Proposed active-shooter training requirements have complicated campus-carry legislation in Arkansas, the latest state to propose a law that has prompted some college faculty resignations elsewhere.
But the lead sponsor for Arkansas' bid to allow employees of college campuses to take guns to work said Friday that he's "optimistic" lawmakers will reach a deal to scale back an amendment that "virtually ruins" the bill while leaving intact part of a newly added training requirement.
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Campus-carry laws, which differ from state to state, have swept much of the country in the aftermath of campus shootings, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures. The laws, which supporters say are designed to improve safety, have generated unease among faculty members who say they fear an angry encounter with an armed student.
Some states allow college students with concealed-carry permits to take guns to campus, and it has been considered in Arkansas.
Two professors and a dean cited Texas' campus-carry law, which allows licensed students to be armed at school, when they resigned from the University of Texas.
A student at a separate Texas university accidentally fired a round inside a coed dorm, and a professor in Idaho accidentally shot himself in the foot during chemistry class, two of a handful of nonfatal accidents that have followed enactment of campus-carry laws in other states.
The proposed Arkansas legislation most closely resembles Tennessee's law, where less than 2 percent of the faculty at the state's university in Knoxville have registered to carry guns on campus.
House Bill 1249, sponsored by Charlie Collins, R-Fayetteville, would strip Arkansas' public universities and colleges of the option to ban faculty and staff members with concealed-carry permits from taking guns to work.
It easily passed in the House of Representatives before the Senate amended the bill on Thursday to require that employees take at least 16 hours of active-shooter and related training before carrying guns on campus and into classrooms.
Lawmakers have since discussed capping the number of required training hours somewhere in the range of eight to 16, among other changes to the bill, Collins said.
Collins, who opposed the amendment on training, said lawmakers are still considering whether to expand who is eligible to take guns to campus beyond faculty and staff members. Collins declined to talk about specific details because negotiations are ongoing.
Arkansas lacks uniform live-fire training as part of concealed-carry licensing, so standardized training of any sort would raise the bar for being armed on campus, according to interviews with concealed-carry instructors.
The House version of the bill, approved 71-22, would allow full-time faculty and staff members -- but not students or the general public -- to carry guns on campus and inside buildings if they have concealed-carry licenses. It did not require additional training.
The Senate version requiring more training will return to the Senate Judiciary Committee next week, when more amendments could be added, said Sen. Trent Garner, R-El Dorado, a co-sponsor.
Garner said he opposed the training requirement because it was filed at the "eleventh hour," and he initially said he would respond by broadening campus-carry to include everyone who has a concealed-carry license, including students. Collins also initially advocated for allowing licensed students to carry. Both took steps away from that stance Friday.
"These discussions have less to do with classes of people as I initially laid it out, and maybe it's based on some other factor, like age," Collins said.
Ultimately, the House and Senate will have to agree on a reconciled version of the bill before sending it to the governor.
UNIVERSITIES OPPOSED
The Arkansas Democrat-Gazette emailed spokesmen for the state's 10 four-year universities asking whether their schools formally support or oppose the bill. Nine of the 10, or their systems, responded to say leadership opposes the bill.
At Southern Arkansas University, a spokesman said that its faculty senate, staff senate and student government association have passed resolutions opposing the bill.
It's unknown how many of the state's 219,000 concealed-carry licensees are faculty members at universities or colleges, Arkansas State Police spokesman Liz Chapman said. The state's Freedom of Information Act prohibits state police from releasing personal information from concealed-carry license applications, Chapman said. The applications also don't include a field for occupation.
Megan Hickerson, an associate professor of history at Henderson State University, holds a concealed-carry license and opposes the campus-carry legislation.
"It's never even occurred to me to want to bring a firearm onto campus," Hickerson said. "I don't think I would."
Hickerson, emphasizing that she was speaking for herself and not the university, said she worries about allowing guns on campus, where professors and students sometimes engage in angry debates about class performance or grades. She called those arguments "intimidating."
"I worry about where we're going," Hickerson said. "I think that this is an attempt to move away from a gun-free campus situation into one where perhaps students can carry. For me, as a professor, that's extremely worrying."
As Henderson State's faculty senate president, Hickerson was part of the unanimous vote approving a resolution in opposition to the bill.
