The New York Times has found a policy on segregated housing that it’s willing to endorse, it seems:
Gun-toting students 21 or older will be assigned to special housing on the Boulder and Colorado Springs campuses, where they must have safes to store their weapons when they are not carrying them. Or they can check them with the local police, Dodge City style.
I’m not OK with public universities interfering with the Second Amendment rights of adults, but I’m fine with requiring students who will keep firearms in a dorm to have a locking safe or cabinet. I think it would also be reasonable to mandate some kind of clearing station, even if it’s just a bucket of sand. The segregation is not OK. If a dorm mate objects to the presence of a firearm, then reassign them, and find them someone who doesn’t object. It’s not a hard solution.
Hell, I like the segregated dorm idea. There are plenty of places that are marked as target-rich environments, and I like the idea of publicizing that the ratio of shooters to victims is close to 100%. I asked my oldest about his thoughts on this (he’s living on campus at ASU). He replied: “I know which dorm I’d request to move into. Safest building in the city.”
Haha that’s brilliant.
I’m OK, as long as the college will provide safe/cabinet. Otherwise it’s a tax on gun possession. Safes are not cheap.
I tend to think dorms should provide safes just generally. Cuts down on thievery overall, and you won’t have as much strife in dorm life.
Living in a dorm means knowing at least one and probably several other people will have keys to your living space. If there’s ever a chance you’re going to leave your firearm(s) in your dorm room while you’re not there, they won’t be secure as long as your roommate or RA has a key. I don’t think it’s unreasonable to insist that if you want to have a gun in a shared public housing unit that you must provide a way to secure it.
I believe there’s a lawsuit concerning possessing firearms in public housing that disagrees with you. That’s a very bad view to set, because if you rent, your landlord almost always has access to your space; and you can (I did) have roommates outside of the college life. Thanks but no thanks.
I don’t think it’s so much that someone else has a key, so much as the shared living arrangement. If public housing were done that way, I’d agree that there would be an interest in keeping firearms stored securely. But in the case of public housing, since those people are poor, if the government wants to require it, for it to be constitutional, they have to provide the safe.
And I agree that would be a good constitutional standard for dorms too. If you’re a public entity, and you want the regulation, cough up the money or materials to comply with it.
This brings up an interesting potential problem. As we’ve seen previously, certain GFW professors have said they don’t want guns in their classes. Of course being concealed, the professor has no way of knowing. Except that being forced to live in certain dorms, and being forced to disclose their carry status with the campus housing people, carriers are open to being “outed” either unintentionally through carelessness on the part of the housing people or intentionally by campus administrators with malicious intent.
That’s ripe for a bias suit, since the professor has no way of knowing if you are carrying concealed at any time, his shutting down class based on your life outside of his classroom is stupid and discriminatory.
where sre the NAACP, the ACLU, and the LGBT communities and there leaders on this segregation issue. Wait i know they are all for it cuz it does not fit there narrative.
The gnu safe requirement does not pass constitutional muster in light of the Heller case.
“Similarly, the requirement that any lawful firearm in the home be disassembled or bound by a trigger lock makes it impossible for citizens to use arms for the core lawful purpose of self-defense and is hence unconstitutional. “
You could make a good argument on constitutionality either way. The safe storage requirement in Heller essentially required that the firearm never be available for self-defense in any circumstance. I’d say if the school required the firearm to always be in the safe when the student is not carrying it, it would be unconstitutional. But to require use of a safe when the firearm is being stored? I think that’s distinct from the situation in Heller. There’s also the fact that the school here is a property owner. The same rule generally applied should face a higher level of scrutiny, for the fact that I always keep my firearms under lock and key when I leave the house, because I lock my doors. I think the situation also changes if you’re dealing with dorm rooms where there is only one occupant.
On a related note, at CSU all housing bans all firearms no exceptions for having a safe or if you are an adult living with your spouse. CSU has for several years allowed CC on campus and in classes/buildings.
http://policies.colostate.edu/PolicyLibrary.aspx?nav=W
“2. Concealed Weapons: Individuals carrying concealed handguns must have a lawful Colorado concealed weapons permit issued by a Colorado sheriff in accordance with the Colorado Revised Statutes, section 18-12-206. However, concealed handguns may not be carried or stored in the residence halls or CSU apartments at any time, per the Mandatory Firearm Check-in and Storage policy (above).â€
When I lived in the dorms as a freshman at a University of California school, people who said they were gay got single rooms, it was not quite as accepted 20 years ago as it is now, and the risk of anyone claiming to be gay just to get a single was probably nil.
It seems in 2012, as far as housing is concerned, carrying a gun is the college equivalent of being gay in in the early 90s.
Gay dudes and girls totally had the best rooms in the dorms. But, if you had a single room as a freshman, people automatically assumed you were gay.
Drop the requirement that kids live in the dorm, and get the government out of the business of renting rooms to college kids.
Where it can get weird is when a State-Funded University REQUIRES all Freshman to live in the Dorms, like they do at the University of Akron, my Alma Mater. Trust me, some 20-Something Iraq/Afghanistan Vets told them to “Pack Sand,” and they won against the University. Now the rule is 18-21 years old. but there’s been some movement to get that overturned. Something about being 18 years old making one a Legal Adult with Voting Rights….
And trust me, the “No Guns on Campus” rules? Well, it’s kinda hard to check out 20,000 Students BackPacks several times a day. So I suspect some of my Fellow Classmates were “Packing,” especially AFTER Va. Tech went down.
All these College Rules tell us that trying to keep adult Students Disarmed is the equivalent of having Separate Water Fountains down in the South during Jim Crow days.