Home Campus Carry Despite Hysteria and Predictions of Doom, Campus Carry Passes West Virginia House

Despite Hysteria and Predictions of Doom, Campus Carry Passes West Virginia House

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West Virginia Campus Carry
West Virginia House of Delegates via Wikimedia Commons

[ED: See yesterday’s article on the rage and protests at West Virginia universities over campus carry.]

By NRA-ILA

On February 27th, the West Virginia state House of Delegates passed House Bill 2519 by a vote of 59-41 to ensure that law-abiding adults are not stripped of their right to self-defense when they cross an arbitrary boundary onto a college campus.

Earlier on the same day, HB 2519 was motioned to be referred to the House Rules Committee.  Despite that delay, HB 2519 returned to the floor in time for a vote and will now go to the state Senate Judiciary Committee for further consideration.

Please contact committee members and urge them to SUPPORT HB 2519.  Click here to contact committee members.

House Bill 2519, sponsored by Delegate Jim Butler (R-14), would allow law-abiding CHL holders to carry on the campus of a state institution of higher education. Current state law does not prohibit carrying of a defensive firearm on campus, but institution policy could lead to expulsion or termination of employment.

Adults who are officially licensed to carry a firearm for self-defense off-campus should not be prevented from doing so just because they seek higher education.

 

This article originally appeared at nraila.org and is reprinted here with permission. 

18 COMMENTS

  1. Still being tied up in conference in the Senate judiciary committee here , but all indications are it will end up on the governors desk soon , will big Jim go all liberal and pull out his veto pen or solidify his newly found GOP base and sign this into law .
    FINGERS CROSSED for WV freedom .

    • One interesting thing about West Virginia, a veto can be overridden by simple majority votes of both houses, and in fact, that is how they got Constitutional Carry in 2016.

      I’m not really sure what the point is of even having a Gubernatorial veto in West Virginia.

      • If the veto occurs after the 60 day legislative session it can’t be overridden, so a strongly supported bill sometimes has to go through the whole process twice.

    • Jim Justice thinks he is an educator as he has a degree in education and coaches basketball. This is foolish as the teacher’s unions, colleges, and universities will stab him in the back in the next election, if they think it’s to their advantage. He will likely veto and we will have to do it again next year early enough for an override.

  2. I can not fathom how the Givers keep expanding Our Right To Be Armed and at the same time passing laws to disarm Us???? Must be the United States of Bi-Polar

    • It’s a trick. They are replacing your exercise of an unalienable individual right with a government licensed or sanctioned privilege. Once the privilege is normalized, it will be much easier to infringe because the rights argument will have been traded away for the trinket of privileges; licenses and government sanctions.

      They are stealing that which is yours and loaning you part of it back.

  3. I thought WV was a constitutional carry state? So you would need a permit to carry on this particular public property? Am I missing something?

    • Missouri has “constitutional carry”, BUT, the law as written makes WHERE I can carry very different from a CCW permit holder. I can’t even DRIVE through a SCHOOL ZONE with a CC gun in my car?? That is just ONE of the many things about CC in MO that make NO SENSE. Bottom line, it is safer and easier to pay for the CCW permit than it is to get caught violating some “hidden statement” in the CC carry law. It should have never been written this way in the first place.

      MO is also an OPEN CARRY state on top of all this craziness.

    • In West Virginia Colleges, universities, and isolated state agencies are treated the same as private property owner’s and can restrict where you can carry by regulation much like a business or Federal entities. It is widely accepted that some students, faculty, and staff carry anyway, but could be asked to leave and presumably be expelled or fired, if caught. Employees of state agencies, except those where guns are regarded as standard equipment (ie. WVDNR Natural Resource Police), are prohibited by blanket regulation, but interestingly visitors are generally not, unless the agency director chooses to prohibit guns. Most just avoid the whole issue for better or worse. At this point I know of no incidents. I am sensitive as I used to work for an agency that should have allowed armed field people, but didn’t leading to some scary experiences in my past as I was a field guy for much of my tenure. Most of these experiences involved wildlife as well as a few with people and a purely defensive 357 Magnum, 44 Magnum, or even 454 Casull revolver at my side would have been been quite comforting.

      At this point I live near West Virginia University, but aside from being in their active student database, as I take an occasionally class, am not involved with the university. Carry permits are very common here and I know several folks, who I suspect end up locking handguns in cars while at work. The university gets in my way sometimes and I occasionally have to detour around the campus as it is difficult to determine where the city ends and where the university begins in places. Theoretically all that could happen is I could be asked to leave, but I don’t fully trust a university with their own police force as I don’t vote for their leadership.

      West Virginia is one of the most pro Second Amendment states in the Union, but there are people who will take Bloomberg bucks to lobby here too and the academic communities are as dominated by liberals as they are anywhere.

  4. So, they’re lifting a ban, so that people who fail to shoot up other places, can now fail to shoot up campuses? People who shoot up places will, per usual, be unimpacted by the change in the carry laws.

  5. I wish we could carry on campuses here in Wyoming.

    We keep bringing it up every legislative session, but the university (there’s only one) and the community colleges keep sending their administrators down to Cheyenne to howl about how “alcohol and guns don’t mix on campus” – despite the fact that alcohol isn’t allowed on most of their campuses.

    • DG, you strike me as a discretion kind of a guy who really doesn’t care where or where you aren’t allowed to carry, only that whether or not you’ll get caught… 🙂

      • “Concealed means concealed!” (said with a squealing quality) may be good for a generation or two but it thoroughly screws subsequent ones. The idea behind that game is “out of sight, out of mind.” Once the general public gets used to not seeing or hearing of many good people bearing arms, the notion that nobody is carrying becomes normalized. We had that happen in Ohio and it really hurt the exercise of the unalienable individual right to keep and bear arms.

    • This is standard operating procedure in West Virginia as well. I have some ties to Wyoming and am surprised you can’t get campus carry passed, but it probably all comes down to mounting an effective lobbying effort. In West Virginia the fact that a simple majority vote by both houses can override a gubernatorial veto helps, but this sometimes means a popular bill has to go through the whole process twice where the second time the bill is presented to the governor early enough in the 60 day session for a legislative override.

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