In New Hampshire, a Setback for Second Amendment Rights on Campus

A legislative effort to eliminate gun-free zones on public college campuses has died. But for its student sponsor, the fight isn’t over yet.

On Thursday, an effort to eliminate gun-free zones on New Hampshire college campuses fizzled out in the state Legislature, when the Senate voted against a committee of conference to renegotiate the bill with House leaders. Despite the setback, proponents of the legislation say they're not done.

"We'll be pursuing this with a legal challenge," says state Rep. Sam Farrington (R–Rochester), who sponsored the bill, which would have also allowed students to carry nonlethal weapons such as pepper spray and mace. Farrington, who graduated from the University of New Hampshire (UNH) last Saturday, says the challenge will be under New Hampshire's "pre-emption statute," which prohibits any "political subdivision" other than the state Legislature from regulating firearms. He thinks that policies that ban guns from campus, imposed by "unelected administrators at public universities," fall into that category.

UNH says that its restrictions were "adopted under authority granted by the Legislature to the Board of Trustees and campus presidents to govern university property."

For now, New Hampshire is one of 37 states where college campuses are gun-free zones. This includes Rhode Island and Virginia, where Brown University and Old Dominion University, respectively, were each sites of deadly shootings this school year. Indeed, according to the Crime Prevention Research Center, more than 80 percent of mass public shootings since 1998 "have occurred in places where guns are banned." (Other estimates, using different criteria for "gun-free zone" and "mass shooting," have arrived at lower figures: 48 percent, even 10 percent.)

So as much as Farrington wrote his bill to protect students' Second Amendment rights, "it's also a safety issue," he says. "At UNH, for example…doors are left wide open, buildings are wide open. Anybody can walk in at any point in time."

"Gun-free zones," Farrington tells Reason, "leave victims defenseless and vulnerable."

High-quality research on the question is sparse, but the only study on gun-free zones that met the RAND Corporation's inclusion criteria for its "Gun Policy Research Review" found "that campus carry laws are not significantly related to violent or property crime on campus" between 2005 and 2014, meaning they neither made students safer nor endangered them. However, it did show that "campuses located in states that allow unpermitted concealed carry"—like New Hampshire—had "lower property crime rates," suggesting that some positive relationship exists between firearm access and campus safety.

Though universities might point to their campus security teams or cooperations with local law enforcement as evidence of their commitment to student safety, Farrington is skeptical. "You can't trust the government police officers to defend you," he says, referencing the 2005 Castle Rock v. Gonzales decision, in which the Supreme Court ruled that law enforcement cannot be held liable for failing or refusing to protect citizens from threats they did not create. "You need to take it upon yourself, and that's why this right is so important," says Farrington.

In the wake of this year's campus shootings, more students around the country are beginning to share Farrington's skepticism. Notable is a spate of op-eds that appeared shortly after the Brown shooting in the Yale Daily News, decrying flaws in Yale's security approach.

One student pointed out that campus security officers—who outnumber Yale Police Department officers 140 to 93—are unarmed. In the case of an emergency, they're tasked with simply telling students to hide and then calling the police, who are actually equipped to deal with a threat. He recommended that Yale, which is a gun-free campus, provide its security officers with some kind of incapacitating weaponry, or at the very least, expand its armed police department.

Of course, mass shootings are a much rarer threat than everyday robberies and assaults. But even then, many campus security solutions are ill-equipped to protect students. In another op-ed, Yale student and active-duty U.S. Marine Timothy Riemann noted that Yale's campus-wide safety alerts—which report all muggings, robberies, or shots fired on campus—always omit the perpetrator's race, providing "deliberately incomplete information" to students who might be in danger.

"To me," Riemann wrote, "it signals that the University prioritizes the potential or theoretical harm caused by including race as an identifying characteristic over the very real safety of its own students, faculty and staff."

But in the months since these criticisms were levied, Yale has indicated no plans to change course, leaving its security approach stuck in the same rut as other universities nationwide. Pending the outcome of Farrington's legal action, things could change for students enrolled at public New Hampshire colleges. But for now, they—along with other students around the country—have no choice but to put their trust in a flawed campus security paradigm.