While most of the country is still reeling from shootings in Boulder and Atlanta this month, universities in Montana are preparing to allow guns on their campuses.
In February, Montana’s newly elected Republican governor, Greg Gianforte, signed a bill that will, in effect, allow open and concealed carry on the state’s college campuses. The new law officially allows guns in public spaces and strips the Montana University System and its Board of Regents of their ability to regulate firearm possession.
The system office and the board opposed the bill, and though they couldn’t kill it, they successfully argued for some adjustments. One is that universities can continue to prohibit guns at large athletic and entertainment events that have armed security on site; another is that the law won’t go into effect on campuses until June 1. That’s left them with just a few months to prepare.
“We don’t know what June 1 looks like,” said Brock Tessman, deputy commissioner for academic, research, and student affairs. The board of regents is considering options, including challenging the law in court, but the state’s Office of the Commissioner of Higher Education is simultaneously coming up with a plan to implement it. The board will vote on that plan in May.
“We’re starting to identify the particularly challenging aspects,” Tessman said, which include how the law works in residence halls, the requirements for those who want to carry a firearm around campus and not just store it in their dorm, and how the university will enforce policy violations.
Last week, the state’s House of Representatives passed a budget that includes $1 million to help the university system implement the law. The money is meant to help fund firearms training, metal detectors, gun safes in dorms, and awareness campaigns. But the university system won’t get the funding if they challenge the law in court.
There have been many shootings on college campuses going back decades, including one at Umpqua Community College in 2015 that left 10 people dead. The most deadly was at Virginia Tech in 2007 when a gunman killed 32 people. Tessman said Montana’s high suicide rate is particularly concerning for officials, who are worried that this bill will interfere with efforts to prevent suicide at universities.
“We’ve been in a huge fight on that front for a number of years,” he said, adding that Montana has one of the worst rates of suicides per capita compared to other states. “That holds true on our campuses.”
Taylor Gregory, president of the student government at the University of Montana at Missoula, said that most of the students he’s in touch with are worried about the new law.
“There probably are students that are in favor of it,” he said. “I haven’t interacted with a student who is in favor of the open-carry aspect of it.”
Gregory is part of a working group at the University of Montana that is trying to figure out how to implement the policy once the board of regents approves it. Part of the group’s work has been to review policies at universities in other states where guns are allowed on campus. Gregory said he’s looked at states like Utah, Idaho, and Wyoming, but that’s only made him more worried. Even those states seem to have more restrictions than what’s coming for Montana.
“Montana is now the most loose, or up there, in terms of campus-carry in the country,” he said. “It will be that environment where you’re going to have to think anyone can be armed at any moment.”
Gregory said there are still a lot of unknowns. How will RA training be changed to incorporate the new gun rules? How will universitywide student orientation have to change? Under the law, people will not be allowed to remove guns from a case or holster unless it’s done in self-defense or inside a person’s “domicile,” but what counts as a “domicile?” A student’s bedroom or their whole dorm building?
University housing is particularly complicated. Students will have to give explicit permission for their roommates to keep firearms in their rooms, Tessman said, which means that gun ownership will have to be taken into consideration when they’re making housing assignments.
Danielle Pease, a first-year student at the University of Montana’s law school and founder of a nonprofit that seeks to support sexual-assault survivors, said that she’s worried about the safety of women on campus and pointed to the high portion of female homicides that are connected to intimate-partner violence. She said she was also worried about how little time the university system has to implement this law.
“It’s just been kind of looming over our heads,” she said. “Now it feels like it’s finally getting real.”
