BY Z. W. TAYLOR AND PATRICIA SOMERS

Only a few decades after the 1789 signing of the US Constitution, Thomas Jefferson and James Madison sat on the board of visitors for the University of Virginia. Both Jefferson and Madison, originalists and contributors to the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, supported the University of Virginia as a violence-free learning environment. They informed the board of visitors and university leadership that UVA ought to be a gun-free campus where students could not set up target practice in the quad or fire celebratory shots into the air after successful academic semesters or athletic triumphs. Board of visitors meeting minutes from October 4, 1824, include the following declaration: “No Student shall, within the precincts of the University, introduce, keep or use any spirituous or vinous liquors, keep or use weapons or arms of any kind, or gunpowder, keep a servant, horse or dog, appear in school with a stick, or any weapon.”

To repeat, two originalists did not want weapons on the campus that they oversaw.

How times have changed. In 2022, originalism has swept over the US Supreme Court (SCOTUS), and now, guns are easier to access than they have ever been before in almost any time in US history. In June 2022, the New York State Pistol & Rifle Association (NYSRPA) was successful in their challenge to New York State law in NYSRPA v. Bruen regarding the “proper cause” stipulation for receiving a concealed carry self-defense gun permit in New York State, substantially expanding originalism.

Given earlier Supreme Court decisions in the 2010 McDonald v. City of Chicago and the 2008 District of Columbia v. Heller, Bruen ushers in a new era of gun ownership in the United States, as now the Supreme Court has deemed it unconstitutional to require someone to demonstrate a need for self-defense to receive a concealed-carry gun permit. Many states across the country, including densely populated states rife with gun violence such as California and New York, have required their citizens to demonstrate that they need a gun for self-defense to carry that gun as a concealed weapon in public. Post-Bruen, the only requirements that states can mandate for concealed-carry permitting is a minimum age of twenty-one and a background check. Some states may continue to require firearms or gun-safety training courses, but many states do not require them as of 2022. Famously, the “gun show loophole” has rendered it incredibly simple for anyone to buy unregistered guns and carry them anonymously. Now, it is “open season” for concealed carry.

What Bruen portends for college campuses is multifold.

First, given the decision in Heller that an individual has the right to bear and carry arms in their home without licensing a gun means that, along with Bruen, college students can carry unlicensed firearms in their residence halls and can apply for concealed-carry permits without demonstrating a need for self-defense. In the wake of Bruen, tens of thousands of new gun registration applications were submitted in New York State after the state waived the “proper cause” for self-defense stipulation. Likely, the same will hold over the rest of the country, especially in states that did not require the self-defense stipulation. In many of these states, college campuses are situated in densely populated areas—often with high rates of violent crime—so these institutions had a vested interest in keeping their campuses safe and as gun-free as possible. Now, many areas with college campuses will likely be flooded with guns, albeit legal ones.

Second, Bruen gives more power to the states. States now have wide authority to award concealed-carry permits with fewer common sense restrictions. In his opinion in Bruen, Justice Clarence Thomas wrote that he considered “sensitive places” as settled law. In prior case law, the Second Amendment had been curtailed to include a prohibition of guns in places deemed “sensitive” such as government buildings, performance venues, and college campuses. However, the right of states to conduct self-defense checks before issuing firearms was also settled law before Bruen. So, are “sensitive places” still settled law? Or will individual states decide that college campuses are not “sensitive places” any longer, echoing conservative language about college campuses as places of the free exchange of speech and thought that have been so stifled by liberal ideologies? As long as SCOTUS is peeling back common sense gun restrictions and “leaving it to the states,” almost any restriction related to curtailment of the Second Amendment is likely on the table.

Finally, SCOTUS has shown itself to be deeply influenced by the National Rifle Association (NRA) and its mantra that “guns don’t kill people, people kill people.” Decades of faulty “peer-reviewed” scholarship—funded by the NRA to demonstrate that gun restrictions are counterproductive and unconstitutional and that nothing should stand in the way of the US citizenry and their guns—echoes this mantra. For college campuses, this tension between gun rights and public safety should continue to divide the system of higher education across increasingly polarized political lines, forcing students and their families to choose between states and campuses that maintain common sense gun restrictions and ones that don’t. Most of us in academia believe that learning spaces should be free from the potential of violence, with young minds focusing on new ideas and discourses instead of wondering where the nearest emergency exit is or whether their discussion group member wearing baggy jeans is concealing an AR-15. As with so many difficult decisions being forced upon women in the wake of Roe’s repeal, college students will also be forced to make difficult decisions about whether to forgo the entire college experience to choose online degree programs or no higher education at all.

Ultimately, Bruen relaxes common sense gun restrictions to the point where concealing and carrying a firearm on a college campus is a minor inconvenience and will not deter gun ownership or concealed carry. In the aftermath of Uvalde, when many educators are asking why gun ownership is so prevalent as mass murder runs rampant in our schools, Bruen asks, “Why not?”

W. Taylor is assistant professor in the College of Education and Human Sciences at the University of Southern Mississippi. Broadly, he researches linguistics and technology in education. Patricia Somers is associate professor in the University of Texas at Austin College of Education with courtesy appointments in the Lozano Long Institute of Latin American Studies and in the Center for Women’s and Gender Studies. Somers and Taylor have written about campus carry and gun violence since 2018. They recently completed a monograph, Trigger Warnings: From Sword Fights to Campus Carry in Higher Education, an in-depth analysis of originalism in Bruen and the legal scholarship on campus carry.