Now that college students are back on campus and classes are in full swing, let’s talk about campus carry — the shorthand for a slew of policies created by the Campus Self-Defense Act inflicted on our public universities by the West Virginia Legislature.
We would understand the state putting in the effort to pass such legislation if it was popular among the demographic it most impacts. However, the state’s college communities — from students to professors to administrative staff — were vocal in their opposition to allowing concealed weapons into various parts of their campuses in an age when school shootings happen with alarming frequency.
But not only did legislators ignore stakeholders’ objections to the Campus Self-Defense Act, they also passed it as an unfunded mandate. The law required public universities to build storage spaces for students’ handguns, post signage about where concealed weapons were and were not permitted and other measures.
It cost West Virginia University around $1 million to implement campus carry across its multiple campuses. WVU had to build gun storage lockers in two Morgantown residence halls and in one residence hall each at WVU Tech in Beckley and Potomac State in Keyser. (Lockers can be rented for $140.) The secure room in just one of the Morgantown residence halls contains 60 lockers.
Fairmont State University spent over $13,000 on 72 gun storage lockers (which can be rented for $200 a year) across two residence halls and signage throughout campus as part of implementing campus carry.
With the school year underway, WVU has two people who requested storage for their weapons on the Morgantown campus, two in Beckley and four in Keyser. At Fairmont State, one person has registered to use a gun locker. Neither school received any financial help from the state beyond their normal appropriations.
We don’t know how many students living off campus and faculty members will take advantage of the new concealed carry rules, but we do know most of the money spent on implementing campus carry was used for the residence hall storage lockers. At this rate, it will take several decades for WVU and Fairmont State to recoup the cost, at a time when higher education is struggling to balance tuition costs against expenses and state funding has failed to increase with inflation.
So far, the Campus Self-Defense Act has proven to be as useless, unwanted and expensive as everyone warned. The only thing left to see is if it proves to be as dangerous as its opponents fear.
Of course, campus carry was never meant to serve the members of our college communities. It was always about imposing the Legislature’s will on the institutions it sees as its ideological enemy. So even though campus carry has been a flop, the Legislature still won.
