Denial Of Campus Guns ‘Good Sense’

NorthWest Arkansas Community College recently renewed its policy prohibiting the concealed carry of a gun on its campuses.

The policy applies on the main Bentonville campus as well as any of the school's other locations.

Expect other institutions of higher learning to do the same in short order, if they haven't already banned the weapons at their respective colleges and universities for another year.

It's all a reflection of the institutions' collective good sense, despite legislative authority to open campuses to gun.

It was about this time a year ago that the various governing boards were rapidly opting out of a then-new state law that allows full-time staff and faculty members who have a concealed carry permit to carry guns on the campuses. State lawmakers had decided that qualifying employees of such institutions should be allowed to carry guns but passed the law with an opt-out provision that the state's colleges and universities quickly jumped on.

It was the only way that law could have passed. The opt-out provision kept the institutions from lobbying against the bill. They could live with the legislation only if they didn't have to follow it.

There had been a swell of opposition to the law on the various campuses, which caused the bill to stall in the Legislature. But the bill's sponsor wouldn't give up on passing something.

Ultimately, lawmakers got to look good to gun advocates while administrators got to keep their academic institutions free of concealed weapons.

The process is an unnecessarily burdensome one, requiring the opt-out be approved on each of the campuses every year. That means the policy must go through some academic governance hoops not once but once a year.

Last year, the various campuses decided one by one against allowing guns to be carried in the academic environment.

That's what happened again Monday at NorthWest Arkansas Community College when the board of trustees voted 6-1 to maintain the policy prohibiting guns. The administration and the presidents of the Faculty Senate, Staff Council and Student Government Association all had also endorsed the ban.

Note that one of the school's trustees, Todd Schwartz, voted to allow concealed carry on the NWACC campus. He did so last year and again this year.

Last month, at a public forum on the issue, there were also a few staff members who supported the option for concealed carry permittees to have guns in their cars for protection as they travel to and from home.

Still, while there is some support for concealed carry, the much wider community on NWACC's campus and on others has objected to allowing guns to proliferate, even in the hands of well-meaning people with permits to carry them.

The greater worry, of course, involves less well-intentioned people who might bring a gun to campus, but there are also concerns about accidental discharge of a gun if more of them are on campus.

Just such an accident occurred on the University of Arkansas campus at the radio station last year. A student shot himself when showing someone the gun he had carried onto campus.

The UA has experienced the other kind of incident, too, when a disturbed student shot and killed a professor several years ago.

Those are the incidents that ought to be remembered when the colleges and universities reconsider allowing more guns on campus.

Weapons on campuses are better left to security people, who are much better trained to have them -- and not to use them. Leave it to them to protect the students, faculty and staffs on our campuses.

Commentary on 04/16/2014

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