A ruling by the Oregon Court of Appeals this week is causing no small degree of consternation among Beaver State university officials, and their colleagues north of the Columbia River might want to give the issue some attention because it overrules campus bans on firearms thanks to Oregon’s preemption statute.
Washington adopted state preemption in 1983 and strengthened it two years later. The Evergreen State law has become a model for preemption statutes in several other states. Yet here in Washington, universities and colleges still prohibit even legally-licensed students, staff and teachers from being armed on campus, under state administrative codes.
Those codes, say gun rights activists, do not trump state law.
It is a dilemma made even more difficult by the growing interest in personal protection that is being fueled by Students for Concealed Carry on Campus. SCCC was founded the day after the Virginia Tech massacre in 2007. Students who were legally able to carry guns anywhere else decided that they wanted a fighting chance in the classroom if something like the Virginia Tech massacre occurred on their campus.
Naturally, university officials are terrified of the proposition, as are some students. Remarkably, or perhaps not so much, the Portland Oregonian reported yesterday that one critic of the court ruling is Ben Eckstein, the 21-year-old student body president at the University of Oregon. Here’s what he said:
"Students feel our college campus should be a place where we can learn safely, engage safely. When anybody brings a lethal weapon on campus, it threatens our ability to learn safely."
One is compelled to ask Eckstein why he would think this. What about armed police officers; how do studies differ when there’s an armed cop moving around campus?
Oh, that’s different? How? Eckstein said “when anybody brings a lethal weapon on campus…” Don’t police fall under the broad definition of “anybody?”
George Pernsteiner, chancellor of the Oregon University System, mouthed the same brand of rhetoric in reaction to the court’s ruling.
“The OUS campuses have worked over the past few years at a high level of diligence to put in place alert systems that will notify students and all campus members of any potential threat to safety. These systems and actions will continue to be in place and we will review if there are additional actions we should take to ensure that we are protecting students and their learning environment.”
What makes Pernsteiner believe that the campus would be imperiled by some person legally carrying a firearm on campus? Guns do not automatically turn people into kill-crazed demons. If they did, America would have a real problem, because some 80 million citizens here legally own firearms, and there are some estimates that the number of arms in private hands reaches as high as 200 million.
But as this column noted, gun ownership has been climbing steadily in recent years, while violent crime rates have been declining. Why should college campuses be any different than the neighborhoods surrounding them?
Universities and colleges are supposed to be training grounds for tomorrow’s leaders. If we are talking about gun-shy folks like Mr. Eckstein appears to be, the future may hold lots of gun rights litigation.
Washington’s preemption statute is at issue in the City of Seattle’s appeal of a 2010 Superior Court ruling that struck down its ban on firearms on city park property. A ruling from the state court of appeals is anticipated sometime this autumn.
Legally-armed people behave themselves. They contrast to people who are illegally armed, whose behavior patterns have already cost them their gun rights.
One might ask whether any of these universities and colleges have courses on constitutional law. If so, the discussion about Second Amendment rights under McDonald v. City of Chicago should remind universities that civil rights do not stop at school property lines.
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