One more time

Community college extends concealed handgun ban

Way to go, Northwest Arkansas Community College.

The institution’s Board of Trustees last week decided to keep its campuses free of guns for as long as it can. Unfortunately, the policy won’t last long. A new state law, Act 562, takes effect Sept. 1. It will expand the state’s concealed-carry law to allow permit-holders to carry guns on campus if they get an additional eight hours of “active shooter” training.

Until then, the Bentonville-based college will exercise its right to opt out. Existing state law, enacted in 2013, allowed college and universities’ governing boards to ban concealed carry on their respective campuses.

The new law won’t.

Last week’s decision came on a split vote of 4-3 with one of the community college’s board members absent, but the vote nonetheless extended the ban for an additional two months.

This was the fifth time the community college board voted to opt out. Last year’s vote would have been effective through June 30. Last week’s vote stretches the ban until the new law is effective in September.

Every other two-year and four-year college in Arkansas has also banned guns in past years. They, too, should continue their respective bans under the 2013 law as long as they can.

The 2013 law, sponsored by state Rep. Charles Collins, R-Fayetteville, only passed because it was amended to include that opt-out provision.

In intervening years, the makeup of the Legislature has become more conservative. Lawmakers were willing in the recently recessed regular session to accept Collins’ never-say-die effort to eliminate the opt-out provision.

Collins had tried in 2015 to change the concealed-carry law, but the effort failed in legislative committee.

This year, the Legislature proved to be a fertile environment for Collins’ bill.

It started out as a bill to allow faculty and staff members, 25 and older, who have concealed-carry permits to possess their weapons on campus.

Enactment came, however, with strong intervention by the National Rifle Association. Collins got his bill passed but with amendments that broadly expanded who may carry handguns and where.

Anyone, 21 and older, who holds a state permit for concealed carry will be able, starting in September, to take the additional training to qualify to carry their handguns not only onto most college campuses in this state but also into most public buildings and into bars where bar owners don’t ban them.

To Collins and to his supporters, the simple presence of those permitted guns in places he called “gun-free zones” will discourage the kind of campus attacks that have occurred nationwide from active shooters.

To the legislation’s foes, the potential proliferation of guns on campuses and elsewhere is a recipe for disaster, whether guns get fired on purpose or accident.

Northwest Arkansas Community College’s president, Evelyn Jorgenson, told her board last week that the college needed time to consider how to handle situations relevant to the new law.

“We’re trying to think of all possibilities, all the things where we’ll need to have policies in place to help us keep everyone safe, yet abide by the new legislation that becomes effective Sept. 1,” she said.

Among such situations, she said, were student field trips to places that do not allow guns and on-campus summer camps for children.

The college sponsored two meetings on campus right after Gov. Asa Hutchinson signed the new law last month.

Officials announced then that the college was forming a task force to figure out how best to align its policies and procedures with the law.

Among questions to be addressed, for example, is whether faculty may ask students to volunteer the information, if they are carry weapons into a classroom. The new law does not require qualified permit-holders to notify anyone at the college that they are carrying a gun.

The task force of 24 staff members has begun to meet and expects to reach out to other colleges and universities in the state to understand how they are responding to the law.

Despite that split vote, the community college board set a good example for trustees of other institutions.

They bought more time and have obviously begun exploring what all might be affected by implementation of the new concealed-carry law.