Note: This article only concerns the policy at Dartmouth that relates to students. The policy referred to in this article is found in the Student Handbook. There is a separate policy for employees, visitors, and contractors available in the Employment, Policy, and Procedures manual.
Dartmouth’s policy towards firearms and other weapons is laid out in the Dartmouth Student Handbook, in a document titled “Weapons, Firearms, Fireworks, and Projectiles.” The College enumerates all of the different types of banned weapons. It moves on to describe the areas where firearms or other weapons may and may not be used. The document then explains the process for registering and storing a firearm with Safety and Security and finally rephrases some state and local laws concerning weapons.
The weapons registration and storage system has some small issues, but overall functions quite well with the resources that are available. However, the policy also has a number of significant negatives, some of which may simply have been oversights when it was written, and others which represent ideological issues.
All weapons registration and storage for Dartmouth students is handled by Safety and Security. Some form of weapons safety training is required to keep a firearm in the S&S gun room, which helps to ensure that people using a firearm around campus are responsible gun owners. Unfortunately, Dartmouth only offers a Hunter Safety Course once a year, and spots are limited. It is possible to use other safety certifications obtained outside of Dartmouth. Registering a gun with S&S is a very painless process that only takes around fifteen minutes. Once a firearm is stored in the gun room, getting it in and out is only a few minutes as long as the officer on duty is not too busy coordinating calls.
Unfortunately, the designers of the Dartmouth firearm policy are culpable for several other issues. First, the document only approves the use of firearms for hunting or target shooting, and not for any type of self-defense. In addition, the College failed to recognize that there are unique problems associated with owning a gun as an undergraduate student living on-campus; instead students living off-campus or on-campus all have their rights restricted to the same levels. Handguns are singled out to be universally banned. Finally, Safety and Security technically has the capability to stop you from retrieving your gun at any time, up to their discretion.
The gun policy makes references to the fact that students are allowed to own or carry guns that will be used for hunting or target shooting. The College requires a Hunter Safety Certificate to store a gun with them, or a more general type of safety certification if the weapon is stored “solely for marksmanship purposes.” No mention is made of more self-defense oriented certifications such as a Concealed Carry Permit. Handguns, which are more convenient to carry and store for self-defense, are completely banned.
The College has demonstrated a commitment against self-defense in the past, at the expense of one of their students. In 2014, Taylor Woolrich, then a junior at Dartmouth, asked Safety and Security for permission to carry a handgun to defend herself against a man who had been stalking her for years. Woolrich’s concerns were very well justified. The stalker, Richard Bennett, was a man 47 years her senior who had been relentlessly following her and sending her messages for four years despite her many protests. A restraining order did little to stop Bennett. He made plans to travel cross-country from California to New Hampshire, and he showed up at the door of her new house after her family had moved to a different town. In her senior year at Dartmouth, a year after Woolrich had requested to carry a gun, he was convicted of felony stalking and jailed. Woolrich said that when she asked law enforcement officers about “using a gun for protection against Bennett [her stalker], they encouraged her to buy one and use it.” Yet, “Safety and Security brushed her off” despite her repeated requests, citing the gun policy’s handgun ban as the reason. Bennett was released from prison on December 6, 2015, and now that Woolrich has graduated from Dartmouth, she has been “training with a gun.” Woolrich’s story demonstrates that Dartmouth was committed to refusing to allow her to defend herself, even when she had a clear and present need to do so. In addition, Dartmouth was unwilling to make an exception to the flaws in its gun policy even in an extreme situation different from that faced by an average student.
Woolrich is not the only student who has had a need for self-defense. In July of 2014, a student was assaulted and robbed by two men, who were later arrested. In the same month, a Hanover resident was assaulted across the street from the TDX fraternity house. More recently, two men were arrested for felony assault when they injured a student firing a gun from their car. Dartmouth’s campus went on lockdown for over an hour as Hanover Police searched for the men responsible. All of these circumstances are indicative of one fact: even in a town as safe as Hanover, there is enough danger that a well-trained individual may justifiably want a legal firearm to defend herself with.
Instead of acknowledging a reasonable right to self-defense, Dartmouth’s policy fails to account for differences in students’ living situations and instead chooses to restrict all students’ rights to the lowest common denominator. The gun policy applies equally to all students, whether they live in a dorm, a communal off-campus house, or an apartment miles away from campus. Students living in a dorm or a communal house within walking distance of campus— such as some student houses on School Street or Sargent Street—are presented with unique problems when it comes to owning a gun. Dorm buildings and communal off-campus houses contain a large number of people who a gun owner might not know that well. These people could easily enter the gun owner’s room, which presents a higher level of risk for storing a gun. Alcohol and guns should never mix. But if someone else living in your off-campus house or dorm building throws a party, there may be a lot of intoxicated students inside or near the room who you do not know. For these reasons, the potential risks of storing a gun are significantly higher for dorm rooms and large, communal off-campus houses. In addition, storing a gun in these places contradicts the policy that prohibits weapons “on the Dartmouth campus … [and] the town of Hanover or its environs.” However, some students live in an off-campus apartment or house that is outside of Hanover and too far away to be easily accessible from campus. Only a few people live in most of these houses, so the number of people with access to a gun is lower. The risk of storing a gun in an off-campus house can be minimized by purchasing a gun safe and a trigger lock, locking the door, and only inviting people you know well to the house, and not throwing any large parties. Storing a gun in an off-campus house will not violate the Dartmouth policy in any way other than the off-campus house clause. Despite the substantial differences between the types of living situations available at Dartmouth, the College treats all of them equally.
