"A pair of Republican delegates and a pair of Virginia college students said Monday that campuses would be safer if the state’s universities allowed professors and students with concealed carry permits to attend classes wearing firearms.
Del. Robert G. Marshall, R-Manassas, said the General Assembly responded to last April’s Virginia Tech shooting tragedy by passing some legislation, including a bill allowing a concealed carry permit holder to take a gun into a restaurant serving alcohol.

“While I support this legislation, there have been no recent mass killings in restaurants that I am aware of,” Marshall told a well-attended news conference. “We have to make sure that potential killers know that Virginia’s colleges and universities are not ‘gun free zones’ where they can kill at will.”

Del. C. Todd Gilbert, R-Woodstock, said the General Assembly should determine whether a student who has undergone a background check and safety training to gain a permit should be able to carry a concealed handgun on campus, not university boards or administrations.

“As we know from so many examples of campus shootings, the only person who should feel safe in a gun free zone is the deranged killer who can rightly assume that he will find his victims defenseless,” Gilbert said.

Gilbert and Marshall saw their bills to allow concealed weapons on campuses killed by fellow House Republicans, who allowed the bills to die in a committee without a recorded vote.

Marshall said his bill would pass if the GOP leadership allowed it to come up for a vote on the floor of the House of Delegates.

House Majority Leader H. Morgan Griffith, R-Salem, said later he doubted that Marshall’s bill to allow professors to carry concealed weapons would pass.

Griffith said the legislature was giving the bills more time to be considered again next year and had sent a pair of gun bills to Gov. Timothy M. Kaine’s desk, including the measure to allow people with a concealed weapons permit to bring a hidden handgun into a restaurant if they do not drink, a bill it has considered since 1995.

“The question is do you want the session to be all about one subject, or do you want to think about it and figure it out?” Griffith said. He said he agrees philosophically with Marshall and Gilbert and agrees that the legislature, not the universities, should set concealed carry policy.

Anyone from outside a university can carry a concealed weapon on campus with a concealed carry permit, Griffith said. “If I had a license, I could go to Virginia Tech right now, wander through, go to the Duck Pond … show or not show my gun.”

Andrew C. Goddard, the father of a Virginia Tech student wounded last April in the campus shootings, attended Marshall’s news conference and said allowing students and professors to carry guns would not make anyone safer.

Most would choose not to carry a concealed weapon, Goddard said, but if a significant number did choose to carry handguns it could prompt an arms race on campus where criminals could decide to switch to more or heavier weaponry.

Goddard said college campuses are not armed camps and Virginia should preserve that status rather than change it. Giving professors the right to carry “is unlikely to alter the balance of power on campus, so it’s ineffectual,” he said.

His son, Colin Gaddard, said he was shot while “in French class. I know my teacher of that day, she would not have had any” concealed weapon even if allowed to carry one on campus, he said after attending Marshall’s news conference.

George Mason University senior Andrew Dysert and Mary Washington sophomore Logan Metesh said students and professors with concealed carry permits have the right to safely carry handguns on campus.

“They don’t mix alcohol and guns,” Dysert said. “They carry concealed weapons for self defense.”" (Bob Gibson, The Daily Progress, March 4, 2008)