Legislators in nine states, including Florida, Texas, Michigan, and Arizona, are considering laws that would restrict public institutions’ ability to have anti-gun policies for their campuses.
Proposals to bar campuses from banning weapons have been common since the Virginia Tech shootings in 2007, which gun-rights advocates say may have been stemmed or even prevented if students and faculty members had the ability to defend themselves. So far none of the proposals have passed. But legal victories for gun-rights advocates have raised questions about the rights colleges have in restricting firearms on campus.
Brenda Bautsch, an education-policy analyst for the National Conference of State Legislators, says the number of states with gun proposals is equal to last year’s total. The high point came in 2008, months after the Virginia Tech shootings, when 14 states proposed such legislation.
A proposal this year in Kansas, for example, would require campuses to either maintain a certain level of security, with measures such as metal detectors and armed guards, or to allow guns on their grounds. But legislation in most states would simply bar campuses from banning guns altogether. In most cases, anyone with a valid gun license could carry weapons on campus.
The proposal in Florida is part of a larger push to allow people to carry weapons out in the open. The legislation is sponsored by State Sen. Greg Evers, a Republican, who says he filed the bill in response to numerous requests from constituents worried about crime on Florida’s college campuses.
“I’ve got children who will be going to college, and I want them to be as safe as possible,” Mr. Evers said in an interview.
The various proposals worry the American Association of University Professors, which has long opposed guns on campus. AAUP spokeswoman Nse Ufot says the idea keeps popping up because it seems to present a simple solution to the threat of campus violence.
But she says campuses would be better served by a more-balanced approach—for example, looking for ways to improve counseling services that would help identify unstable and potentially dangerous people, or adjusting emergency-response plans to deal with violent situations.
“There is not a one-size-fits-all solution,” Ms. Ufot says.
Gains for Gun Rights
This week gun-rights legislation advanced in the Arizona State Senate, passing in the Judiciary Committee by a margin of 5-3. Before the vote, the University of Arizona’s police chief, Anthony Daykin, testified before the committee, saying the presence of guns on campus during a shooting would make the situation even more chaotic.
“Who knows who’s going to shoot who?” Mr. Daykin said in an interview with The Chronicle. “Add to that the issue of the police response. [They’d] have to sort out, in virtually no time at all, who are the people with guns? Which ones pose a real threat?”
Gun-rights advocates are riding a wave of victories on both the state and national levels. A U.S. Supreme Court decision last year, McDonald v. City of Chicago, overturned that city’s ban on firearms and ended arguments over the interpretation of the Second Amendment that had been the subject of scholarly debate for years.
An earlier ruling, District of Columbia v. Heller, established that the Second Amendment, referring to the right to bear arms, applies to individuals, not just armed militia groups that “provide for the common defense.” Chicago officials tried to argue, in McDonald, that the amendment only applies to the federal government, but the court ruled that states and municipalities must abide by it also.
Gun-rights advocates in Utah and Colorado have won legal disputes that forced campuses to eliminate their firearms bans. Utah’s Supreme Court ruled in 2006 that the University of Utah’s firearms ban was in violation of state law, amended two years earlier to allow people over 21 to carry a weapon on campus. Last year the Colorado Court of Appeals ruled that Colorado State University’s firearms ban was in violation of the state’s existing gun laws after a student gun-rights advocacy group filed a lawsuit against the university.
Those victories, however, may not make it easier for guns to be allowed on more campuses. The U.S. Supreme Court decision, in Heller, maintains that bans in “sensitive places such as schools and government buildings” are constitutional.
The question now becomes whether “sensitive places” include the campuses of colleges and universities. In a lawsuit brought by a man who wanted to carry his gun on the campus of George Mason University, in Virginia, Circuit Court Judge Bernard Goodwyn ruled that George Mason’s campus qualified as a “sensitive place,” noting that it had a preschool and hosted summer camps for thousands of elementary- and high-school students every year.
Mr. Goodwyn’s written opinion also implies that he believes allowing guns on campus could create an unsafe atmosphere.
“Parents who send their children to a university have a reasonable expectation that the university will maintain a campus free of harm,” he wrote.
Correction (2/17, 5:30 p.m.): The article misstated Brenda Bautsch’s position at the National Conference of State Legislators. She is an education-policy analyst, not a spokeswoman.
