Anti-gun CU physics professor Jerry Peterson threatens to defraud students if he finds a gun in his classroom.

By Seth Richardson

In the Denver Post today, a story by Boulder Daily Camera writer Brittany Anas says that CU physics professor Jerry Peterson has threatened to cancel classes if he finds that one of his students is lawfully armed. “My own personal policy in my classes is if I’m aware that there is a firearm in the class–registered or unregistered–concealed or unconcealed–the class session is immediately cancelled,” Peterson is quoted as saying. “I want my students to feel unconstrained in their discussions.”

This sort of irrational fear of law-abiding citizens who go to the trouble of getting a permit to carry a concealed handgun is typical of hoplophobes. The word was coined in 1962 by one of the leading figures in armed self-defense training, the late Col. Jeff Cooper, who coined it in his book “To Ride, Shoot Straight, and Speak The Truth.” Cooper opined that hoplophobia was a “mental disturbance characterized by irrational aversion to weapons.” It derives from the word “hoplite,” which refers to the ancient Greek citizen-soldier who was expected to procure his own weapons and armor in order to serve in the militia when called to duty. The Spartans are perhaps the best known hoplites thanks to movies like “300.”

In the present usage, it means, broadly, “those who have an irrational fear of an armed citizenry,” a mental disturbance that’s quite typically seen in academia, which is these days severely infested with liberal panty-waists, Progressives and outright Marxists, all of whom see an armed citizenry as both a threat to their personal aggregations of power and privilege, and as an obstacle to their left-wing political agenda that requires a disarmed public in order to facilitate the sort of oppressive government control that these sort of wanna-be despots so desperately want in power.

An armed citizenry has always been an obstacle to tyranny and despotism, as well as a deterrent to criminality, as the Spartans and the authors of the U.S. Constitution well knew, which is precisely why the Founders forbade the federal government from infringing upon the right of the people to keep and bear arms.

When the Colorado General Assembly passed the Concealed Carry Act in 2003, it intended to divest not just the Regents of the University, but also every state employee, which includes professors, of any authority to regulate the lawful carrying of concealed weapons on campus. So when Professor Peterson threatens to cancel classes if he finds someone lawfully carrying a handgun, he’s violating state law. That’s bad enough, but what’s worse is that he is also defrauding the students who have paid to attend his classes, and the people of the State of Colorado who pay his salary. We don’t pay him to make hoplophobic political statements, we pay him to teach classes and ignore students who are lawfully exercising their constitutional right to keep and bear arms.

If he can’t bring himself to be in the classroom with a lawfully-carried handgun, then he needs to be dismissed from his position at a public university and told to seek employment somewhere else. And if the Regents won’t do it, then some student who is defrauded by Professor Peterson by having a bought-and-paid-for class dismissed because Professor Peterson suffers from hoplophobia should sue the University and force them to either fire Peterson or order him to obey state law and do his job.

© 2012 Altnews

When will the Regents of the University of Colorado bow to the authority of the General Assembly?

By Seth Richardson

When it comes to the lawful carrying of concealed handguns on campus, the University of Colorado Board of Regents has been stubbornly resistant to either abiding by the law, respecting the constitutional rights of students, faculty, staff and visitors to its campuses in Boulder and Colorado Springs, or obeying the rulings of the Colorado Supreme Court.

For decades the University has ignored the requirements of a 1994 state law regarding the carrying of concealed weapons pursuant to a valid concealed carry permit on campus. The Regents stubbornly insisted that the University was not subject to the control of the Legislature or state law and that they could make up whatever rules they wanted. Even when the Legislature created a statewide comprehensive law regarding the carrying of concealed handguns in 2003, the Regents continued to flout the law with rules that flatly defied the new statute. The University was eventually sued by a group of students who objected to the continuing absolute ban on concealed carry.

While the Regents of the University are something of a power unto themselves when it comes to operating the University, it’s still a department of the state government and is under the general supervisory control of the Legislature, but it took a Colorado Supreme Court ruling to finally convince them that they are not an independent power.

In Students for Concealed Carry on Campus v. Regents of the University of Colorado the Court ruled that “citing ‘widespread inconsistenc[ies] among jurisdictions,’ the General Assembly enacted the CCA [Concealed Carry Act] to ‘occupy the field of regulation of the bearing of concealed handguns’ and to ‘provide statewide uniform standards for issuing permits to carry concealed handguns for self-defense.’ “ In legal parlance, “occupying the field” means that even home rule cities must bow to the state’s authority to exclusively regulate in that area.

Decided in March of this year, the Colorado Supreme Court held that the Legislature had “divested the Board of Regents of its authority to regulate concealed handgun possession on campus.”

But evidently even that clear declaration hasn’t gotten through to the Regents, who today announced new regulations for freshmen students and public attendance at events on campus that once again purport to ban and/or regulate concealed handgun possession on campus.

The rationale used this time is “contracts.” The University maintains that has the authority to limit the possession of concealed weapons in campus housing facilities as a function of landlord/tenant contract law. As expressed in an article in the Denver Post by Ryan Parker, Patrick O’Rourke, vice-president of the Board of Regents is quoted as saying, “In contrast to other public buildings, student housing presents a relationship that is essentially landlord-tenant.”

The same sort of rationale is used to justify banning concealed handguns at public campus events like football games and theater events. “We are treating that ticket purchase as a contractual agreement that you won’t bring your weapon to the venue,” says CU-Boulder spokesman Bronson Hilliard in Ryan’s article.

The problem with this reasoning is that while the concealed carry law explicitly permits private property owners to forbid concealed handguns on their property, the University is not private property, it’s public property, and that includes every single building on every campus, including dorms and sports venues.

Impeaching the supposed need to weasel around an absolutely crystal clear Colorado Supreme Court ruling is the University’s own claim that the number of over-21 students eligible to even obtain a concealed carry permit is only four percent at the Boulder campus. Ryan goes on to quote Tom Hutton, spokesman for the UCCS campus as saying, “Of the total UCCS student body population, which should exceed 10,000 this year, we estimate that less than 1 percent will have a concealed carry permit.”

Two questions come to mind from this information: What’s the problem that they are trying to fix, and what part of the Colorado Supreme Court ruling that the General Assembly has “divested the Board of Regents of its authority to regulate concealed handgun possession on campus” is unclear to the Regents?

© 2012 Altnews