After finishing a midterm exam one night in 2007, Amanda Carpenter was walking back to her car at the University of Nevada at Reno when she was attacked and raped.
The rapist had a gun. She didn’t.
“Had I been carrying that night,” she says, “I know I would have been able to stop my rape.” But state law prevented her from carrying a gun on the campus, even with a license. Now Ms. Carpenter has joined a campaign to change that.
She spoke at a national conference held in August by Students for Concealed Carry on Campus. “Just how does rendering me defenseless protect you against a violent crime?” she asked.
Five years after the Virginia Tech massacre prompted a student in Texas to start a Facebook page in favor of the right to carry concealed weapons on college campuses, the resulting group, Students for Concealed Carry, has advanced its cause. The number of colleges that allow guns on their grounds has grown. But whether the momentum is coming from students is unclear. The group claims chapters on multiple campuses, although it does not reveal how many, nor how many individual members it has.
Nonetheless, following a flurry of news coverage and educational and lobbying campaigns on a state-by-state basis, it is beginning a national legislative push. “We’re kind of in a second phase,” says David V. Burnett, director of public relations.
In more than a dozen states, legislation has been introduced to allow the carrying of concealed firearms on public-college campuses or to soften gun bans there. Legislators in Mississippi and Wisconsin passed such bills in their most recent sessions.
But the student group’s attempts to spread the message have met resistance. Many college administrators are opposed to allowing guns on their campuses, and are interpreting the language of concealed-carry laws in restrictive ways. In Wisconsin, for example, despite the new state law, the University of Wisconsin at Madison has established a policy that any faculty member who carries a firearm on campus can be subject to dismissal.
Students for Concealed Carry has had a two-part mission since its inception. First, members seek to send a message about the importance of guns in maintaining a safe campus. Second, they are working to change state policies to legalize the concealed carrying of weapons by licensed permit-holders on college campuses.
Chris Brown, then a student majoring in political science at the University of North Texas, started the Facebook group the day after the Virginia Tech attacks, in April 2007.
In 2008, following the shootings at Northern Illinois University that killed six people, including the gunman, membership in the Facebook group skyrocketed, and the organization was quickly noticed by the national news media. The group still makes heavy use of social networks.
“We want to draw attention to an idea,” says the current president, Daniel Crocker. It’s “the idea that your college thinks that you turn incapable of executing sound judgment when you step onto a college campus.”
Empty-Holster Protests
Leaders of the organization, who argue that there are many misconceptions about carrying a concealed handgun, hope that they can dispel public anxiety about the issue and raise awareness of the benefits of carrying a weapon for self-defense.
The group’s supporters and campus leaders distribute information on campus-crime statistics, hold debates with gun-control advocates, and run licensing workshops for concealed handguns. Their national empty-holster protests, in which students and faculty members don empty gun holsters to demonstrate their inability to defend themselves, has had thousands of participants over the past four years.
Its leaders have encouraged supporters to write newspaper editorials and meet with their local lawmakers and ask them to consider introducing bills to decriminalize carrying a licensed handgun on campus.
Last year, at least in part as a result of the efforts of Students for Concealed Carry, such legislation was introduced in 15 states.
“The first thing that people think of when they hear about guns on campus is that we’re going to hand out guns and beers at the door,” says Mr. Burnett. To the contrary, he says, the group simply wants eligible people to be able to carry weapons on the campuses of public colleges, just as they can in, say, a grocery store.
All public spaces are not equal, though, say some campus-carry opponents. Unlike grocery stores, they argue, colleges are places where ideas are debated and identities are formed, and guns are not appropriate there.
“Our argument has always been that college campuses have always been extremely safe,” says Jay Sanguinetti, co-president of Students Against Guns in Education, or Sage, and a graduate student in psychology at the University of Arizona.
“Bringing guns on campus will do more harm than good,” he says. “It will alter the environment in the classroom, and a lot of teachers and campus police say it will make their jobs harder.”
Sage is one of many student groups that have cropped up in response to the wave of campus-carry legislation that has been introduced over the past two years.
Not all of those bills are transparent about their intentions to legalize the concealed carrying of weapons on college campuses. Mississippi’s recent campus-carry law, for example, was tucked into a bill about self-defense for public defenders and slipped under the radar of many gun-control advocates.
“We don’t want to hide our bills,” Mr. Burnett, the gun-rights group’s public-relations director, said in an interview during the Students for Concealed Carry conference, in Washington. “The state has a process in place, and it issues concealed carry permits. Once they issue those permits, why should I as a resident be allowed to carry in ... 99 percent of places across the state, but as soon as I cross that invisible boundary to pursue higher education, I’m suddenly irresponsible and not allowed to defend myself?
“That’s the dialogue we need to get out there. We don’t have anything to hide. But if in some cases it becomes necessary to take discreet measures, that’s not against our policy at all.”
Obstacles Ahead
Five years after its founding, Students for Concealed Carry is at a turning point. It has built a national support network for student groups that are in favor of extending gun rights to college campuses. But it has run into some challenges, too.
Setting up campus chapters has proved difficult at some colleges, where faculty are reluctant to sign on as advisers to pro-gun student groups, even if they support the idea themselves.
James Purtilo, an associate professor of computer science at the University of Maryland at College Park, says that if a chapter were formed on his campus, “I’d sign on, because I do believe campus should be a melting pot of ideas.” But, calling himself a victim of the “intellectual bigotry” of his more-liberal colleagues, he says “there are just too few of us who are willing to take the bullet.”
Eugene Volokh, a conservative legal scholar at the University of California at Los Angeles School of Law who speaks out in favor of Second Amendment rights and has taught a firearms-policy seminar, says that administrators and fellow professors have treated him no differently because of his views. Everyone has been entirely collegial about the subject, he says, and he has not been coerced to suppress his opinions.
Still, there may be other obstacles ahead for Students for Concealed Carry. Facebook recently required all groups on its Web site to reconfigure their presence there. (Students for Concealed Carry’s reconfigured page has about 5,400 “likes.”) And though the organization will not disclose the number of active members, Mr. Burnett does say it is experiencing some “attrition.” He attributes that not only to the usual high turnover of college students, but also to what its leadership sees as a decline in public interest.
It has been several years since there was a large-scale episode of violence on a college campus in the United States. “If the problem has not manifested itself in two years, the problem dies away,” says Mr. Burnett. “Incidents like college shootings provide us with the best publicity, unfortunately,” he says.
In the meantime, leaders hope to get their message out to more people and introduce more legislation. “Students for Concealed Carry is not going away,” says Mr. Burnett.
