Students and professors will be legally
allowed to carry concealed handguns onto college campuses starting Saturday in
the US state of Kansas.
The concealed carry law was enacted four years
ago and applied to all public buildings, but colleges in the Midwestern state
were exempted until July of this year.
The law is the latest in a series of state
legislative efforts around the country to address the issue of campus safety
from potential shooters.
Some approaches tightened restrictions on guns
while others made them more available with the goal of allowing potential
targets of gun violence to defend themselves with their own weapons.
Kansas is joining Arkansas, Georgia and other
states with laws that allow students and faculty to carry guns on college
campuses. California and South Carolina are among 16 states that ban the
practice.
The Kansas law would still let universities
ban concealed guns, but only if they provide students with metal detectors at
entrances to buildings, which school administrators have said would be
prohibitively expensive.
The concealed carry law has prompted some
faculty to leave state universities, according to Topeka TV station KSNT, even
as campus administrators offered guidance and information to help students and
staff understand the new requirements.
“I am looking for another job,” Philip Nel, an
English professor at Kansas State University, told KSNT, “I will not teach
armed students, because that’s crazy.”
Wichita State University emphasized in its
guidance that the law still allows for multiple prohibitions.
Universities can still ban other weapons and
firearms, aside from concealed handguns, and only those 21 and older are
permitted to carry concealed guns, the university said.
“Nothing in this policy shall be interpreted
to require individuals who lawfully possess a handgun to use it in defense of
others,” its guidance said.
Universities can also still ban guns from
sports games and other events, if they provide security and metal detectors.
Kansas lawmakers this year also passed another
exemption to the concealed carry law — maintaining a ban on guns at state
mental institutions and public hospitals, including those on university
campuses.
“The right to bear arms is essential towards
preserving our freedoms and maintaining self-government,” Kansas’s Republican
governor Sam Brownback, who had supported the 2013 law, said in a statement
endorsing the exemption for hospitals, saying “this bill does appropriately
address safety concerns.”
Other Republican state lawmakers also endorsed
the latest measure.
“The optics of guns in mental health hospitals
obviously is, you know, not defendable,” Jim Denning, majority leader of the
state senate, told The Kansas City Star newspaper.
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