A group of five democratic state senators — including two from Douglas County — is trying to reverse the portion of a law requiring public colleges to allow concealed carry of guns on their campuses starting in July 2017.

Under current law, the personal and family protection act, postsecondary educational institutions are among a handful of entities allowed a four-year exemption before they must allow guns, like other state and municipal buildings have been required to do for the past few years. That exemption runs out in July 2017. (Sidenote: Other entities with the same four-year exemption are medical care facilities, adult care homes, community mental health centers and indigent health care clinics.)

Senate Bill No. 348, introduced Jan. 21, would scratch colleges from the exemption list and, instead, state that the law does not apply at all to postsecondary educational institution buildings, or buildings leased by them. (Another note: Buildings on the grounds of the Kansas state school for the deaf or the Kansas state school for the blind are currently the only place the concealed carry law doesn’t apply, according to the legislation.)

The bill was referred Friday to the Committee on Federal and State Affairs. You can track its progress via kslegislature.org.

The bill was introduced by senators Tom Hawk, D-Manhattan; Oletha Faust-Goudeau, D-Wichita; Marci Francisco, D-Lawrence; Tom Holland, D-Baldwin City; Pat Pettey, D-Kansas City.

Holland said universities should be able to decide whether they want to prohibit guns and not have that decision “forced upon them” by the state.

“Honestly, the schools won’t have enough money to put the proper security machines in place to rectify if they want to keep guns off campus,” he said. “Once again the state has overreached.”

Francisco said she agreed prohibiting weapons should be an institutional decision. She added that since only people 21 and older are allowed by law to carry concealed, practically half the people on college campuses would not be allowed to, which she called inconsistent and “disconcerting.”

I’ve heard a representative may be planning to introduce a related measure in the House. I’ll try to do a follow up report if and when that happens. (See update, below.)

The Kansas Board of Regents and state university administrators — at least at Kansas University — in the meantime aren’t counting on any changes in the law and continue to plan for the arrival of guns on campus beginning in July 2017. The Regents last week passed a statewide policy directing individual schools to create their own, more specific policies, about how the law will be implemented on their respective campuses. Read more about what the Regents policy says here.

So if the law that means guns will come to campus has been around a couple of years already, why are constituents on campus and legislators in Topeka just now speaking out against it?

“When it was four years from now, people could say, ‘Oh I’m going to deal with that later,'” Francisco said. “I think now there are many discussions about how could we actually address this.”

UPDATE (Thursday):

Rep. Barbara Ballard, (D) Lawrence, said she introduced a nearly identical bill in the House Standing Committee on Appropriations last week. She said she’s hopeful that by introducing the bill in committee, it will have a “stronger chance of going somewhere.”

Ballard’s bill, House Bill 2526, also would move postsecondary institutions off the four-year exemption list and onto the list of entities to which the concealed carry law does not apply, she said.

“Concealed carry and education don’t go together,” she said. Ballard added that, under current law, if universities want to prohibit it in any buildings after July 2017 their only option is to put in security measures. “We don’t have that kind of money, and higher ed doesn’t have that kind of money.”

Ballard was inspired by a statewide poll that she said showed 82 percent of Kansans don’t support campus concealed carry, as well as university students and faculty members speaking out against it. When the initial legislation was passed several years ago, 2017 seemed far away, she said. “The closer we get to it then the students on our campus and the students on other campuses start getting involved.”

• I’m the Journal-World’s KU and higher ed reporter. See all the newspaper’s KU coverage here. Reach me by email at sshepherd@ljworld.com, by phone at 832-7187, on Twitter @saramarieshep or via Facebook at Facebook.com/SaraShepherdNews.