People mistakenly believe that segregation was eliminated from our society with the passage of the Civil Rights Act. Segregation never left, the targets have merely changed throughout time. Anybody on the sex offender registry, regardless of the reason they were put onto the list, finds themselves cast into areas outside of arbitrarily defined radiuses from school properties. Felons, regardless of the violation that put them on the felony list, find themselves segregated from gun stores and voting booths. Now, as Uncle points out, permit holders wanting to attend Colorado universities are now being tossed into “separate but equal” living spaces:
The University of Colorado Boulder today announced it is amending housing contracts to ask students who live in undergraduate residence halls and hold a Colorado concealed carry permit, or CCP, to forgo bringing a handgun to campus. The campus also will accommodate those who hold a CCP in a graduate student housing complex off the main campus, provided the permit holders store their weapon in a safe within their dwelling when they are not carrying it.
The university also is asking residence advisers and faculty who live in university housing to sign the same housing agreement as a condition of their residence in these facilities.
Emphasis mine. You have to love the language, holders of carry permits will be “accommodated” as if they somehow have differing needs than students that don’t holder carry permits. What is this really about? Control. The administrators of the University of Colorado Boulder don’t like guns or gun owners and, like any good statist on a power trip, demand the students comply with the administration’s desires. After being defeated in court the administrators had to change their tactics. The Colorado Supreme Court merely ruled that carrying firearms on campus couldn’t be prohibited, it didn’t say that students holding valid carry permits couldn’t be tossed into a ghetto off campus.
What can be done to fix this problem? Another court case could rule that students with valid carry permits can’t be segregated but that will merely require the school administrators to find another way to penalize permit holders. The root of this problem is the fact that school administrators can find out which students hold valid carry permits. Thus the real issue here is that a registry of permit holders exists. These registries need to be abolished and the right to bear arms must be acknowledged as an extension of self-ownership instead of a state granted privilege.