Four minutes.

It may not sound like long in most contexts, but it can be an eternity when you are a college student trapped in a campus building where a deranged attacker is methodically stalking and killing everything he meets. The majority of those killed at Sandy Hook, and roughly half of those killed at Virginia Tech, were murdered within four minutes. The deranged graduate student who shot up the Aurora Colorado movie theater managed to shoot 82 people, though officers arrived in just 90 seconds.

Four minutes was an eternity at Florida State’s library, when a mentally ill former prosecutor randomly opened fire on students because he thought shadowy government forces were targeting him with mind control weapons.

It is because of this momentary eternity and the need to deploy a firearm immediately when mass killers and criminals display deadly intent that gun right attorney in Florida are fighting even harder now for the right of faculty and staff to legally concealed carry on campus.

The shooting at Florida State University has given gun rights attorneys new ammunition in their fight to allow students to carry weapons on campus.

As it stands, it’s legal in the state of Florida for licensed students to keep their guns in their cars on universities, but attorneys want to take it one step further and make guns legal in classrooms.

If students were armed at FSU when the gunman opened fire in the library, could they have taken out the threat before police and prevented three injuries?

That’s the argument attorneys with Florida Carry are making. They want students allowed to be armed in the classroom, and they’re taking their fight to court.

Three to four minutes is how long it took for police to shoot and kill Myron May early Wednesday morning in front of the library. It may sound like a swift response time to some, but gun rights attorneys want an instant reaction.

“Any response time beyond a gun in your hand is too long,” said attorney Eric Friday, of Florida Carry. “You wouldn’t set your hair on fire and then wait for the fire department to put it out. You would grab a fire extinguisher.”

Friday said several lawsuits are pending against Florida universities that refuse to allow students the right to carry weapons in class. In states like Idaho, Colorado, Utah, Oregon and Kansas, Friday said, school shooting statistics are remarkably lower than the rest of the nation.

“Every state that allows law-abiding students to carry guns on campus, every one of those schools has not had a mass shooting since they enacted that rule,” Friday said.

Criminals and the dangerously mentally ill may be insane, but they aren’t stupid. Unless they have a specific individual or group that they desire to harm, they tend to pick targets that represent the least threat, and which offer the greatest opportunity of their success.

A stunning 92-percent of mass shootings have taken place in known “gun free zones.”

Purely from a logical standpoint, doesn’t it make sense, then, to remove as many of their “gun free” killing fields as is possible?