Georgia Legislature Passes Campus Carry

It is now off to the Governor for his signature.

I've had one of these licenses for decades, with a short void while I was a citizen of other states in the early 2000s. The permit requirements are fairly stringent. Most undergraduates are simply too young to apply, as you must be 21. All applicants are finger-printed and undergo both state and Federal criminal background checks. In addition, the probate court contacts Georgia's mental health facilities to make sure that they have no mental issues, and have never been in drug or alcohol rehabilitation treatment. All these checks are repeated every five years, and any serious criminal convictions -- as well as mere accusations of domestic violence, which is taken especially seriously by the Federal government -- void the license and are entered into the central tracking system to prevent the issuing of a new one.

Georgia has no firearms training requirement, which is a weakness in the law in my opinion: I think all American citizens should be trained in the use of firearms in High School as part of their militia service as citizens. Nevertheless, for the most part the state takes seriously the question of making sure that only rational adults of continually demonstrated good behavior are licensed.

The people who are likely to shoot up a campus are unlikely to prove to have a license -- nor, for that matter, are they likely to have cared whether it was legal to bring the gun in the first place.

The article does mention the recent robberies at Georgia State University, where I went to school as an undergraduate long ago. They're right that there were robberies regularly, as it is right downtown in Atlanta and classes run well into the night. Many of the students are "nontraditional," meaning they have enrolled in school later in life, and often they are working a full-time job in addition to pursuing a degree after work. These students are a very low risk for turning criminal, but they are exposed to a significant risk of robbery or assault walking back to their cars, or to the MARTA station, on what is often a lonely campus late at night.