Order 1062932: Guns on Campus

Guns on University Campuses: The Colorado Experience

The Washington Post

By David Kopel April 20

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/volokh-conspiracy/wp/2015/04/20/guns-on-university-

campuses-the-colorado-experience/

Texas appears poised to join the growing number of states allowing licensed, trained adults to

carry concealed handguns for lawful protection on the campuses of public universities and

colleges. In Texas, as elsewhere, opponents offer a parade of horribles about the supposed

results: heated classroom discussion of Sophocles will result in gunfights; students will threaten

to kill professors who gave them a bad grade, and so on. Since Colorado has had licensed guns

on campus for over a decade, it may be helpful to look at the experience there.

For most of Colorado’s history, firearms were legal on public university campuses. That began to

change in 1970, due to concerns about campus violence by terrorist organizations such as the

Weather Underground.

In 2003, the Colorado legislature enacted the Concealed Carry Act. The statute was written by

County Sheriffs of Colorado, the organization which represents all 62 of Colorado’s elected

Sheriffs. The Act passed with broad bipartisan support, including all Republicans and almost

every Democrat except some from Denver and Boulder. The National Rifle Association and the

Firearms Coalition of Colorado supported the Act.

According to the Concealed Carry Act, a carry permit is valid “throughout the state,” with

certain exceptions. Private property owners can ban guns on their property. (For example, the

Aurora movie theater that was attacked in July 2012 had exercised its right to forbid licensed

carry.) At K-12 schools, guns may be in automobiles, but not carried outside the automobile.

Government buildings can prohibit licensed carry, as long as they make themselves into genuine

gun-free zones: public entrances to such buildings must have security personnel with metal

detectors.

The bill has no special exemption for public institutions of higher education; an amendment to

create such an exemption was proposed on the House floor, and defeated. Of cousre since the

Concealed Carry Act requires that a permitee be at least 21 years old, most undergraduates were

not eligible for permits. When the Concealed Carry Act became law on July 1, 2003, Colorado

State University (30,000 students; main campus in Fort Collins) promptly complied. In 12 years

of licensed carry at CSU, there have never been any problems caused by licensed carriers.

Things were different at the University of Colorado (30,000 students, main campus in Boulder).

Then-Attorney General Ken Salazar issued an non-binding opinion stating that the University of

Colorado did not have to obey the Concealed Carry Act. The University of Colorado is the only

institution of higher education specifically named in the Colorado Constitution, and some cases

have held that CU does not have to comply with some generally-applicable statutes, unless the

statute specifically states that it covers CU.

CU enforced its gun prohibition vigorously, based on a 1994 Regents’ policy that guns are

“offensive” to the University’s “values.” So, for example, getting from one side of Boulder to the

other often requires driving through a public street which cuts through campus. University police

would arrest drivers on that street who had a licensed handgun in their automobile.

Students for Concealed Carry on Campus brought a lawsuit a few years later, represented by

attorney Jim Manley (a recent CU Law graduate) of the Mountain States Legal Foundation.

SCCC was founded in 2008, on the night of the Virginia Tech murders, and advocates for

campus safety for students.

SCCC lost in the state district court, won in the Court of the Appeals, and the case went to the

Colorado Supreme Court. I filed an amicus brief presenting the views of County Sheriffs of

Colorado. The Sheriffs argued that the right to carry firearms is important for public safety,

because law enforcement officers cannot be everywhere at once. Further, adults who are granted

permits by the Sheriffs to carry a handgun anywhere in the state do not become a menace to

society when they set foot on campus.

As the brief explained, Colorado’s law, like the law of almost every other state, provides an

objective process for issuing permits to responsible adults. In Colorado, an applicant must be at

least 21 years old, pass a fingerprint-based background check, and a safety-training class taught

by a nationally-certified instructor. Even if a person meets all these conditions, the statute

instructs the Sheriff to deny the application “if the sheriff has a reasonable belief that

documented previous behavior by the applicant makes it likely the applicant will present a

danger to self or others.”

As a result, in Colorado, as in other states, persons with carry permits, tend to be highly law-

abiding. For example, in the five-year period between 2009-13, there were 154,434 concealed

handgun carry permits issued in Colorado. During this same period, 1,390 permits were revoked.

931 of these permits were revoked following an arrest. Contrast this with the arrests of over

200,000 Colorado adults in 2013 alone.

The Colorado Sheriffs’ support for defensive arms carrying is confirmed by national data. For

example, the U.S. Census Bureau conducts in-person interviews with several thousand persons

annually, for the National Crime Victimization Survey. In 1992-2002, over 2,000 of the persons

interviewed disclosed they had been raped or sexually assaulted. Of them, only 26 volunteered

that they used a weapon to resist. In none of those 26 cases was the rape completed; in none of

the cases did the victim suffer additional injury after she deployed her weapon.

Professor Gary Kleck, author of the above study, then conducted a much broader examination of

NCVS data. Analyzing a data set of 27,595 attempted violent crimes and 16 types of protective

actions, Kleck found that resisting with a gun greatly lowered the risk of the victim being

injured, or of the crime being completed.

In 2012 the Colorado Supreme Court ruled 7-0 that the University of Colorado must obey the

Concealed Carry Act. This was consistent with precedent that CU has no special exemption from

civil rights statutes.

But in 2013, a bill was introduced to outlaw licensed carry on all campuses. Rape survivor

Amanda Collins testified before the Senate State Affairs Committee about how a ban on campus

carry had affected her life. As a 21-year-old, Ms Collins had a Nevada defensive handgun

license. But the University of Nevada at Reno did not allow licensed firearms on campus. She

was raped in the parking garage of the campus police station, which was closed for the night.

The crime took place just a few feet from an emergency call box. “How does rendering me

defenseless protect you against a violent crime?” she asked the Colorado Senators. State Senator

Evie Hudak told Collins that if Collins had been carrying a gun, statistics showed that the gun

would have been taken from her. Actually, statistics show that fewer than one percent of

defensive gun use results in the defender’s gun being taken.

“Respectfully senator, you weren’t there,” Collins responded. “Had I been carrying concealed, he

wouldn’t have known I had my weapon; and I was there. I know without a doubt in my mind at

some point I would’ve been able to stop my attack by using my firearm. He already had a

weapon of his own; he didn’t need mine.”

Because the rapist was not stopped that night, he later raped two more women and murdered one.

Senator Hudak resigned in December 2013, to avoid a recall election.

The experience on Colorado campuses since 2003, and at the University of Colorado since 2012,

shows that adult students or professors who are permitted by their local Sheriff to carry a

concealed handgun for lawful protection do not perpetrate unlawful aggression. There has been

one case in which an employee at CU’s dental school was showing off her gun, and accidentally

fired it. She was immediately and properly fired.

Colleges should respect the rights of responsible persons, such as Amanda Collins, to protect

themselves. As the Sheriffs told the Colorado Supreme Court, law-abiding adults who have been

licensed to carry guns throughout the state should retain their self-defense rights when they

attend or teach at a public institution of higher education.

David Kopel is Research Director, Independence Institute, Denver, Colorado; Associate Policy Analyst, Cato

Institute, Washington, D.C; and Adjunct professor of advanced constitutional law, Denver University, Sturm

College of Law. He is author of 15 books and 90 scholarly journal articles.

Article Citation:

Kopel, David. "Guns on University Campuses: The Colorado Experience." The Washington Post. 20 Apr.

2015. Web. 09 July 2015.