Oklahomans would vote next year whether to allow residents with concealed handgun permits to openly carry their weapons if a bill passed out of a House committee Wednesday becomes law.

House Bill 1796, which passed 17-0, was one of three gun bills that won passage Wednesday in the House Public Safety Committee.

HB 1652 would allow students, teachers and visitors who have permits to carry concealed weapons to take their guns to CareerTech centers and leave them locked in their vehicles.

HB 2087 would allow licensed faculty and administrators at colleges and universities to carry concealed weapons on campus, unless the university president banned the practice. University presidents now may grant permission on a case-by-case basis to faculty and administrators who have concealed handgun permits to carry their guns on campus.

All three bills go to the full House of Representatives.

Rep. Sue Tibbs, committee chairman and author of HB 1796, said the open-carry issue should be left up to voters. Some committee members argued for changing the measure to let legislators pass a law and send it on to the governor instead of making it a ballot issue.

“This bill touches every life in Oklahoma,” said Tibbs, R-Tulsa. “I felt the people have the right to decide this issue.”

The measure would be on the November 2012 ballot if HB 1796 wins House and Senate approval, Tibbs said.

The bill was changed Wednesday to require those who would openly carry their handguns to have a locking mechanism in the holster, such as a strap over the weapon. Rep. Pat Ownbey, R-Ardmore, who proposed the amendment, said it would reduce the risk of someone grabbing a gun out of a holster.

Tibbs, who has a concealed carry license, said if voters approved the open-carry issue, Oklahomans with a valid handgun license would have the right to carry a weapon openly. The license would be similar to the current concealed carry permit.

Nearly 97,000 Oklahomans are concealed carry license holders.

HB 1652, by Rep. John Enns, passed the committee 11-4.

Enns, R-Enid, said his measure would allow those with concealed carry permits to bring their guns on CareerTech campuses as long as the weapons remain locked in vehicles.

He said 34 states have similar measures.

Pat McGregor, executive director of the Oklahoma Association of CareerTech Education, said CareerTech superintendents are against the measure. The main concern is safety of students, he said.

“We handle a large number of secondary students in our 54 campuses across Oklahoma,” he said. “We also have child care centers in about a dozen of our facilities.”

Rep. Fred Jordan, R-Jenks, was unsuccessful in changing the bill so that each CareerTech superintendent could decide whether to allow guns on campus. He said he is concerned that many of the students are high school students.

“This is really no different than allowing weapons to be brought into the high school or elementary school or any other school parking lot,” Jordan said.

Committee members voted 9-8 to approve HB 2087, by Rep. Randy Terrill, which would permit college faculty members and administrators to carry firearms. Terrill accepted an amendment by Rep. John Bennet, R-Sallisaw, to his bill that would allow colleges and universities the right to establish rules to ban them.

University of Central Oklahoma President Roger Webb, a gun owner, said allowing faculty and administrators to carry guns on campus would make colleges and universities more dangerous.

“Anytime you introduce more guns to a college campus we know you are going to have a more unstable condition,” he said.

Oklahoma State University graduate student Adrienne O’Reilly, the Oklahoma director of Students for Concealed Carry on Campus, supported the measure.

“There’s a big difference between feeling safe and being safe, and I know that our faculty members would be safer if they had the same options for self-defense that they have virtually everywhere else in our state when they go to work on the college campus,” she said.

Higher Education Chancellor Glen Johnson told the committee college presidents oppose the bill and believe it would make their campuses more dangerous. More than a dozen presidents showed up for the hearing.

He said a task force formed to look at student safety on campus opposed allowing guns on campus.

The task force, comprising law enforcement officials, students, parents, higher education and business leaders, was formed after the April 2007 shootings at Virginia Tech University, where a student killed 32 people and himself.

Terrill, who teaches at Hillsdale Free Will Baptist College in Moore, disagreed.

“I can’t imagine any scenario where a 10-second shoot-out between two armed individuals, one faculty who has been trained in the use of a weapon and the other one a perp who is seeking to kill a bunch of people, could be any worse than a 10-minute uncontested massacre on one of our college campuses,” he said.