After the Colorado Supreme Court struck down Colorado University’s gun ban the school has decided to preserve its gun-free zones by forcing residential students with gun permits into separate housing. The Denver Post reports that “The university said Thursday that both campuses will establish a residential area for students over the age of 21 with permits. In all other dormitories, guns will be banned, the new policy states. ‘The main dorms on the main campus will not allow any concealed-carry weapons,’ CU-Boulder spokesman Bronson Hilliard said.'” The University’s “separate but equal” discrimination against on-campus concealed carry permit holders is bad enough. But there’s more . . .
Attendees at ticketed athletic and cultural events, such as football games and theater, on both campuses will not be permitted to bring their guns, officials said.
“We are treating that ticket purchase as a contractual agreement that you won’t bring your weapon to the venue,” Hilliard said.
Does this firearms apartheid get worse? Of course it does.
In Boulder, those who want to lawfully carry their gun must live in the family-housing units downtown, [vice chancellor for student affairs for the Boulder campus Deb] Coffin
said . . .The Colorado Springs campus will allow those with a permit who want a gun in their possession to live in upperclassman dorms, officials said.
“We have very few individual units, so those who wish to have the concealed carry must have permission from their roommate,” said Tom Hutton, spokesman for UCCS.
Pro-gun protesters are getting organized to fight the edict, but the message from the University to concealed carry permit holders is clear: FOAD.
Meanwhile, as many of our commentators have already highlighted, the policy could backfire. Dorms without permit holders may be subject to more theft or assault than those with, making that whole “more guns, less crime” meme more appealing. And true.
Dollars to donuts that housing area will be magically free of violent crime, armed robbery, etc.
Separate, but equal……. seems I heard this before, and it sucked and didn’t work then.
Separate but equal?
*Edit: Crap – Joe beat me to it
Sure is a lot of stupid in Colorado….
..but then, sure is a lot of stupid just about anywhere any more….
BTW, I thought discrimination and segregation was wrong?
Plenty of it carried in with Californicators I would suspect.
“forcing residential students with gun permits into separate housing” LOL, that pretty much says to any would be robber or home invader: Target here no guns, not there where there are guns
It also says to the other housing, oh hell no everyone is packing in there!
I will be amused to the point of outright laughter when there is a rash of burglaries at the unarmed dorm, while the armed dorm stays safe and unmolested and bears not the slightest resemblance to the OK Corral.
In all fairness, the dorms were unarmed for a long, long time, so I wouldn’t expect a change in the crime level there. Perhaps you could argue that there will be relatively less crime in the new armed dorms though.
I’m still trying to figure out how they thought this was a good idea. Not in an “Oh no, guns on campus!” way, but in an “Oh no, we are getting this snot sued out of us…again!” sort of way.
Wow, that is a serious case of the stupids. Are concealed carry permits public knowledge in CO? In Texas only LE have access to who has a concealed carry permit, but that wasn’t always the case. Not long ago it was public knowledge and companies ie Nokia would go down the list and fire all employees with a CHL. I guess it being a state school in CO they would know, but man that is BS.
I smell lawsuits!!
Just like their attempts to ban cc on campus, this will probably be shot down.
Also, a ccw won’t be issued to anyone under 21 in a non-emergency situation, so most students who have them either already ARE upper classmen, or are returning students…
And screw Boulder…
I wonder how the NAACP and other such civil rights groups are going to react to this given the whole “separate but equal” part. It’s segregation at its core, after all.
i’ve commented before, the silence from the aclu on our rights being violated is deafening. proves their agenda isn’t about protecting civil liberties.
I take the position that we should thank the holophobic university staff at Colorado University. They built the perfect real-world academic study on the merits of gun control. As for the gun toting residents themselves ,they owe an even bigger thank you to the staff. After all the hot young women of Colorado State know exactly which building to visit for armed and strong men,no?
Man, I would *love* to have this setup in Texas. Not because I think it’s okay or it’s right. No. I would love to have it because then those of us advocating campus carry would finally have a goddamn foot in the door.
