Falwell said the university will provide safes for students who want to keep their guns in the dorms. The policy will require students to put the guns in the safes immediately upon entering the dorm and keep them there while they are inside. He said in an email Tuesday night that currently the plan is for the university to provide the safes in the students’ dorm rooms, although “that could change in the future.”

Liberty became the only Lynchburg-area college to allow concealed weapons on campus — and one of the most gun-friendly campuses in Virginia — when it lifted a ban on concealed weapons outdoors on campus in 2011.

“It was because of what happened just an hour and a half up the road at Virginia Tech,” Falwell told students during a convocation on Dec. 9, explaining why he’d asked the LU board to make the change in 2011. “More than 30 innocent students and facility were just murdered viciously and none of them had the ability to protect themselves.

“From the day that happened, I thought we needed to do something here at Liberty.”