Guns on campus? Of course!
In an AJC poll two years ago, Georgia voters were asked a question:
“Do you favor or oppose allowing students to carry guns on college campuses and in college dorms?”
Just 20 percent supported allowing guns on campus; 78 percent opposed it. Seventy-one percent of Republicans opposed it; 71 percent of voters in North Georgia opposed it; more than 80 percent of those in South Georgia opposed it. Male, female, black, white, Republican, Democrat, urban, rural, old, young: Georgians overwhelmingly opposed it.
Yet this week, House Republicans introduced legislation that would legalize firearms on campus anyway. House Bill 859 has already been embraced by House Speaker David Ralston, who argues that “getting a college degree should not mean abdicating your Second Amendment rights.”
Ralston is an attorney, and a smart one at that. So he knows — or ought to know — that he is spouting legal nonsense. If carrying weapons on a college campus was a right protected by the Constitution, no state legislation would be necessary — Georgia’s law against it would have been overturned years ago.
That hasn’t happened, and the reason is obvious. In a landmark 2008 decision written by Justice Antonin Scalia, the U.S. Supreme Court confirmed an individual right to own firearms. But Scalia — one of the more conservative jurists in our nation’s history — took the time to make this explicit:
“… nothing in our opinion should be taken to cast doubt on … laws forbidding the carrying of firearms in sensitive places such as schools and government buildings.”
So imagine if you’re a professor meeting a student angry about a grade, and the student shows up at your office with a sidearm. Under HB 859, the professor would have no ability to object and in fact would be violating the student’s right by doing so. Imagine that after a heated classroom discussion, one of the angry students shows up armed at the next scheduled class. Again, neither the professor nor fellow students would have legal recourse to object.
No private business would expose its employees to such an environment. Very few allow workers to bring and carry private firearms on the job, and very few allow customers to do so either. The Georgia General Assembly certainly doesn’t allow its constituents to show up armed at Capitol offices. Yet that’s what we may soon impose on university system employees.
In that same AJC poll, 82 percent supported requiring a gun-safety course as a condition of receiving a permit. (Georgia law requires none.) Just 17 percent opposed it. Just 15 percent of Republicans opposed it. Three bills creating such a system have been introduced in the current legislative session, but they are doomed.
Under HB 331, for example, the training would be free to the public. It would include instruction in basic firearm safety, information on proper storage “with an emphasis on storage practices that reduce the possibility of accidental injury to a child,” and instruction on state law regarding legal use of such weapons.
Many if not most responsible gun owners would embrace such reasonable law. But in the Georgia General Assembly, the odds of passage are about the same as a resolution making Barack Obama president for life.
