Utah Gun Packers Don’t Leave Home Without It

When Vice President Dick Cheney came to town last summer, a lot of people didn’t see any reason to leave their guns at home. If something happened, wouldn’t the vice president be better off with a roomful of law-abiding armed Utahans there to help?

The Secret Service had another view--no guns, no exceptions--and state Atty. Gen. Mark Shurtleff ended the argument by putting locked storage boxes outside the convention hall where Cheney was speaking. That way, holders of concealed-gun permits could leave the room when Cheney arrived, stow their guns and fetch them when the vice president departed.

Now, with the Olympics here, many gun owners tried to argue that similar “safe storage” facilities should be provided at the venues. In a state where permit holders can legally take their guns into state offices, bars, elementary schools, day-care centers, the state Capitol and churches, many see no reason not to provide gun owners with a place to stow their weapons while attending Olympic events.

State gun organizations lost that fight too, but are moving toward a showdown at the University of Utah, where President J. Bernard Machen has defied a recent state attorney general opinion that would allow teachers and students to carry guns on campus for the first time in 20 years.

Last week, the Utah Senate’s state and local affairs committee held hearings on a bill that would allow the Legislature to withhold half the salaries of officials who violate state laws--a pointed, if indirect, reference to Machen and other college administrators believed to be defying the Legislature’s will on gun control.

“Classrooms, libraries, dormitories and cafeterias are no place for lethal weapons,” Machen told a legislative committee in January. “Their very presence would interfere with the essential functions of a university.”

Most of the other state colleges, along with Brigham Young University, run by the Mormon church, also prohibit guns on campus, but Machen has gone out front in the debate, declaring he’s willing to go to court to keep guns out of the university. The university’s gun ban applies to students and teachers, but not to visitors.

“I hold out some hope that we could be found to be not in defiance of the law,” Machen said in an interview at his office near the Olympic Village, where thousands of athletes and coaches are residing during the Games. “But our view is that having guns around would challenge the very nature of dialogue on campus, where the passionate defense of ideas is sort of the hallmark of what we’re all about.”

Those arguing in favor of upholding the law, which lets holders of concealed-weapon permits carry guns nearly anywhere, say university leaders miss the point when they frame the issue around free academic debate.

What they should be considering is the safety of teachers and students who often walk to their cars late at night, who feel safer with a gun to defend themselves, said Janalee Tobias, president of Women Against Gun Control.

“Right now, with the Olympics, there’s chain-link fences up everywhere and helicopters hovering overhead and soldiers running around with guns. I think you’re pretty safe right now,” Tobias said. “But what about later? They actually think they can wave this magic wand and crime will just magically disappear. I have a question for Bernie Machen: Why are there so many emergency phone booths up there if the University of Utah is such a safe place?”

Utah ranks 12th lowest in the nation in violent crime.

Matt Boyden, a third-year law student who helped organize the College of Law Gun Rights Advocates, said students long felt the university’s ban on guns was illegal under Utah law.

“It’s a two-edged sword. From his [the university president] perspective, he thinks if professors or students knew there were students who were concealing firearms, they might not be at liberty to speak freely. But the Catch-22 is, those students who carry may feel like they can’t speak freely if you take away the power to defend themselves,” Boyden said.

Until the mid-1990s, Utah had fewer than 1,000 citizens with concealed-weapon permits. Then, like many other states, Utah changed its laws in 1995 to qualify most law-abiding citizens for a permit. Now, about 42,000 state residents, or 3% of the adult population, are licensed to carry concealed firearms. They cannot carry guns in secured areas such as airports, courthouses and jails.

They are subject to background checks, fingerprinting, training requirements and regular law enforcement checks. Permits are declined for those who have been convicted of drunken driving, domestic abuse, sexual abuse, felonies or violent misdemeanors, as well as those who have been judged mentally incompetent.

With all those protections, gun advocates say, it’s up to the state to come up with a reason why citizens with permits should not be allowed to carry their guns, whether it be on a university campus or to an Olympic skiing event.

