NC private college professors can now carry guns. Most other states allow it too
North Carolina’s private universities are the latest in a growing number across the country whose states allow higher education professors or K-12 teachers to carry a concealed firearm. House Bill 193 allows private colleges and universities in the state to approve an employee to carry a concealed firearm on campus or at a university religious site.
The employee must first complete an eight-hour firearms training course and keep a valid concealed-carry license. The college employee can only carry a gun or stun gun on their campus, not on another university’s property. The bill was first vetoed by Democratic Gov. Josh Stein, subsequently overridden by the Republican-controlled Legislature, and went into effect Monday.
Supporters of North Carolina’s law cited a recent uptick in private religious school shootings as a reason for the change.
State Rep. Jeff McNeely, R-Iredell, called his legislation a “simple, all-American bill that protects our children” during the May 1 debate on the measure.
“The FBI estimates about two million times per-year that legally owned guns are used to defend people in the United States of America,” said Rep. Keith Kidwell, R-Beaufort. “It’s only common sense that when a bad guy shows up with a gun, you don’t want to bring a knife to a gun fight or a stick. You want to bring a gun to a gunfight.”
Stein said in his veto message that giving school faculty the ability to carry a firearm would make students less safe.
“Just as we should not allow guns in the General Assembly, we should keep them out of our schools unless they are in the possession of law enforcement,” he said.
Critics say this makes kids less safe
Gun control proponents feel the same, as did a majority of teachers in K-12 schools.
“There is currently no evidence that arming teachers effectively deters gun violence in schools, nor reduces the lethality of a shooting should one occur,” Everytown for Gun Safety said in its October post about the growing trend of arming teachers.
The nonprofit RAND surveyed nearly 1,000 teachers and found in 2023 that 54% believed that teachers carrying firearms would make schools less safe. Another 20% thought that it would make schools safer. Just over a quarter of respondents said it wouldn’t make a difference.
Last resort
Should an armed assailant attack a school, students and faculty have training and procedures on how to react. Students across the country conduct safety drills to have some semblance of a plan. Police response to school shootings, an event where lives hang on every second, has come under scrutiny.
The May 2022 mass shooting at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas, saw students and faculty trapped in classrooms with an armed attacker for more than an hour. Nineteen students and two teachers were killed. Follow-up investigations eventually led to two school police officers being indicted.
The FBI found that the median police response time for 51 active shooter attacks was three minutes. The bureau called that “fast” for law enforcement standards.
The window between an attack and the eventual police response is the conundrum that was studied by a Purdue University professor in 2014. Professor Eric Dietz, who previously headed the Indiana Department of Homeland Security, estimated that armed personnel at a school, be it school resource officers or armed faculty, would slow an attack by 70%. He told the Purdue Independent in 2018 that 5%-10% of a school’s staff being armed could reduce casualties up to 20%.
Everytown mentioned the thought of “doing something” as the impulse of policymakers facing a growing trend of gun violence in schools, both public and private.
For years, arming teachers has been that something.
The norm, not the exception
North Carolina’s public school teachers at the K-12 or collegiate level aren’t allowed to bring a concealed firearm into work. That puts the state into the minority. At least 30 states have some form of law allowing school faculty to carry a firearm on campuses.
As of October 2025, Everytown said 15 states have laws that explicitly allow teachers to carry a firearm into their schools. According to The Campaign to Keep Guns off Campus, just 12 states ban firearms on college properties. Eight more allow firearms that must remain locked inside cars. The rest either have laws explicitly allowing concealed carry on campus grounds or let school administrators decide.
Collegiate policies on the issue largely mirror laws regarding K-12 campuses. An analysis by Newsweek in April 2024 similarly found that at least 30 states allow K-12 teachers to carry a concealed firearm with some exceptions and training requirements.
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Ella Rae Greene, Editor In Chief
