Ruling puts gun law in spotlight

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By LORI PILGER / Lincoln Journal Star

A judge tossed charges against a pair of teens who took rifles onto a Lincoln college campus because Nebraska lawmakers’ intentions were unclear.

Did they intend for a law barring firearms from school grounds to apply to colleges? Or just K-12?

Who better to ask than the man who back in 1994 introduced LB988, the bill that would become State Statute 28-1204.04.

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Sen. Ben Nelson, D-Neb. (Nati Harnik)

Former Sen. John Lindsay of Omaha, now a lobbyist in Lincoln, said he couldn’t remember whether they intended to, or talked about, including colleges.

The speaker of the Legislature in 1994 didn’t remember, either.

But staff for Sen. Ben Nelson, who as governor asked Lindsay to introduce the bill, said they were going after the K-12 schools, not college campuses.

“At the time there were kids all of a sudden taking guns into schools,” said Jim Fagin, Nelson’s deputy communications director. “It was a problem at the time, and they wanted to address it.”

The intentions — remembered by some and forgotten by others — found their way to the heart of a criminal case involving two young men who carried rifles to UNL’s student union Sept. 19 for a College Republicans meeting to talk about the National Rifle Association.

The state argued senators didn’t define the word school in statute, but because it isn’t a technical word they didn’t have to define it. The plain meaning of the word would include any educational institution, attorneys said.

Defense attorneys contended the words were not synonymous, and that the Legislature either intentionally or inadvertently excluded a college campus from the law’s scope. It wasn’t for the courts to supply missing words to make a statute clear.

In his ruling on Monday, Lancaster County Judge Gale Pokorny sided with the defense, dismissing charges against Colin Fury, 18, and Craig Clark, 19.

Pokorny said it was noteworthy the Legislature learned of a potential definition problem in 2006 through an opinion by Attorney General Jon Bruning.

Lawmakers amended the Concealed Handgun Permit Act the next session to fix it but chose not to do the same with a related statute: “unlawful possession of a firearm on school grounds.”

Which led to the debate over the charge and Pokorny’s ruling.

Asked what he recalled of the bill, Lindsay said he introduced it 14 years ago as part of a larger crime bill.

“At the time there was a concern about guns being brought onto school grounds,” he said.

It was a concern, Lindsay said, but back then — five years before Columbine, 13 years before Virginia Tech — senators didn’t know just how real the threat was.

Lindsay said there’d been some incidents of kids bringing guns to school, and state senators started asking questions.

What if someone brings a gun to a high school football game? Or Memorial Stadium? Or anywhere else emotions run high?

Not everyone was for the idea to bar guns from schools. Lindsay remembered debate over whether parents with gun racks in pickups could pick up their kids at school if the bill passed?

But the more contentious part of the 1994 juvenile crime bill was a youth boot camp, according to Lincoln Journal archives.

“School is for teaching children; it is not for possessing guns,” a reporter quoted Lindsay saying in March 1994.

The bill would reduce violence among youth, he said in another story.

Senators voted 45-1 to pass it.

After a story in Tuesday’s paper, then-Speaker of the Legislature Ron Withem, director of government relations for the University of Nebraska today, tried to think back to 1994.

“But I couldn’t come up with any concrete answers,” he said.

Withem remembered other issues, like a provision for mandatory expulsions that was dropped.  Not a discussion if it should apply to colleges and universities.

Pokorny said in his ruling, a review of floor debate and legislative history of the bill revealed references to juvenile justice, but no specific discussion or definition of “school.”

He threw the charges out Monday.

University policy forbids guns on campus, regardless.

On Friday, Fagin clarified Nelson’s intention. Though his staff couldn’t recall the detail behind the 1994 bill, Nelson did.

“The senator said we weren’t trying to solve all the problems. We were looking to solve the problem at the time,” Fagin said.

It seems to have made a difference, he said.

To try to go beyond that to college campuses could lead to a lot of complications, Fagin said.

For one thing, he said, sprawling public campuses are different than grade schools where people need to check in at the door.

“You’re dealing with adults versus children,” Fagin said.

Lindsay said legally colleges always have been treated differently than primary schools, partly for just that reason.

“I think there is a difference,” he said.

“Now the Legislature certainly could include colleges or universities within the meaning of that statute, and we could have at that time. ... I suspect the difference wasn’t even discussed.”

The law came up in the Legislature again in 2002, when former Sen. Kermit Brashear introduced a bill to raise the penalty for violations. But, he said Friday, they didn’t revisit the substance of the already existing statute.

In 2002, everyone who testified on the bill was from K-12 school boards or groups. And the law includes an exception for “nonstudent adults,” which Brashear said seemed to indicate it was intended to apply to K-12 schools.

For the most part, he said, the word “school” in statutes means K-12. But it can mean a postsecondary institution, too.

“So it is not clear whether there was an understanding that the statute originally applied to colleges or not, and nothing we did in our bill appears to change that understanding one way or the other,” Brashear said.

Reach Lori Pilger at 473-7237 or lpilger@journalstar.com.