SALT LAKE CITY — When Vice President Dick Cheney came to town last summer, a lot of people didn't see any reason to leave their guns at home. If something happened, wouldn't the vice president be better off with a roomful of law-abiding armed Utahans there to help?
The Secret Service had another view--no guns, no exceptions--and state Atty. Gen. Mark Shurtleff ended the argument by putting locked storage boxes outside the convention hall where Cheney was speaking. That way, holders of concealed-gun permits could leave the room when Cheney arrived, stow their guns and fetch them when the vice president departed.
Now, with the Olympics here, many gun owners tried to argue that similar "safe storage" facilities should be provided at the venues. In a state where permit holders can legally take their guns into state offices, bars, elementary schools, day-care centers, the state Capitol and churches, many see no reason not to provide gun owners with a place to stow their weapons while attending Olympic events.
State gun organizations lost that fight too, but are moving toward a showdown at the University of Utah, where President J. Bernard Machen has defied a recent state attorney general opinion that would allow teachers and students to carry guns on campus for the first time in 20 years.
Last week, the Utah Senate's state and local affairs committee held hearings on a bill that would allow the Legislature to withhold half the salaries of officials who violate state laws--a pointed, if indirect, reference to Machen and other college administrators believed to be defying the Legislature's will on gun control.
"Classrooms, libraries, dormitories and cafeterias are no place for lethal weapons," Machen told a legislative committee in January. "Their very presence would interfere with the essential functions of a university."
Most of the other state colleges, along with Brigham Young University, run by the Mormon church, also prohibit guns on campus, but Machen has gone out front in the debate, declaring he's willing to go to court to keep guns out of the university. The university's gun ban applies to students and teachers, but not to visitors.
"I hold out some hope that we could be found to be not in defiance of the law," Machen said in an interview at his office near the Olympic Village, where thousands of athletes and coaches are residing during the Games. "But our view is that having guns around would challenge the very nature of dialogue on campus, where the passionate defense of ideas is sort of the hallmark of what we're all about."
