Public colleges like to speak in the language of community. They are marketplaces of ideas, shared spaces, open campuses, open doors.
But when the topic is firearms, many public universities suddenly speak a different language. Not community, but property. Not rights, but rules. Not citizens, but “campus users.”
New Hampshire is now testing how far that switch can go. A proposal to roll back gun-free zones on public college campuses collapsed in the state Senate this week, and its sponsor, Rep. Sam Farrington of Rochester, says the next chapter will be a legal one.
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The bill ended
The immediate news is procedural but the stakes are constitutional. The New Hampshire Senate voted against sending the campus-carry bill to a committee of conference to renegotiate final language with the House. That vote effectively ended the measure for this session.
Farrington, who graduated from the University of New Hampshire last Saturday, had pushed the bill as a way to prevent public colleges from treating lawful adult carry as contraband. The proposal also would have allowed students to carry nonlethal defensive tools, including pepper spray and mace.
Now, he says, the fight shifts to court. “We’ll be pursuing this with a legal challenge,” Farrington has said, focusing on New Hampshire’s firearms preemption law.
The hinge is preemption
Most Americans think campus gun rules are a Second Amendment issue first. In New Hampshire, the more immediate hinge may be state law.
New Hampshire has a firearms preemption statute, which prohibits any “political subdivision” other than the Legislature from regulating firearms. The point of preemption is simple: a patchwork of rules turns ordinary travel into a legal obstacle course. One town says yes, the next says no, and the citizen is left guessing where the line moved.
Farrington’s theory is that a public university, run by administrators who are not elected, still functions as a governmental arm for purposes of gun regulation. If so, a campus-wide gun ban is not merely a “policy.” It is a regulation issued by an entity the Legislature has told to stay out of the gun-control lane.
The University of New Hampshire answers with a different concept: delegated authority. University leaders have said the restrictions were “adopted under authority granted by the Legislature to the Board of Trustees and campus presidents to govern university property.” In other words, the state can delegate management of state property, and part of management is deciding what is allowed on that property.
This sets up a classic legal collision. Preemption statutes are designed to keep sub-state actors from regulating firearms. Public universities argue they are not regulating the public in general, but setting conditions for use of a particular set of state-owned premises.
Courts are then forced to ask an unglamorous but decisive question: when a public university bans guns, is it acting like a landlord or like a legislature?
Rights meet open doors
Even if a preemption challenge fails, the constitutional question lingers: can the government disarm otherwise law-abiding adults simply because they are standing on a public campus?
Legal debates after New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v. Bruen (2022) tend to turn on history and tradition rather than modern interest balancing. Universities often defend bans by describing campuses as “sensitive places.” But the label “school” is doing a lot of work. An elementary school is not a sprawling public university with adult students, faculty, visiting speakers, public events, and open walkways that function like a small town.
Farrington’s argument is not only legal, but practical. “At UNH, for example…doors are left wide open, buildings are wide open. Anybody can walk in at any point in time,” he has said. In that setting, he argues, “gun-free zones” “leave victims defenseless and vulnerable.”
National pressure
New Hampshire is one of 37 states where college campuses are treated as gun-free zones as a general matter. This includes Rhode Island and Virginia, where Brown University and Old Dominion University, respectively, were each sites of deadly shootings this school year.
Those tragedies are part of why campus gun rules never stay confined to policy manuals. They feed a broader student argument about what “safety” actually means when a campus is open to the public but disarms the adults who spend their lives there.
Research is thin
One reason these fights grow so heated is that the evidence is contested and often thin. Studies measure different outcomes, use different definitions, and reach different conclusions depending on what counts as a “gun-free zone” or a “mass shooting.”
Some advocates cite the Crime Prevention Research Center’s estimate that more than 80 percent of mass public shootings since 1998 occurred in locations where guns were banned. Other analyses, using different criteria, have produced markedly lower shares, including 48 percent and even 10 percent.
Meanwhile, RAND’s review of the evidence has found the literature limited enough that only one study met its inclusion standards on the relationship between campus carry laws and campus crime. That study found campus carry laws were not significantly associated with violent or property crime on campus between 2005 and 2014. It also reported that campuses in states allowing unpermitted concealed carry, like New Hampshire, had lower property crime rates.
This is not a neat empirical story. But constitutional rights do not rise or fall on social science alone. The Second Amendment does not say “shall not be infringed, unless a regression model says otherwise.” The question is whether the government has the power to impose the rule, and whether the Constitution tolerates it.
Security and skepticism
Universities often point to campus security teams or coordination with local law enforcement as evidence of their commitment to student safety. Farrington is skeptical. “You can’t trust the government police officers to defend you,” he has said, referencing Castle Rock v. Gonzales (2005), where the Supreme Court ruled that law enforcement cannot be held liable for failing or refusing to protect citizens from threats they did not create. “You need to take it upon yourself, and that’s why this right is so important,” he said.
In the wake of this year’s campus shootings, more students around the country have begun to echo that skepticism. After the Brown shooting, a run of student op-eds criticized the limitations of campus security models that rely on alerts and unarmed personnel.
One student argued that campus security officers, who outnumber Yale Police Department officers 140 to 93, are unarmed and, in an emergency, are tasked with telling students to hide and then calling armed police. He urged Yale to give security officers some kind of incapacitating weapons, or at least expand its armed police department.
In another op-ed, Yale student and active-duty U.S. Marine Timothy Riemann criticized campus-wide safety alerts that, he wrote, always omit the perpetrator’s race. “To me,” Riemann wrote, “it signals that the University prioritizes the potential or theoretical harm caused by including race as an identifying characteristic over the very real safety of its own students, faculty and staff.”
Mass shootings are a much rarer threat than everyday robberies and assaults. But the broader point of these student critiques is not that universities do nothing. It is that their paradigms can be structurally limited, and those limits become harder to ignore when the rules are strict and the stakes are life and death.
The real battleground
The deeper issue is structural: public colleges occupy an odd position in American law. They are state actors, funded and empowered by the government, yet they often claim the discretionary freedom of private institutions when they write codes of conduct.
Sometimes that flexibility makes sense. Universities need to manage labs, dorms, sporting events, and crowds. But the more a policy looks like a general firearm regulation, the harder it becomes to describe it as mere property management. And if it is regulation, preemption statutes exist to stop precisely this kind of decentralized rulemaking.
Courts in a case like Farrington’s would likely have to answer at least three questions in order:
- Is a public university a “political subdivision” or otherwise covered by state firearms preemption?
- If the Legislature delegated authority to govern university property, did it also authorize firearm prohibitions that contradict preemption’s purpose?
- Even if state law permits the policy, does the Second Amendment allow it under the history-and-tradition test?
That sequence matters. Preemption could decide the case without reaching the Second Amendment at all. But if courts do reach the constitutional question, the university’s strongest argument will be “sensitive places,” and the challengers’ strongest reply will be that public university campuses are not monolithic zones and cannot be treated like K-12 schools by default.
The takeaway
There is a temptation to treat this as a narrow campus dispute. It is not.
It is a test of how the modern administrative state interacts with enumerated rights. The Second Amendment restrains government, but government today often acts through institutions that feel semi-autonomous: boards, trustees, presidents, and policy manuals that carry the force of law for the people who live under them.
If Farrington’s promised lawsuit comes, it will force New Hampshire to clarify something that affects more than firearms: when you step onto a public campus, do you enter a zone where ordinary constitutional assumptions fade, replaced by a “terms of use” document?
The Constitution does not vanish at the campus gates. The hard part is deciding which gate is being guarded: a schoolhouse door, or a public square.