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Kansas Dem Supports Allowing College Admins to Use State Funds to Push Gun Control

Kansas Dem Supports Allowing College Admins to Use State Funds to Push Gun Control

“Kansas is one of a handful that allows for campus carry.”

For Democrats, anything that advances their agenda should be on the table. In academia, they know they won’t get any push back.

Campus Reform reports:

Kansas Dem supports college admins using state funds to lobby gun control

A Democrat lawmaker in Kansas has filed a bill that would allow for the use of “state appropriated moneys to lobby on gun control issues.”

State Rep. Brandon Woodard filed Kansas House Bill 2036 Wednesday, which he said on his Facebook page would “repeal the ‘gag order’ that restricts university leaders from advocating on gun safety issues.”

But university leaders in Kansas are already allowed to advocate for gun safety issues. Woodard’s bill would repeal an existing state statute that restricts money appropriated by the state legislature from being used to promote gun control. Woodard argues that since university leaders are salaried employees, a distinction cannot be made between their personal time and the time they spend in their official capacities.

Kansas is one of a handful that allows for campus carry. Staff, faculty, and students’ attitudes toward campus carry policies were measured by Fort Hays State University Docking Institute studies in 2015 and 2016. The studies gauged attitudes toward the campus carry policy on the campuses of all Kansas Board of Regents (KBOR) Institutions, as well as Washburn University.

One of the findings of the study was that “eighty-two percent of the KU staff, students, and faculty who participated in the January 2016 Docking Institute survey expressed opposition to allowing concealed weapons on campus.” Citing that statistic, the University of Kansas University Senate passed a resolution voicing opposition, “in the strongest possible terms, to allowing concealed weapons on the University of Kansas campuses,” in December 2016.

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Comments

Most likely the administrators themselves won’t be doing the lobbying. This law will be used to hire people whose full-time job is to do nothing but lobby, and I doubt they’ll restrict themselves to gun control. Indeed, I would expect if passed that the subject restriction would be rolled back over time until state money can be used to lobby for anything. That’s the real goal here.