Gun bill reintroduced Monday in state House

The South Dakota House of Representatives is considering a bill to allow firearms on the campuses of the state’s public universities.

If passed, HB 1257 will prevent university administrations from prohibiting the possession of firearms on their campuses.

This bill, reintroduced Monday, comes less than a week after an identical bill, SB82, was defeated on the senate floor by a vote of 25 to 10.

Sen. Larry Rhoden, R-Union Center, a supporter of SB82, said he believed its passage would have gone largely unnoticed by most South Dakotans.

“It’s currently legal to carry guns in 99 percent of places in the state,” Rhoden said. “You don’t see 18 year olds and college students walking around carrying around automatic weapons”

Rhoden commented during the debate on the senate floor that he would support the bill even if “100 percent of students” were opposed to it.

“It’s not really relevant whether or not they want it,” Rhoden said in an interview following the debate. “To me it’s about establishing and maintaining those rights for that group of students, regardless of what their opinion is on it.”

Rhoden added that, based on the testimony of students and faculty of South Dakota’s public university system, he estimated that the majority of them were opposed to it.

Sen. Ben Nesselhuf, D-Vermillion, said Rhoden’s comments demonstrated a “detachment from reality.”

“I think that totally runs counter to the role we are supposed to play as legislators,” he said. “We are, in fact, supposed to consider the desires of the people we are impacting with our legislation.”

Nesselhuf argued it would be a mistake to limit the autonomy of university administrations, adding that the best place for such decisions to be made was on each individual university campus.

Nesselhuf said that because his constituency includes USD, he is particularly interested in the fate of the bill.

“I would say we have a bigger stake in this than any other community in South Dakota simply given the size of our university compared to the size of our town,” Nesselhuf said. “I took this bill very personally.”

Nesselhuf voted against SB82 and said he wasn’t surprised to see it reintroduced in the House.

He said he still isn’t worried about the bill becoming law.

“I don’t know what will happen on the House side, but given the votes we’ve seen in the Senate, I don’t know what could happen to sway enough votes to get it through,” Nesselhuf said.

A similar bill was put forth during last year’s legislative session in the House of Representatives but ultimately failed.

Several other states have seen similar legislation this session.

Reach reporter Nick Woltman at Nick.Woltman@usd.edu.

• Facebook Comments
• Site Comments

2 comments

hunter

Wed Jun 16 2010 16:48

So just because I want to be able to bring my gun with me to campus that means that I am going to bring it to class with me? No this is another sign that people forget what South Dakota is about. We have a large number of hunters through out our state. Now I understand the idea of some gun control but why do we have to go to extremes? There has to be some sort of middle ground, why couldn't students be aloud to bring there weapons to Public safety or UPD and have them store in a vault and let us come check them out if they wanted to go hunting or to the range or something. How things are currently aren't fair at all, and it's making criminals out of good people, who might have just forgot their gun in their truck.

Rya McGillivray

Mon Feb 16 2009 21:03

I unfortunately have the dubious honor of being from District 29, the district represented by Larry Rhodan and Thomas Brunner, two of the most adament supporters of SB82. Larry Rhoden clearly doesn't care about 100% of students opposing this bill, and he also fails miserably in caring at all about the opinions of his constituents in this matter as well. I have not met anyone in support of this bill in my district and I strain to see how these men are doing anything to help district 29, or any of South Dakota. I pose one thought to any legislator who supports this bill: Feel free to bring a gun into my classroom, but only if I can bring one to your comiittee meeting where you attempt to exercise your control where no one has ever asked for or ever wanted it in the first place. We at the universities are fine, dare I say better off without this sort of meddling. Maybe you should spend your time passing some legisation that actually does some good.

Add comment


I am not posting spam. I understand posting spam or other comments that are unrelated to this article will cause my comment to be flagged for deletion and possibly cause my IP address to be permanently banned from this server.

Enter the characters in the image above:

log out