The state Legislature passed a law in 1999 specifically declaring all Olympic venues off limits for guns and mandating metal detectors to enforce the ban. Many gun rights advocates said they could live with a ban that was enforced on everyone--criminals and law-abiding citizens as well. But they pushed strongly--and ultimately unsuccessfully--to store weapons in lockboxes at venues. They rejected Olympic officials’ suggestion that they leave their guns at home or in their cars.

“Leaving your weapon at home makes you defenseless during the many hours that you will spend traveling to and from each Olympic event. Leaving it in your parked car is impractical, potentially unsafe and possibly illegal,” the Gun Owners of Utah argued in a position paper.

“The people responsible for this decision don’t seem to understand that legally armed American citizens are an asset to public safety, not a liability.”

Those who have advocated limits on guns questioned the need for lockboxes. “I can say, as someone who lives in downtown Salt Lake City, that the concept that I would have to leave my home carrying a gun and [lock it up when I] go into a secured area and immediately need my gun to go home again is silly,” said Maura Carabello, director of Utah’s Gun Violence Prevention Center, which is attempting to qualify an initiative for the November ballot to keep guns out of schools and churches.

Winston Clark Aposhian, legislative liaison for Gun Owners of Utah, had secured funding for Olympic lockboxes through the National Rifle Assn. But he said he broke ranks with some of his colleagues and decided not to press the issue when federal security officials appeared adamant.

“The Secret Service said, flat out, no,” Aposhian said. “If I wanted to get on the Secret Service bad list, I’d push it. But frankly, I don’t.”

No one, however, is backing down on the guns-on-campus fight.

Aposhian, who carries a .40-caliber “Baby” Glock stuffed into the back of his waistband whenever he leaves the house, says many teachers and principals have taken his concealed-weapon training courses.

Dining at a Salt Lake City restaurant one recent evening with the Glock wedged between him and the back of the chair, Aposhian said he has rarely had to pull his gun from the holster. But that doesn’t make it any less useful, he said.

“If someone comes in here with a gun and tries to hold the place up, one of the things he has to consider is, this is Utah. There may be return fire. That’s one of the fringe benefits of this law.”

For years, many state agencies, along with the university, have prohibited workers from carrying guns to work. But most of those regulations were turned on their head last fall when the attorney general looked at an ordinance passed a little over a year ago in the southern Utah town of Virgin. There, city leaders had taken an affirmative stand on the 2nd Amendment by requiring all heads of households to own a gun. (Most of the town’s 394 residents already did.)

Shurtleff believed Virgin was possibly in violation of a state law, which placed gun policy solely within the purview of the Legislature. Then again, he concluded in a November opinion, so were state regulations that attempted to prohibit state employees from carrying firearms in state facilities, in state cars or on state business in places outside designated secure areas.

In hearings in late December before the state personnel board, some state workers said they felt safer carrying a gun to work. “The concealed-weapon permit holders I know are responsible people who are not trying to save the world, they’re trying to protect us,” state employee Rodney Smith testified. “They’re going to be pointing guns the other way. Not at us.”

But Lorna Brown, a mother of young children, said allowing guns in state buildings would make it twice as hard to protect her children. If someone goes on a shooting spree and the employees are unarmed, she said, “The only thing I have to worry about is shots coming from one direction, not two.”

Backers of the Safe to Learn, Safe to Worship initiative--ranging from the PTA to the Utah Education Assn. and the Utah Medical Assn.--say schools and churches are regarded as gun-free zones in most states and ought to be in Utah as well.

In January, when the Capitol Preservation Board met to consider gun regulations inside the state Capitol, Atty. Gen. Shurtleff brought a silhouette target of a human being from a recent trip he made to the shooting range, proudly displaying 148 out of 150 possible shots clustered in the so-called kill zone--to the delight of most of the crowd.

Shurtleff still hopes to negotiate a resolution to the university issue, his spokesman Paul Murphy said. “We are hoping we can get together, reason with each other and that it can be settled without going to court.”

Leaders in Virgin were happy to compromise. Last fall, they amended the law that said households had to have a gun and required citizens instead to have “arms.”

“We are not allowed to say ‘firearms,’ ” Mayor Jay Lee said then. “We changed it to say arms, which can mean anything from a pitchfork to a banana.”