When a University of Arkansas student accidentally shot himself in the hand at a campus radio station in February, it was a wake-up call for colleges.
Three weeks later, Gov. Mike Beebe of Arkansas, a Democrat, signed into law a bill that allows faculty and staff members to carry guns on public-college campuses unless the governing boards ban them. Every public college in the state has opted out so far, with many administrators and trustees rejecting the idea that more guns would make colleges safer.
“We didn’t buy that argument, and I don’t think many people, frankly, did,” said G. David Gearhart, chancellor of the University of Arkansas at Fayetteville. “We’re an institution that believes in the Second Amendment, but we also feel that this is a place for learning and education, and the carrying of handguns doesn’t have a place on a college campus.”
The developments in Arkansas represent the faint progress made nationwide this year by proponents of campus concealed-carry laws: Some headway faced by a swell of opposition.
Over the last three years, state legislators have introduced nearly 50 bills to expand gun rights on campuses, but still only seven states permit anyone to carry a gun at public colleges.
This year, 19 bills to expand gun rights on campuses came up across the country, but only two states, Arkansas and Kansas, enacted them into law.
Arkansas was no surprise. The state passed eight laws this spring that gun-rights advocates applauded, including one that allows those with concealed-carry permits to bring firearms into churches. At colleges, though, there was opposition, said Charlie Collins, a Republican state legislator who wrote the campus concealed-carry bill.
“College professors won’t view it in the same way as rural Arkansans are,” Mr. Collins said. “I was not surprised that there were a lot of protests and animated people against it.”
Similar measures were blocked, vetoed, or tabled this spring in Western states like Montana, Nevada, and Texas. Laws allowing guns on campuses already exist in Colorado, Mississippi, Oregon, Utah, and Wisconsin.
A Kansas measure passed and signed into law this year was a victory for gun-rights advocates, but it still allows colleges up to four years to reverse their bans on guns. Andy Pelosi, director of the Campaign to Keep Guns Off Campuses, an advocacy group, said he still hoped to undo the law before Kansas colleges have to buy in.
And he hopes the group can help get pending bills blocked in Georgia and North Carolina.
“For the most part,” Mr. Pelosi said, “we’re winning a lot of states.”
Shootings Strike Fear
A decade ago, Utah was the only state to allow guns on campuses for people with permits. Since then, Mr. Collins said, it’s become increasingly evident that professors, staff members, and potentially students need guns to protect themselves.
Incidents such as the massacre at Virginia Tech, in 2007, and the killing of three and wounding of three others by a professor at the University of Alabama at Huntsville, in 2010, illustrate the vulnerability of many college campuses, Mr. Collins said.
The Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting, in Newtown, Conn., in December, should also get gun-rights advocates moving, as shooters can be drawn to campuses they know to be gun-free zones, Mr. Collins said.
“This has been a bad year for campus killings, and it’s a problem that’s not going away,” he said. “One thing that can help reduce it, and help save the lives of our loved ones on college campuses, is eliminating the magnets that exist for these crazy killers.”
At least one private university is now thinking that way, too. In March, Liberty University’s Board of Trustees removed the college’s ban on students’ carrying firearms and allowed concealed weapons in classrooms on its campus, in Lynchburg, Va. The college’s chancellor, Jerry Falwell Jr., told the new media then that the move would help improve campus safety in the wake of the Virginia Tech shooting.
Virginia is one of 22 states that allow colleges to make decisions about concealed-carry policies individually. In two other states, court rulings have legalized guns on campuses: Oregon in 2011 and Colorado last year.
The Newtown shooting got state legislatures and pro-gun lobbyists riled up, said Mr. Pelosi. “The gun lobby saw an opportunity after Sandy Hook that people were afraid, and they thought, ‘We should introduce these bills.’”
But the front against lifting campus gun bans has mostly stood strong because of support from campus police forces, Mr. Pelosi said. Antigun advocates also say that adding guns to the mix with drugs, alcohol, and potentially suicidal students on college campuses would be volatile.
‘Ideological Agenda’
Survivors of the Virginia Tech shooting have also rallied to keep guns out of classrooms. John Woods, a Virginia Tech alumnus whose girlfriend was one of 32 killed on the Blacksburg, Va., campus, said giving faculty members and students the right to carry guns in classrooms would distract, not help, during a potential mass shooting because people with guns might cloud police officers’ judgment on identifying suspects.
Mr. Woods is the lead organizer of the Texas arm of Students for Gun-Free Schools and helped rally against the state legislature’s efforts to allow guns on campuses this past session.
He said lawmakers were using the issue as a political wedge: “It’s not about campus safety. It’s about an ideological agenda.”
“Classrooms, in general, are still some of the safest areas of the country,” he said.
Democrats eventually succeeded in blocking the bill in the Texas Legislature, though Mr. Woods said “we can never really exhale” until the legislative body’s special session wraps up, by August 1.
Correction (7/16/2013, 2:14 p.m.): This article originally misspelled the surname of a Virginia Tech alumnus. He is John Woods, not Wood. The article has been updated to reflect this correction.