, a primary supporter of the bill, asserted that the law is necessary because, in particular, Tucson, Arizona’s Mexican American, African American and Native American studies courses teach students that they are oppressed, encourage resentment toward white people and promote “ethnic chauvinism” and “ethnic solidarity” instead of treating people as individuals.

Now, coming as it does on the heels of the tragic shooting in Tucson, resulting in the murder of nine people, and injury to 13 others, including U.S. Representative Gabrielle Giffords, the legislature of Arizona, by exercising its own distorted logic, has passed Senate Bill 1467, which requires community and state colleges and universities to allow both concealed and openly carried guns in their public rights of way, which would most likely include public roads and sidewalks adjacent to these campuses.

Supporters of the bill claimed that this measure will go far in the direction of improving campus safety. We need to question, however, whether SB1467 would have eliminated or reduced the tragic incidents of gun violence on our institutions of higher education? For example:

April 16, 2007: Seung-Hui Cho murdered 32 people and wounded a number of others in a dorm and a classroom at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University in Blacksburg, Virginia before turning the gun on himself.

Sept. 2, 2006: Douglas W. Pennington killed his two sons, Logan P. Pennington, 26, and Benjamin M. Pennington, 24, and then killed himself as he visited Shepherd University in Shepherdstown, W.Va.

Oct. 28, 2002: Robert Flores, a student at Failing University of Arizona Nursing College and a Gulf War veteran, armed with five guns, killed three of his instructors before committing suicide.

Jan. 16, 2002: Graduate student Peter Odighizuwa, who was recently dismissed from Virginia’s Appalachian School of Law, killed the college dean, a professor and a student. He also wounded three female students.

Aug. 28, 2000: James Easton Kelly, a University of Arkansas graduate student who was dropped from his doctoral program, and John Locke, an English professor supervising his course of study, were shot to death in what appeared to be a murder-suicide.

Aug. 15, 1996: Frederick Martin Davidson, a graduate engineering student at San Diego State University, while defending his thesis before his faculty committee, drew a gun and killed three of his professors.

Nov. 1, 1991: Gang Lu, a physics graduate student, fired into two buildings on the University of Iowa campus, killing five university employees and wounding two others before turning the gun on himself.

And I still remember as if it were yesterday when I was a 19-year-old college student, the tragic events of Aug. 1, 1966, when a sniper, Charles Whitman, aiming his rifle from the observation tower at the University of Texas at Austin perpetrated an hour-and-a-half rampage killing 16 people, including his wife and mother, whom he murdered the previous night, and wounding 31 others.

So I cannot understand the “reasoning” of the proponents of Arizona’s SB1467. To assert that having more guns on and around college and university campuses increases overall safety defies all logic.

I commend the Democrats in the Arizona Legislature who voted as a block in opposition to SB1467 along with four of their Republican colleagues. To the Republican majority who passed this ill-advised legislation, I ask you now:

How many more members of the college community will initiate gun violence, and settle disputes with firearms? How many more accidental injuries and deaths will result? How many more college-aged students will take their own lives? And what is the potential for mass tragedy now that we are legally whipping up an alcohol or drug-and-gun cocktail for college students?

The insanity must end. Gov. Jan Brewer still has the opportunity to veto the bill, which she must do if she wishes to slow Arizona’s backward direction.