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“Campus carry” is a convenient nickname for the issue of guns on campus, but it also obscures the wide variation in the laws and their implementations.

Ten states already allow guns on campus by law in some manner—Arkansas, Colorado, Idaho, Kansas, Mississippi, Oregon, Tennessee, Texas, Utah, and Wisconsin. Some of those still impose limitations or outright prohibitions of guns on state college and university campuses. And all of them involve tradeoffs and customizations, whether through policy or litigation.

Utah is the only state to put the right to regulate guns on public campuses entirely in the hands of the legislature. In other cases, broader gun laws were interpreted not to exclude colleges and universities. Such is the case in Colorado, where guns are authorized by virtue of two Court of Appeals decisions regarding challenges to the state’s 2003 Concealed Carry Act.

A similar verdict established the right to bear arms on campuses in Oregon. Even so, Oregon’s State Board of Higher Education has banned guns from all buildings on campus after a Court of Appeals decision overturned an outright administrative ban. A 2013 Arkansas campus gun law also allowed only faculty and staff to carry concealed weapons, but required campuses to opt-in to the policy. None did. However, a new law passed in the state this year will expand the law to allow concealed-carry licensees to bring guns to campus. Meanwhile, Tennessee law allows college and university faculty and staff to carry firearms, but not students.

Given the complexity of these laws, any citizen serious about understanding campus carry must dig into the legislation, rather than assuming that guns on campus amounts to a simple yes-or-no decision. This applies to proponents as much as detractors. Presumably responsible, licensed gun owners would want clear guidelines for how citizens might legally carry firearms on campus as much as campus administrators, faculty, and students would. Often, those citizens will find more confusion than clarity.

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Georgia’s Deal vetoed last year’s campus carry legislation, HB 859, after facing widespread public reproach. The University System of Georgia (USG) and all 29 state campus presidents and chiefs of police had opposed the law—along with many faculty, students, and parents.

HB 859 made it to the governor’s desk in the wake of widespread, national controversy over a similar bill in Texas, which became law in 2015 and went into effect last September. Concerns about losing university talent over the issue appeared to be justified when UT Austin’s architecture dean cited the law as a contributing factor in his decision to leave Texas for the University of Pennsylvania. And fears over the chilling effects of campus speech when guns might be present in classrooms appeared to be justified by a widely circulated account of a University of Houston faculty-senate presentation, which appeared to advise educators to adjust their curricula and office hours to avoid hypothetical conflict with armed students.