NC Speaker Moore questions UNC being a gun-free zone after second lockdown in weeks

The day after UNC-Chapel Hill went into lockdown for the second time in a few weeks because of gun violence, House Speaker Tim Moore questioned why the campus is a gun-free zone.

“You’re not just going to snap your fingers and get rid of guns,” said Moore, a Kings Mountain Republican. “That’s not reality; criminals are going to have guns. And the best deterrent against a criminal with a gun is a good guy with a gun.”

State law makes it a felony to carry a gun on campus or other educational property.

Republicans have total control of the General Assembly. Moore is in his fifth and final term as speaker.

“I have a son who’s a student at UNC Chapel Hill, so this is very personal,” Moore told reporters on Thursday morning at the Legislative Building. Rather than tightening existing gun laws, which some believe is a solution to violence, he questioned why students have to be unarmed “when clearly there’s a way bad guys can get on campus.”

“The campus is a gun-free zone. And so a number of students have said, why do they have to be unarmed, when there’s clearly a way that bad guys can get on the campus? So, you know, it’s a gun free zone, and that clearly is not working,” Moore said.

A person was arrested after the incident at the student union bagel shop that sparked a campus lockdown for more than an hour on Wednesday. The News & Observer previously reported that Mickel Deonte Harris, 27, has been charged with assault, possessing a firearm on educational property and two counts of communicating threats.

Moore said the incident Sunday involved a “criminal,” and is the kind of thing that “happens, unfortunately, every day all across this state. The fact that it happened on the campus is what elevated it,” Moore said.

He said a recent armed robbery a few blocks away from the Legislative Building did not have the same response, like the sirens on campus.

“At the end of the day, we need to back our law enforcement. We need to ensure that lawful gun owners have the right to have their guns, but we also need to make sure that the criminal justice system is working, that criminals ought not be out here on the streets,” Moore said.

Moore was criticized on social media this week for his response to UNC and N.C. A&T State University students protesting as part of a March for Our Lives event on Tuesday. The students shouted “vote them out” in the House gallery, and were escorted out. Moore jokingly commented at the time that the protesters must secretly be Duke students. He said Thursday that was an attempt to relieve the tension and anger in the room.

Moore said the students violated the House rules by yelling and disrupting the business of the House.

No discussion on allowing guns at UNC

UNC System President Peter Hans and Board of Governors chair Randy Ramsey told reporters after a meeting Thursday that the board has not explored the idea of allowing guns on the campuses of the state’s public universities.

”We’ve had no discussion about that,” Hans said.

Ramsey praised the law enforcement response to the recent incidents at UNC, as well at N.C. A&T in Greensboro, where one person was shot on campus last month. The person was not a student at the university.

”We hope tragedy will never come, but we prepare for it and we respond when it does,” Ramsey said.

House Democratic Leader Robert Reives, of Chatham County, said he struggles with the thought process that guns would make the campus safer, calling it frightening.

“I’m not sure that that’s the solution,” Reives told reporters on Thursday. He said he would be happy to talk with students who “think that will make them a safer campus.”

Berger understands ‘desire to do something’ after shooting

Senate leader Phil Berger, an Eden Republican, questioned what change in state law would have prevented the killing of UNC physics professor Zijie Yan in late August. A graduate student, Tailei Qi, is charged with murder in his death.

“What gun law modification would have prevented that incident? And I don’t know that there’s anything that’s previously been proposed. And I certainly understand the the desire to do something,” Berger told reporters on Thursday.

“But I think unless that something is something that reasonably would have prevented something from happening, I just don’t know that there’s anything that that we would be called upon to do, as a practical matter, or that would be reasonable for us to do,” he said.

As for changing the law that makes UNC-Chapel Hill a gun-free zone, Berger said he hasn’t thought about it yet, but would be open to discussing it. He said he doesn’t know if he would support or oppose the idea.

“I’ve generally been supportive of the idea that the Second Amendment is something that should apply in terms of giving people freedom to to take reasonable steps to protect themselves. I really haven’t thought about that aspect in the context of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill,” he said.

Asked about the chance that extreme risk protection orders, known as red flag laws, could advance in the General Assembly, Moore said he hasn’t seen proposed legislation that “would address the concerns of lawful gun owners.” Red flag laws let courts temporarily take guns away from people found to be a danger to themselves or others.

However, he said that on “behavioral health, there clearly are folks who have mental issues who should not have a weapon, right. But in those cases, we have ... a court process in place, if someone has been deemed a danger to themselves or others, to seize a firearm in that case. The problem is the process is so cumbersome. So some, they’ve talked about improving the process.”