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A victory for gun rights advocatesAppeals court rules in favor of proponents of concealed carry on campusPeter Marcus, DDN Staff WriterFriday, April 16, 2010 | |
The Colorado Court of Appeals yesterday ruled in favor of students seeking the right to carry concealed weapons on campus.
The appeals court reversed an earlier ruling by El Paso County District Judge David Miller who dismissed a lawsuit filed in 2008 by Students for Concealed Carry on Campus, seeking to overturn the University of Colorado’s gun ban.
The unanimous ruling comes as a huge break for gun rights advocates who oppose campus gun bans. The case will now head back to district court.
University of Colorado officials immediately raised concerns over undermining their jurisdiction over campus policies. But attorney Jim Manley, who is representing Students for Concealed Carry on Campus in its lawsuit, called the ruling a “victory.”
“This decision is a victory for individual freedom and a victory for the rule of law,” he said in a statement. “The court vindicated the right to licensed concealed carry on campus and the Constitutional protection for the right to keep and bear arms.”
The CU Board of Regents banned weapons on campus in 1970 and then added teeth to the policy in 1994. Colorado State University also recently overturned a long-standing policy allowing concealed carry on campus.
Rocky Mountain Gun Owners yesterday filed a lawsuit against CSU also seeking to overturn the Board of Governor’s decision to ban concealed carry on campus. Officials with the state’s largest gun rights organization said yesterday was a good one for the movement.
“This is a good day for gun owners, and for the safety of students, faculty and citizens who frequent college campuses,” said Dudley Brown, executive director of Rocky Mountain Gun Owners. “CSU’s ban only had one legitimate leg to stand on, and now even that’s gone.”
The two lawsuits are similar. Both argue that the gun bans violate concealed carry law in Colorado, which states that no local government may limit state law when it comes to concealed carry.
Judge Miller, however, dismissed the Students for Concealed Carry on Campus lawsuit last year, finding that the Colorado Concealed Carry Act only applies to local government, not statewide institutions like universities. The appeals court thought differently.
CSU and CU officials are once again concerned about how their jurisdiction will be affected if judges rule in favor of gun rights advocates. CU System spokesman Ken McConnellogue says the issue for his system isn’t so much about gun rights as much as it’s about preserving the system as a sort of fourth, independent branch of government. He points out that the state constitution gives institutions of higher education their own, independent authority to govern campuses.
“We’re disappointed in the decision in that for CU, this case is not so much about guns or no guns, but about the autonomy of the Board of Regents to govern the university, as detailed in the Colorado Constitution,” McConnellogue said yesterday.
Officials with both CSU and CU are currently exploring their options, including appealing yesterday’s ruling.
Only a very small handful of universities across the country allow concealed weapons. In the 23 states that allow state universities to decide their own gun policies, almost all of them ban weapons on campus. Michigan State University has allowed weapons since last summer and Blue Ridge Community College in Virginia has allowed weapons since 1995. Utah prohibits a ban on campus weapons at all its state campuses, keeping in line with its concealed carry law.
Former Congressman Tom Tancredo, a Republican, is working on a proposed 2010 ballot measure that would ask Colorado voters to recommend to state leaders that they oppose all forms of gun restriction.
But gun control advocates say restrictions are necessary to keep the public safe, especially at universities. A demonstration is planned for Sunday outside a downtown Denver Starbucks where family members of victims of both the Virginia Tech and Columbine High School massacres will call on Starbucks executives to reverse a decision to allow open carry supporters to hold meetings inside Starbucks coffee houses while wearing loaded firearms.
Today is the third anniversary of the Virginia Tech massacre that took the lives of 32 students and teachers, and Tuesday will be the 11th anniversary of the Columbine massacre that took the lives of 12 students and a teacher.
“It’s not just in high schools that we see bullies in action,” said Tom Mauser, a gun control activist who lost his son during the Columbine massacre. “We now have grown-up gun extremists trying to bully Starbucks into accepting behavior that most Americans consider unnecessary and dangerous.”
The Washington, D.C.-based Brady Center to Prevent Gun Violence, which had filed a brief urging the Colorado Court of Appeals to uphold CU’s gun policy, agrees that gun control is necessary to curb gun violence.
