While people hyperventilate about Betsy DeVos, President-elect Trump’s choice to lead the Education Department, supposedly demanding guns in schools to protect from grizzly attacks (she didn’t actually say that), her actual position got lost in the shuffle: “I think that’s best left for states and locales to decide.”
Sen. Christopher Murphy, D-Conn., apparently thought that was an extreme position. He cut her off and said, “You can’t say definitively today that guns shouldn’t be in schools?”
While federal law currently prohibits most instances of guns in or around K-12 schools, that’s not the case for college campuses.
For colleges, states and localities already make their own decisions about guns on campus.
According to the National Conference of State Legislatures, 18 states ban carrying a concealed weapon on a college campus. There are 23 states that have devolved that decision to each college and university to make their own decision. Eight states allow concealed weapons to be carried on college campuses.
DeVos’ position essentially takes the way current law handles guns on college campuses and extends the same logic to K-12 schools.
Jason Russell is the contributors editor for the Washington Examiner.