Down here? Football games? ANY campus building? Forget about it. And that’s not school policy (well, to a degree it is, but we’re really splitting hairs if we start that discussion). That’s written into the freakin’ statutes.
Will students who are housed in the “Gun-Free” zones be immediately moved at no personal expense if they decide to later purchase a weapon? Are carrying students allowed to visit friends or fellow students in the Gun-Free Zone?
This idiocy will be litigated away faster then MSNBC puts spin on things.
So, if you don’t have a CC permit can you opt to move into the ‘well armed’ dorm? Cause I’ll happily toss my little tykes into for their own good.
So, if you don’t have a CC permit can you opt to move into the ‘well armed’ dorm? Cause I’ll happily toss my little tykes in for their own good.
Segregation and demonizing a certain social group is how genocides start. Just saying.
While the forced segregation is reprehensible and disdainfully typical of leftist hypocrisy and moral bankruptcy, I’d love nothing more than to be housed with others that I know are armed, responsible, and likely more mature than typical college dingbats. I wish they had an option for such housing when I was in college.
Also, plenty of decorating options for the front door area, like this sign someone else here posted recently:
http://mksviews.files.wordpress.com/2009/05/stupid_neighbor.jpg
That sign is amazing. Also, seperate but equal? What kind of liberals are these people? Demonizing gun carriers like we’re somehow less of a human being because we choose to use our 2A right to bear arms? If I were a student in Boulder I would sue the crap out of CU-Boulder for this hypocrisy.
I agree with the whole segregation aspect people touched on, as well as it being a violation of privacy. It is none of their business if I’m carrying or not…defeats the concept of concealed. Like someone said, it is not public knowledge for a reason, i.e. the example of Nokia going down the list to fire someone mentioned.
The aspect I don’t see as “winnable” is the stadium gun free zone. There are rules and precedent for not allowing it in such large public arenas. Now that regularly comes along with armed security and pat downs at entry control points. The thing I wish was in place is that if a place is going to be a gun free zone and effectively disarm me (assuming I make the choice to obey the law, which is why gun free zones don’t work), and there is above an x number of people gathered the establishment should be required to ensure that NO ONE is armed. This would need to be done through armed security and entry check points, because the goal is not achieved by putting up a sign.
While the premise of this whole segregating gun owners is farcical, it will definitely be an interesting experiment in gun control. We’ll possibly get to see the difference in crime between an armed community and unarmed.
The university sages are now herding the defenseless sheeple into a target rich enclosure with the only guard-dog a sign that says ‘no guns allowed’. Such modern-era academic wisdom!
Will the university also be establishing segregated housing for groups that choose to exercise other inalienable rights?
Will there be a free speech dorm, the only spot on campus where students wont have to worry about PC speec codes? How about a building that will have a sign over the door stating “no troops will be quartered here?”. Or some just compensation housing where everyone there is assured that the (state) university will pay them if their bong is confiscated?
Dan, a few institutions of Higher Learning certainly have gone out of their way to make on-campus recruiting and the ROTC unwelcome. Harvard just lifted its own ROTC ban earlier this year. Columbia and Yale also are moving to bring the ROTC to campus. The Stanford Review ridiculed attempts at their school to use ROTC as a tool to protest DADT or to about equality for transgendered persons, or to try to shame Congress and shift the responsibility (for self-government, as the Review correctly notes) on Congress.
Personally, I think the Colorado school’s move is one step towards accommodation. The problems, historically, have been inertia, exhaustion after the first lap, and the excuse that completing the first lap is the same as winning. Yes, it sure does look like “separate but equal,” but it is a toehold. “Separate but equal” is sure better than “no blacks allowed.”
What I think is often overlooked in “separate but inequal” critiques is that having separate facilities gives people, especially in this case, grounds for comparison. In this case, you very clearly will have a basis now to compare the two groups, and no matter which way this experiment goes, there will be “lessons learned.”
