Georgia college students can continue to bring their handguns to class after the Georgia Supreme Court upheld a lower court’s decision to dismiss a challenge by a group of five professors to the state’s campus carry law.
The law, which went into effect in 2017, requires the 26 universities in the university system to allow legitimate gun owners to carry concealed handguns inside school buildings, with limited exceptions, such as on-campus daycares, classes in which senior high school students are enrolled, or administrative offices where a disciplinary proceedings are carried out. Last year’s Constitutional Transportation Act further abolished licensing requirements for transportation at colleges and elsewhere.
The law was controversial when it was created. Former Republican Gov. Nathan Deal vetoed one version of the law in 2016, before signing another version with more exceptions into force the following year. After that, the Board of Regents, which oversees the state’s public universities, changed its policy to comply with the law.
The five professors behind the lawsuit said they would be at risk if they were forced to let guns into their classrooms. Some said they operate labs with chemicals or machines that could be extremely dangerous if damaged by a firearm.
They argued that Georgia universities had banned guns on campus for over two centuries and that the legislature had overstepped its bounds in changing its rules.
But in a unanimous ruling, the judges found that the Board of Regents had adopted the rule change on its own initiative and that it was the Regents’ policies, and not anything passed by the legislature, that led to the alleged damages suffered by the Professors wanted to make amends.
“As we determine that this action by the board challenges the professors’ objection to the 2017 amendment, we do not concern ourselves with why the board took this action,” Judge John J. Ellington wrote in Tuesday’s decision. “We do not look behind the exercise of government power to determine the subjective reasons – legal, political or otherwise – for a particular action so long as the action is within the authority of the government actor.”
Ellington added that complying with the professors’ demands and declaring that the campus carrier law violated the separation of powers would not have solved the problems caused by the university system’s gun policy.
Matthew Boedy, a professor at the University of North Georgia and president of the state chapter of the American Association of University Professors, said the ruling reaffirmed the independence of Georgia’s higher education system and he hoped governors would use that independence to ban firearms again.
“While the law allowing guns on campus was sponsored by a GOP-led legislature and signed by a GOP governor, the court clarified that it was the actions of the Board of Regents in revising its own policies that this dangerous law to students, faculty, and staff,” Boedy said. “The court then indicated that the Regents could act independently and ban guns from campus. The regents should do this. I applaud the professors for working to keep everyone on campus safe. I continue to ask the Regents to do the same. Guns on campus are an affront to education.”