Another issue is the universal ban on handguns that is imposed without any reason given. The only thing that the policy says on handguns is that “Privately-owned handguns are prohibited anywhere on the Dartmouth campus.” Thus, a student who wishes to store a handgun in Safety and Security simply cannot, even if that student only wants to go to the range with their handgun. Due to the prohibition on weapon storage in any student home, no matter where they live, the handgun ban prevents Dartmouth students from owning handguns while they are in school. A student can keep a handgun back home but will not have access to it for the vast majority of the year. This poses a problem for students who wish to legally carry a firearm in their home states when they are away from campus as the recommendation by the NRA Law Enforcement Training division is that individuals training to carry ought to live fire practice at least once every two weeks.
The off-campus house clause combined with the handgun ban means that being a Dartmouth student restricts a student’s Second Amendment rights, even when that student is not on the Dartmouth campus and is not doing anything related to Dartmouth. There are a number of Dartmouth students who are legally allowed to carry a handgun in the states of Vermont and New Hampshire, and who live several miles away from campus. A Safety and Security officer spoken to while researching this article, who often carries a gun on his hiking trips in the area to defend against wild animals, confirmed that off-campus Dartmouth students cannot do the same thing. Even if a student never carries a weapon on the Dartmouth campus, he or she still cannot own or carry a gun due to the off-campus clause. Dartmouth has every right to infringe on students’ Second Amendment rights when that restriction relates to Dartmouth—for example, when a student is on campus or is on a Dartmouth sponsored trip. But Dartmouth currently restricts students’ rights everywhere in New Hampshire if they are not a local, no matter where they are or what they are doing. As a private organization, it is technically within Dartmouth’s legal right to do this. However, they ought not to do so.
The problem described in the two previous paragraphs becomes more apparent when we alter the circumstances of a student. A veteran—someone well-trained in firearm safety and older than a traditional college student—moves to the Upper Valley to attend Dartmouth College with her family. There is no family home. There is only the home of the student. The student does not have a legal address outside of this Upper Valley home where she can store a firearm. Therefore, she effectively cannot own a handgun to defend her family for four years while she is a student here.
One final issue with the Dartmouth gun policy is that Safety and Security can stop you from retrieving your gun at any time, for any reason. According to the policy document, “During certain times, and at the discretion of the Department of Safety and Security, weapon withdrawal may be suspended or denied.” The document makes no mention as to what those “certain times” are, or what could cause Safety and Security to deny your weapon withdrawal. Certainly, there are many valid reasons to stop students from withdrawing weapons: handling a gun in an unsafe manner or seeming emotionally unstable, among others. But, as Taylor Woolrich’s experiences show, Safety and Security has previously denied a student who had a very strong reason to need a gun, and who was encouraged by actual law enforcement officers to own one. One member of the Review was once not permitted to retrieve his gun after a miscommunication on the part of Safety and Security and Judicial Affairs. This Review member had previously requested a no-contact order to be placed on a student who had sexually assaulted him. The assaulter falsely reported a violation of the no-contact order, and Safety and Security never followed up on it. The Review member was never notified of this supposed violation, and he knew nothing about it until Safety and Security denied him access to his rifle. He was not told when he would be able to retrieve his gun, or whether he would be able to retrieve it at all –something especially upsetting for a survivor of sexual assault. Clearly, this section of the policy should be rewritten to include more specific reasons why students can be denied withdrawal of their firearm. regarding a violation that did not occur in relation to a no-contact order. This member had requested a no contact order in relation to another student after he was sexually assaulted to ensure his safety.
As the above points show, there are some significant issues with the Dartmouth weapons policy. Attempting to discuss these issues with someone familiar with the reasoning behind the policy was extremely difficult. Several Safety and Security officers spoken to before the writing of this article agreed that there were substantial issues in the way that the policy restricts students’ rights outside of Dartmouth. Unfortunately, no one knew who had written the policy or who could discuss the reasoning behind some of its problems. An officer who has worked at Safety and Security for twenty-five years said that the gun policy has not changed since she has been at Dartmouth, and that the people who wrote it had most likely retired. Rory Gawler, the College advisor to Bait and Bullet (a Dartmouth Outing Club group focused on hunting and fishing), also did not know who had written and implemented the current policy. Mark Lancaster, a retired S&S sergeant who managed the Dartmouth gun room and Hunter Safety courses, could not be reached for comment.
The people behind the current gun policy may no longer be at Dartmouth, but that is no reason to not reconsider some of the flawed elements of the policy. Dartmouth should be congratulated for allowing students to own and easily access their guns for hunting and target shooting; that is more than many colleges do for their students. But Dartmouth should still strive to improve the ambiguous areas and problematic restrictions on student gun rights that are present in its gun policy. Even if Dartmouth refuses to change the policy, the College currently lacks a clearly articulated reason for the most pressing issues within the document. Dartmouth’s policies should be based on well-reasoned thought, and those reasons should be available to students with questions. Dartmouth ought to fix the flaws present in the gun policy or at least justify them.
Be the first to comment on "Gun Policy at Dartmouth"