“We are disappointed by this ruling that could result in students and transient visitors carrying loaded semiautomatic weapons at the University of Colorado,” said Paul Helmke, president of the Brady Center to Prevent Gun Violence. “We hope the university appeals this ruling to ensure that students and faculty are protected from the severe danger posed by loaded weapons on campus.”
| Comments: |
| Rob @ 2010-04-16 07:32:07 | The Board of Regents is being disingenuous in citing their constitutional authority to govern university campuses. They leave out the fact that their authority is explicitly subordinate to state law. Since the state law on concealed carry makes all restrictions, except those explicitly exempted in the law itself (colleges and universities are not exempted), illegal, their authority is moot. The state constitution, which gives them their powers, says they do not have the authority to make rules that violate state law. What they're trying to claim is that they can.
And Mr. Mauser needs to look long and hard in the morror. Starbucks is just doing what most national corporations do - allowing local and state laws to govern. No one petitioned them to do this, or protested to get them to. The only people who have ever tried to "bully" Starbucks are Mr. Mauser and his associates, who are doing just that in protesting the policy that Starbucks chose to adopt for itself based on its own corporate values, despite the fact that the company has made clear its position and publicly asked to be left out of the political debate on the subject of gun rights and gun control. |
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| Pro US @ 2010-04-16 08:39:57 | Let's tally the number of incidents involving law-abiding citizens lawfully carry their firearm on college campuses.
The number must be huge. Okay, I have finished. The total number is - wait for it - Zero.
Why do people hate the constitution so much? The 2nd Amendment was codified for a reason, people. |
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| MAJOR @ 2010-04-16 08:44:30 | The gun bans certainly did not help the victims of the Columbine massacre and V-Tech. Had someone responsible been armed, maybe many would still be alive. |
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| Mike Ebel @ 2010-04-16 08:53:29 | If the schools decide to ban firearms without any added security for students and faculty then they should also be financially liable if someone who would of had a firearm to defend themselves was disarmed and hurt or killed. If it hit them in there precious pocket book the ban would go away especially if to comply they had to install metal detectors and security personal to make the ban actually work. Because guess what right now there are firearms on campus but it is only the criminals that have them the law abiding are the only ones that are disarmed. |
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| CSU Vet @ 2010-04-16 09:30:02 | ARob, you could look at the fact that concealed carry has been allowed at 11 colleges for a total of 71 years with no incidents of any kind involving a concealed carry permit holder. If it was such a BAD idea don't you think something would have happened by now? |
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| Rob @ 2010-04-16 12:50:00 | ARob, first, yours is a stereotypical characterization that is certainly not remotely true for a very large portion of university students. Second, you must be at least 21 to carry a concealed weapon, so the vast majority of students, particularly those within the age groups where such reckless behavior is concentrated, would still be prohibited under state law. Instead it would be almost entirely faculty, staff, and adult commuter students who would be affected. Third, as CSU Vet pointed out, this isn't new. Most universities didn't ban weapons at all for decades, and even today there are several that don't, and not a single one of them has experienced any adverse incidents with concealed carry firearms, despite many people carrying. Finally, instead of engaging in ad hominem attacks and name-calling, why don't you educate yourself? According to the CDC there are 200,000 cases reported every year of what you ignorantly call "armchair rambos" successfully defending themselves against violent crimes with firearms, and estimates of how many instances go unreported every year are up to 2 million. That's an awful lot of people every year who successfully defend themselves, using a gun, rather than "wetting themselves". Like most deprecating statements I see and hear made by anti-gun people against gun owners, yours sound more like transference of your own insecurities and inadequacies, not any actual knowledge of anyone else's. |
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| James @ 2010-04-17 18:31:33 | No need to take this to court. Just stop subsidizing the universities until they change their policy. |
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| Jerome @ 2010-04-17 19:39:58 | "gun control advocates say restrictions are necessary to keep the public safe, especially at universities."
Paul Helmke, president of the Brady Center to Prevent Gun Violence said “We hope the university appeals this ruling to ensure that students and faculty are protected from the severe danger posed by loaded weapons on campus.”
So it seems that school shooting victims and their family's should sue the school, and gun control organizations, since their statements justify disarming victims by assuming liabilityfor their protection. |
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| Advendytorver @ 2010-05-17 22:14:15 | |
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