With New Hampshire families struggling under housing prices, energy costs, and a youth mental health crisis, Senate Republicans chose to spend Thursday prioritizing putting guns into NH classrooms.
Senate Republicans on Thursday passed an amended version of HB 1793 on a 14-8 party-line vote, guaranteeing faculty at New Hampshire’s public and private universities the right to carry firearms in classrooms while sending the question of arming students to a summer study committee.
The vote moves forward a policy opposed by 85% of UNH students in a recent UNH survey, by university leadership, and—according to Senate Minority Leader Rebecca Perkins Kwoka (D-Portsmouth)—by the chiefs of police at New Hampshire’s public universities.
Republicans were transparent about treating the study as a stepping stone rather than a genuine review.
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“The policy contemplated by this bill will eventually become law,” said State Sen. Keith Murphy, (R-Manchester). State Sen. Howard Pearl, (R-Loudon), framed the vote as incremental: “I want to protect our rights, I believe in that, but I understand sometimes we have to take what we can get.”
Senate Democrats pushed back on both the policy and the process.
“If we endeavor to protect the safety of our constituents, and assist our law enforcement in doing so, we should heed their advice consistently—and not just when it fits into our ideological agenda,” Perkins Kwoka said in a statement following the vote.
State Sen. David Watters, (D-Dover), said he was “frankly appalled by the idea that the only armed person will be a faculty member in a classroom or a department meeting or in a lab.”
The Senate vote came one day after the bill’s House sponsor, State Rep. Sam Farrington (R-Rochester), signaled plans to attach HB 1793’s language as floor amendments to two unrelated bipartisan bills: SB 498, about insurance companies covering wraparound children’s mental health services, and SB 408, relative to insurance coverage for adult prosthetics.
Firearms are the leading cause of death for youth and children under 18, and suicide is the second-leading cause of death among college students, according to the National Institutes of Health and figures cited by the NH Gun Violence Prevention Coalition in opposition to the bill.
The bill now heads to a House-Senate conference.
