At Home on the Range, Liberty U.’s President Talks Guns and God

“Bring me that blue box,” Jerry L. Falwell Jr. instructs his son Trey.

The blue box is gingerly delivered, placed atop a wooden shelf, and carefully popped open. The gun inside, resting atop a gray egg-crate inlay, is huge.

Among the arsenal assembled at this outdoor shooting range, which is just up the road from Liberty University’s central campus, the gun in the case stands out. Mr. Falwell, president of Liberty, received it as a Christmas gift from his wife’s parents. It’s something Dirty Harry surely would have carried — if only a handgun so powerful had been available in his day.

The Smith & Wesson Model 500 is the supercharged successor of the Model 29 .44 Magnum, which Clint Eastwood once ominously warned “would blow your head clean off.”

As Mr. Falwell pulls the trigger to thunderous effect, his son stands behind him, filming the moment in slow motion on a camera phone.

Until a few days ago, no one much associated Mr. Falwell with guns. He was the mild-mannered president of a Christian college, a background player in comparison to his late father, the Rev. Jerry Falwell Sr., a fundamentalist minister who founded both the university and the Moral Majority, a political coalition of Christian conservatives.

But, earlier this month, it felt a bit like Mr. Falwell was channeling his old man. He told an audience of students that he had a gun in his back pocket, and that the students might all be safer if they started packing heat, too.

The president’s comments, coming as they did just days after the mass shootings in San Bernardino, Calif., proved healthy nourishment for both the culture wars and the continuing national debate about the efficacy of guns on college campuses.

“I’ve always thought that if more good people had concealed-carry permits, then we could end those Muslims before they walked in and killed,” Mr. Falwell told the students, who were gathered for a thrice-weekly convocation, which all are required to attend.

Liberty’s president has since said that the words “those Muslims” were meant merely to identify the perpetrators of the California shootings, but in some quarters they were interpreted as a modern-day call to Holy War.

‘The House Filled Up With Guns’

A few days after the convocation, Mr. Falwell met with a Chronicle reporter at Liberty’s target range, where he shot off a few rounds and discussed his position at the heart of a divisive Second Amendment debate.

The shooting gallery here is a portrait of rural tranquillity, reached by a winding, gravelly road that runs through a hilly forest. Wearing a gray suit and a red, white, and blue tie, Mr. Falwell takes a seat at a small, plastic table and begins to load a .38 Special. This is the sort of gun he says he will start carrying regularly. The hand cannon he showed off earlier is a conversation piece and a bear killer, but it would hardly be practical in a man’s back pocket.

Mr. Falwell’s taste in pistols runs traditional. The 53-year-old president has no affection for the magazine-fed handguns that Trey, who is 26, tends to favor.

“I’m better with a revolver,” Mr. Falwell says.

The president was first exposed to pistols as a teenager. A local man, “who believed that everybody should know how to shoot,” prevailed upon the Falwell family to let him train Jerry and his brother.

“He took us out in the country,” Mr. Falwell says, “and taught me how to shoot a gun, how to pull the trigger slowly and not jerk — just to squeeze it.”

The lessons did not transform Mr. Falwell into an instant gun enthusiast. For much of his life, the only firearm he owned was a .22-caliber rifle, which he says he purchased from Kmart for $39. But that changed when he became a father.

“After my boys came along, then the house filled up with guns,” he says.

Despite living on a farm of some 500 acres, the Falwell family does not hunt. But target shooting is an occasional hobby for the president and his two sons, Trey and Wesley. His wife, Becki, has a concealed-carry permit and keeps a handgun in her car. She is hard-pressed to say what model it is.

“I don’t know one from another,” she says, describing herself as “an old-fashioned pistol-toting kind of girl.”

Mr. Falwell obtained his concealed-carry permit in 2013, a couple of years after the university’s board decided to allow weapons on the campus. The decision, Mr. Falwell says, was a response to the shootings at Virginia Tech, where, in 2007, a student killed 32 people and himself.

“It was so horrific,” he says, “an hour and a half up the road at Virginia Tech, to see so many students slaughtered.”

A Perfect Shot

On the range, Mr. Falwell is all business. Preparing to shoot the .38 from a seated position, he lays his arms across the plastic table and focuses at a blue target 50 yards away.

Then a blast.

An inspection of the target shows a bullet hole just to the right of the yellow bull’s-eye. From such a distance, an instructor at the range says, the president has taken what amounts to a perfect shot.

But this was a clinical demonstration of Mr. Falwell’s skills. There were no terrorists unloading on him with semiautomatic weapons. He has no tactical training to speak of that would prepare him for such an encounter.

