Gun rights advocates speak at Liberty

With a “Guns Save Lives” sticker on his breast pocket, Philip Van Cleave, president of the Virginia Citizens Defense League, made the case Friday for why students should be allowed to carry concealed firearms on college campuses during
the “To Keep and Bear” Second Amendment symposium at Liberty University School of Law.

“At the end of the day, I don’t think there should be restrictions of firearms. Period,” Van Cleave said during the question and answer period.

“There are always going to be criminals; they will always get guns. But the key is, can you protect yourself? God gave you one life and I think he wants you to protect it.”

Guest speakers Van Cleave and Robert Dowlut, general counsel for the National Rifle Association, took center stage during the two-hour dialogue in the law school’s Supreme Courtroom — a full-scale replica of the U.S. Supreme Court, complete with a nine-member bench and Roman columns.

More than 100 students, faculty and community members attended the event, which was sponsored by the Liberty chapter of the Federalist Society, a national organization that advocates a legal system based on individual liberty, traditional values and the rule of law.

The brainchild behind the symposium was third-year law student Jeremy Morris, who believes in a strict interpretation of the Second Amendment.

“Especially in this time of Comrade Obama, excuse me, President Obama, we want to make sure our gun rights are protected,” Morris said during his introductory remarks, eliciting some chuckles from the audience.

Dowlut’s speech focused on the status of gun rights on the state and national levels. He drew on his experience with the NRA and court cases old and new to show how gun law has been shaped over the past century.

“State courts are a very important bulwark of freedom,” Dowlut said.

“The national Constitution is a floor, not a ceiling,” he said, adding that broader gun rights may be achieved on the state level.

Van Cleave, a former police officer, heads up the Virginia Citizens Defense League, a grassroots organization devoted to advancing Second Amendment rights in Virginia.

He argued that lives might have been saved during the Virginia Tech massacre if students and faculty with concealed firearms permits had been allowed to arm themselves while on campus. Van Cleave said he believes that future shootings can be prevented or mitigated with looser gun laws, and cites colleges in Utah and Colorado as leaders in allowing guns on campus.

Self-defense with firearms is a basic right, he said.

“The worst crimes we have, when you think back to all those massacres, they happen in gun- free zones.”

The symposium was rounded out with comments from Virginia Tech student Ken Stanton, who founded the VT chapter of Students for Concealed Carry on Campus (SCCC). Stanton, who lost a friend in the shootings, said he was compelled to start the chapter as a way to make his campus safer.

Liberty University also has a chapter of SCCC, headed by Clint Armstrong, a student and full-time IT employee at the school. Last spring, Liberty’s board of directors decided that the school should stay gun-free, after Armstrong and others approached the school about allowing people with concealed handgun permits to carry weapons on campus.

Armstrong, who attended the symposium, said he hopes Liberty will change its policy on concealed handguns.

“I have my concealed carry permit and I carry a gun everywhere else I go, but I work here five days a week, full-time,” he said.

“It just never made sense that the place where I spend the most amount of time I have to be disarmed. I’m not as safe as I am when I go to Walmart or a restaurant.”

Morris is also a strong proponent for allowing guns on campus.

“We live in a violent society, a society where a seemingly peaceful, safe community, like here in Southern Virginia, can see tremendous violence.

“I have a natural right to protect myself that’s guaranteed to me in the Constitution, and derivatively through the Bill of Rights.”

Federalist Society president Benjamin Boyd said that the symposium was a good fit for university.

“Liberty University is well known for its conservative positions. We have an automatic appeal in that most conservatives and many evangelicals are emphatically supporting gun rights.”

He said he hopes the speakers’ messages reached some anti-gun people in the audience, even if they were in the minority.

“It’s good just to see people coming together and speaking about gun rights.”