The Students Behind ‘Students for Concealed Carry’

Eric Gay, AP Images

When Chris J. Brown heard about the Virginia Tech massacre nearly a decade ago, he began questioning why it was illegal for students to protect themselves by carrying guns on college campuses.

Mr. Brown has always loved guns. His family owns firearms, and as a kid he read Guns & Ammo magazine. When he turned 21, he bought his first weapon and secured a concealed-handgun permit soon thereafter.

In college, as a political science major at the University of North Texas at Denton, he got involved in conservative activism. He once created a website encouraging people to help him send bricks to Congress, as a way of protesting immigration policies, and to give the federal government supplies to build a border wall.

A day after the shootings at Virginia Tech, in April 2007, he merged his passion for political organizing with his lifelong love of guns, when he created a website called “Students for Concealed Carry on Campus.”

Within a week, he said recently, his project had a working website and flourishing Facebook group.

Mr. Brown, now 32, hasn’t been an active member of the concealed-carry movement for years, but he continues to support it as member of the Facebook group he founded. He says he ran the group for about six months before relinquishing it to others.

Since its founding in 2007, the organization has transformed from what Mr. Brown described as “a bunch of kids” congregating on Facebook to tens of thousands of Second Amendment enthusiasts who speak out in hopes of being permitted to arm themselves with concealed handguns on campuses across the country.

On August 1, Texas became the latest state where they can legally do so, when a new law took affect allowing people with concealed-carry permits to carry their weapons inside buildings on public university campuses.

The passage of the Texas measure, known as Senate Bill 11, prompted fierce opposition on the state’s campuses. Students, staff, and faculty members have expressed dismay over the legislation, which they consider dangerous.

Mr. Brown doesn’t view guns in a negative light. When he started his Facebook group, he was a frequent visitor to multiple online forums and message boards for gun hobbyists, sports shooters, and Second Amendment advocates. He found that many of them were eager to help get his fledging organization running. The Facebook group became a platform for gun enthusiasts to exchange ideas.

Before long, chapters were popping up and Mr. Brown, becoming overwhelmed by his new responsibilities, decided it was best to give the reins to more energetic campus-carry advocates.

The group has come a long way since its early days on social media. Chapters have been established on college campuses across the United States. Some states have directors who manage campus leaders’ efforts within their states. Together, they collaborate on how best to get their message out. A national board, made up of regional directors and other high-ranking members, governs the organization and decides which groups of students can become official chapters.

Some members, like Antonia Okafor, the group’s Southwest regional director, regularly appear on conservative talk shows, such as Fox & Friends. Ms. Okafor recently starred in a commercial for the National Rifle Association.

Philip Harding, the group’s director for the Rocky Mountain region, became interested in guns when he was a student at the University of South Alabama, in 2010. He worked part-time at a sporting-goods store that sold guns, and his on-the-job experiences inspired him to rekindle a defunct chapter on his campus. Now 27, Mr. Harding said he’s focused on expanding campus carry to more of the states that he oversees — Colorado, Utah, and Idaho already allow it.

“We definitely are moving at a brisker pace,” he said. Now that a few more states have recently moved to adopt campus-carry laws, he added, “we’ve had a lot more activity, a lot more students wanting to get involved, a lot more chapters springing up all at once.”

But many of their anti-gun opponents have been mounting strategies to counter those efforts, even as Students for Concealed Carry has grown.

In 2008, Andy Pelosi co-founded a national organization that opposes legislation that would make carrying guns on campus legal. The Campaign to Keep Guns Off Campus, he said, works mostly with faculty members, but also students.

Mr. Pelosi, who is the organization’s executive director, predicted that gun advocates in Texas would next year introduce measures aiming to eliminate restrictions on where concealed firearms can be carried. (Some areas have been designated as gun-free zones.) To counter that effort and other pieces of pro-gun legislation, he said, the campaign has organized in specific states and has been circulating a petition that opposes legislation that would legalize carrying concealed firearms on college campuses. So far, the campaign has collected signatures from 420 colleges and universities in 42 states, he said.

Next year, Mr. Pelosi says, his organization is likely to oppose gun legislation in several states, including Alaska, Arizona, Florida, Georgia, Indiana, Michigan, and Ohio.

Michael Newbern, assistant director of public relations at Students for Concealed Carry, said his organization was getting ready to lobby next year for guns on campus in many of those states.

Mr. Newbern said members of his group are encouraged to mentor the next generation, and to focus their efforts in the places where they’re likely to get the most traction.

“Some campuses are very hostile environments,” when it comes to concealed carry, he said. “And so sometimes it takes a special kind of person to do those things.”