New Bill Would Allow Guns On School Property

Guns at school (Added: January 30, 2009)

A new bill would allow concealed weapons permit holders to have guns on school campuses. (more)

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New Bill Would Allow Guns On School Property

A bill introduced by Spartanburg Sen. Shane Martin would allow those with concealed weapons permits to have their guns on school grounds, as long as the guns are locked in vehicles.

By: Robert Kittle | WSPA-TV
Published: January 31, 2009

A new bill introduced in the South Carolina Senate is either a worrisome threat to children's safety or a minor change to keep law-abiding citizens from inadvertently breaking the law, depending on your viewpoint. The bill would allow anyone with a concealed weapons permit to have his gun on a school campus, as long as the gun is locked in a vehicle.

Sen. Shane Martin, R-Spartanburg, introduced the bill Thursday because, as a concealed weapons permit holder, he's run into a problem. "If my wife calls and says, 'Shane, our daughter's sick. I need you to come by school and pick her up,' well, what do I do? I've got my concealed weapon with me. I would have to come home or go somewhere. I wouldn't be able to come on school grounds and pick up my child. And I just think that's an inconvenience that law-abiding citizens don't need." He says the current law prohibiting that is rarely enforced, but he'd rather make this change to keep it from being a problem.

Concealed weapons permit holders have to be at least 21 years old, have a clean record and pass a handgun safety training course. The bill says any gun would have to stay inside a locked vehicle. That's the major difference between this bill and one that was introduced and defeated in 2007. That bill would have allowed someone with a concealed weapons permit to carry a gun with them into a school.

Waiting to pick up his daughter at a Columbia high school Friday, Ray Hoskins said the proposal doesn't bother him. "If a person has gone through the training and has a license to carry a concealed weapon in his glove compartment of his car, then if he goes to a school to visit a school, as long as he doesn't take the weapon inside the school but leaves it in his car, for which he's legal and lawful and has a license to have it there, then I think that's fine," he says.

But, perhaps in a foreshadowing of the Statehouse debate to come on the bill, parent Dottie Hanlin sees it much differently. "I don't feel comfortable with having any kind of firearm on a school campus, except for those that belong to the resource officer. I teach in a public school and I just don't think it's something we need to be dealing with when we're trying to educate our children," she says.