Concealed Guns on College Campuses: Examining Support for Campus Carry Among Faculty, Staff, and Students

ABSTRACT

This study examined the factors that influence support for campus carry laws among a sample of approximately 2,700 faculty/administrators, staff, and students at a large, public university in Georgia. Although previous research suggests that support for campus carry may differ across groups on campus, there have been no studies that have examined why these differences may exist. In order to shed light on this understudied issue, this study estimated the extent of support for campus carry and examined if the predictors of support varied across campus populations. Results indicated that there were differences in the proportion of each group that supported campus carry with students (57%) reporting a higher level of support than staff (39%) and faculty/administrators (19%). Further, results from multivariate analyses indicated that there are some differences in the factors that predict support for campus carry for faculty/administrators compared to staff and students.

KEYWORDS:

• Guns
• campus carry
• campus safety
• attitudes

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. Due to the overlap in campus roles between faculty and administrative positions (i.e., deans and department chairs who still have a teaching load), these two campus populations were combined into one group.

2. There were significant differences observed for measures of race across the subsample, with a slightly larger proportion of White respondents in contrast to the number reported in the university’s figures. These findings could reflect an overrepresentation of White respondents, or could be the result of differences in the operational definitions of race used in this study and by the university.

3. The Cronbach’s alphas reported in the text are provided as measures of internal consistency for this current sample only and do not reflect instrument developer reliability estimates. While some scholars have proposed the use of alternative measures to estimate the reliability of scales such as omega (see e.g., Dunn, Baguley, & Brunsden 2014), Cronbach’s alpha is reported in the current study as it is a more appropriate measure of reliability for scales comprised of a smaller number of variables.

4. Although we considered using ordinal regression models, the results of the Wald tests indicated that the parallel regression assumption was violated for multiple coefficients (Long & Freese, 2003), including key theoretical variables, in each of our models. Therefore, multivariate binary logistic regression models were the most appropriate method to use to examine the factors that predict support for campus carry in our subsample analyses.

5. Due to low frequencies for respondents reporting four or five campus safety concerns, we collapsed those who reported three or more campus safety concerns into one category.

6. Given data from the Pew Research Center (2014), which indicates that 28% of young adults in Georgia (ages 18–29) identify as politically conservative, the higher proportion of conservative students in our sample (36%) suggests that our sample may be more conservative than other college students and young adults in Georgia.