Liberty, which has an on-campus enrollment of about 14,500 and some 65,000 students online, has 55 police officers. The concealed-carry policy, Mr. Falwell says, is not meant to subvert law enforcement’s role in an active-shooter situation. It is, however, meant to give students, faculty, and staff a fighting chance in a nightmare scenario.

Liberty has for years provided a course for students seeking concealed-carry permits, but Mr. Falwell’s recent remarks seem to have fired up the campus. The course typically attracts around 50 people; last week more than 200 showed up. The university has also recently lifted a ban on handguns in dormitories.

Plenty of college presidents disagree with Mr. Falwell, asserting that campuses will only become more dangerous if guns are added to the mix. Mr. Falwell says he respects that view, but simply does not share it.

“This seemed to strike a raw nerve in a lot of people,” Mr. Falwell says, looking out into the misty woods. “I’ve never had so much support from the local community, just people walking up to me in stores and restaurants and thanking me for what I said, and thanking me for not apologizing and not backing down.”

The president has a newfound status as something of a folk hero among gun-rights advocates, a few of whom recently sent him holsters to express their support. But Mr. Falwell, while resolved in his convictions, is still a bit uneasy about becoming the poster boy for a movement. He agreed to be photographed at the shooting range, for example, but asked that no pictures be taken of him holding a gun. Mindful of the polarized gun debate, he says he fears his opponents might somehow use such pictures against him.

An Accidental Activist

Indeed, being in the national spotlight is unfamiliar territory for Mr. Falwell, who grew up watching his father at the center of the culture wars but has mostly shied away from them. Liberty’s educational programming is unapologetically evangelical, and it is not uncommon to hear hot-button issues like abortion discussed at convocation, but Mr. Falwell is seldom at the forefront in the way his father was.

“He had different roles,” Mr. Falwell says of his father, who died in 2007. “He was a political activist. He was a pastor. I’m just the president of a university, so it’s not part of my responsibility as much as it was his. I’ve tried to focus on building Liberty, training young people. They can go out and be activists.”

To hear Mr. Falwell tell it, he fumbled his way into this debate. The featured speaker at the convocation was Jim DeMint, a former Republican senator from South Carolina. When it became clear that Mr. DeMint would wrap up his comments early, Mr. Falwell took to the podium to fill some time.

“It wasn’t intentional,” he says. “But I strongly believe what I said.”

A few nights later, Mr. Falwell was a guest on Fox News’s Hannity. Then came a call of support from Donald J. Trump, the Republican presidential front-runner.

In some quarters, Mr. Falwell’s comments have been described as Islamophobic, akin to the inflammatory rhetoric that Mr. Trump has been accused of using on the campaign trail.

Liberty is open to students of all faiths, but Mr. Falwell says he knows of only three Muslim students on the Lynchburg campus. He says he has not heard from any of them, nor has he reached out to them. “They knew I wasn’t targeting anybody’s faith,” Mr. Falwell says.

The Other Cheek

Leaving the gun range, Mr. Falwell takes the wheel of a white GMC Acadia Denali. As he cuts through the forest, Liberty’s president talks about his ancestors, who came to Virginia in the 1600s and have dwelled in the commonwealth for generations. Some of them, he says, fought in the Revolutionary and Civil Wars.

Firearms, the president suggests, have been part of the Falwell family for centuries. “So it’s probably not surprising that Liberty has a little different position on this issue than a lot of schools.”

Yet, as Christians, members of the Falwell family are also well schooled in the message of peace that is a cornerstone of the faith. Pulling his SUV into a parking lot at Liberty, Mr. Falwell ponders the tensions between his religious beliefs and his views on guns.

Yes, Jesus told his followers to turn the other cheek. But he also declared, in Luke 22:36, that his disciples should “sell their coats and buy swords to protect themselves,” Mr. Falwell says.

Passivity, the preacher’s son says, has its limits.

“If somebody walked up to me and slapped me on the cheek, I would turn the other cheek,” he says. “But if a terrorist walked up to me and put a gun in my face, I wouldn’t hesitate to defend myself.”

With that, he kills the Acadia’s engine and heads off to a meeting. Mr. Falwell has a university to run.

Jack Stripling covers college leadership, particularly presidents and governing boards. Follow him on Twitter @jackstripling, or email him at jack.stripling@chronicle.com.

Correction (12/17/2015, 11:25 a.m.): This article originally included a truncated version of Mr. Falwell’s statement at the convocation, ending with the phrase “before they walked in.” A more complete version ends with “before they walked in and killed,” and the article has been updated to include that wording.