The faculty senate at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock on Friday passed a resolution opposing the bill, joining peers from at least three universities.
Michael Tramel, chairman of UALR's department of construction management, cast the lone dissenting vote on the faculty senate's resolution.
Tramel, a member of the National Rifle Association, does not hold a concealed-carry license and said he's wary of faculty and students carrying on campus, particularly without the training requirement. But he said he believes the decision is the Legislature's to make.
"It's kind of hard to take a view against the Legislature," Tramel said. "The university doesn't fund itself."
State laws vary
Arkansas and 23 other states allow colleges and universities to decide whether to ban concealed weapons, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures.
Seventeen states ban concealed-carry weapons on college campuses, eight states allow it and one -- Tennessee -- allows only full-time faculty and staff members to carry concealed guns, the format Arkansas lawmakers are considering.
Tennessee, where the law went into effect July 1, does not require active-shooter training, but faculty members who carry must register with campus or local police departments.
At the University of Tennessee at Knoxville, the state's largest college, 143 faculty members are registered to carry, university police spokesman Jillian Paciello said.
The university employs about 9,800 faculty and staff members, but many are also students or work part time, so they're not eligible under the law, Paciello said. Registered faculty would represent less than 2 percent of the university's workforce.
"Everything has gone smoothly," Paciello said of the law's inception.
That hasn't been the case everywhere.
A staff member for University of Colorado's dental school in Denver accidentally fired a handgun at work, injuring herself and another person, The Denver Post reported in 2012, about eight months after the state's Supreme Court ruled that university system regents couldn't ban licensed employees from carrying on campus.
In 2014, an Idaho State University assistant professor of chemistry accidentally shot himself in the foot during a class two weeks after a campus-carry law went into effect, the Idaho State Journal reported.
Last year, about six weeks after the Texas law went into effect, a student at Tarleton State University accidentally fired a gun inside a coed dorm, causing "minimal" property damage but injuring no one, a university spokesman told The Dallas Morning News.
All were licensed by their respective states to carry concealed handguns, according to press reports.
Training Varies
To get a concealed-carry license in Arkansas, a person must first complete a state-mandated training program. Arkansas State Police in an 18-page training manual lays out the minimum requirements, and concealed handgun safety instructors throughout the state conduct the programs.
"There's obviously some room for an instructor to be able to explain things differently, but the curriculum itself comes directly from Arkansas State Police, and it is standardized," said Nathan House, a Lonoke County constable and concealed-handgun safety instructor.
Instructors have wide latitude, however, in administering the live-fire part of training. State law requires that students "establish proficiency" but is not specific as to how that is determined.
House, who has trained more than 750 people over the past year, requires that those students fire 30 rounds at a target located 21 feet away. At least five shots must be right-handed, and at least five must be left-handed shots, House said. To pass, the student must hit the 9.5-inch by 18.5-inch target at least 24 times, he said.
"I don't know that we've ever had anybody fail," House said. "These folks, by the time they come to us, they know something about firearms."
If someone misses the target a couple of times early during the test, the instructor will intervene, coach the student and allow him to start over, House said. Other than someone being repeatedly reckless with a handgun on the range, it's hard to imagine rejecting students, he said.
"I think it's a good judge of people's ability to safely employ a handgun," House said of the proficiency test. "If we're not good instructors, we don't get hired."
Independence County-based instructor David Payne's proficiency test is more flexible. The roughly 500 students he trains each year will fire between 20 and 50 rounds at a target between 15 and 30 feet away.
Payne requires students to fire at a target consisting of six circles, each one 8 inches in diameter. He does not have a quota for how many rounds must hit the circles and instead wants applicants to demonstrate safe handgun use, consistency and focus, he said.
Payne said he has failed some of his students, but at least 95 percent pass.
Garner, the state Senate co-sponsor, served in the U.S. Army Special Forces and said he's not fundamentally opposed to a training requirement but that he disagrees with the way it was presented and how it was written.
"I can tell you, at some point, you will never have enough training once somebody starts shooting at you," Garner said, adding that the lack of a cap on required training hours could increase the money and time concealed-carriers would have to spend. "At what point does it become some so onerous that it infringes on someone's right [to carry]?"
A Section on 02/18/2017