Personally, I don’t see anything wrong with a “gun free zone” – if it is in the form of a minimally constraining, voluntary agreement by people who want that extra nice fuzzy feeling.
I have written a few times about Kalamazoo and the problems with crime around the Kalamazoo campus of Western Michigan University. The core campus has a radio-equipped student night watch, but no firearms. Despite this, most bad guys do seem to be more or less deterred by the presence of police and crime doesn’t spill over once you get on campus. It is once you leave campus that you need to be wary, and of course the ban against arms on campus or in your vehicle makes it impossible to use one level of protection. Now, it shouldn’t sound so bad as that you can assume you will be mugged as soon as you step onto the wrong street – but it could happen here. It certainly has happened a few times.
As a practical measure, I don’t think firearms on campus (there has been a student group advocating recently) will radically change the day-to-day on campus. It is more the issue of what happens when you leave campus that could present a problem.
This won’t affect many undergrads, because Colorado only gives CCW permits to those 21 and over. CU has a shortage of on-campus housing, so many undergrads (and most graduate students) already live off campus.
I grew up in Boulder, and I’ve sadly become accustomed to this strain of imbecility in my embarrassingly naive hometown. Most state universities are short on funds, so it seems anomalous that CU has so much money they can throw it away on bigoted frauds like Ward Churchill and waste it in court trying to change Colorado law.
I’m also a CU alumnus (Poli.Sci. ’92) and CU sends me several fundraising solicitations each year. If they can waste money on Ward Churchill and gun bans, they’ve demonstrated that they’ve already got more money than they know what to do with. They’ll never get a dime of mine.
“This won’t affect many undergrads, because Colorado only gives CCW permits to those 21 and over.”
Yeah, this is why I think “no concealed weapons on campus” laws, like we have in Florida, are stupid. People like to wave the “young people just out of high school running around with concealed firearms” flag, but that’s simply not the case. If you have to be 21 to get a permit, most students that can legally get a permit are juniors, at the least.
It really irritates the shit out of me that I’m 36 and going back to finish my degree, and have to disarm at the property line. Well, I’m supposed to, anyway.
Gee
Making gun/CC owners live in a Victim Fee Zone with PPL that have the same value system and probably the same Political beliefs,,,,
Unintended Consequences anyone?
I see a silver lining!
One more reason not to live in university housing.
I thought college was where the smart ones were? Clearly we have created two environments, one of which no one would dare start any trouble in
I went to CU also. This made me laugh. There is not much family housing to speak of, so they will never get in if they are single.
I came back to CU at 24 as an enlisted guy after getting accepted into a commissioning program. That town and university is so far left it will blow your mind. We use to call Boulder 20 square miles surrounded by reality.
Here’s a little piece of CU history. In the 60’s they moved all the ROTC units into the football stadium. They were moved to keep SDS (parent group for the weather underground) from burning the buildings down and allow midshipmen and cadets the ability to drill unmolested from protesters. They figured those useful idiots wouldn’t burn down the football stadium.
Even when I was there in 98-02 they were throwing paint on ROTC students in uniform.
Neither discrimination nor segregation is illegal unless it violates some local, state or federal law.
Who is being discriminated against here? Is the selection based on age, gender, color, religion, disability, alienage or any other of the highly suspect categories? If not, then there’s no illegal discrimination. These rules may well violate the state’s preemption statute, but that’s a separate argument.
Absent the preemption issue, the real question is: why would the University want to render its young people defenseless by depriving them of the umbrella of protection provided by legally armed students? I’m sure that the next Danny Rolling will be thrilled to learn that he can murder at will.
Replace the references to permit holders in the article with the word “negro” and see how it reads.
Plessy v. Ferguson anybody?
My son chose Colorado State for grad school. So far the adminstration has taken no issue with carrying on campus. When I was there in June I open carried in the student union with no issues.
Next thing you know CCW will have to use separate bathrooms and sit in the back of the bus!
It’s worth remembering that Boulder is Colorado’s equivalent to Berkeley, California. The rest of the state, outside the Denver area, is much more sensible.
Comments are closed.