Man Behind New Hampshire Campus Carry Bill a UNH Senior and First Term State Legislator

A while back, I saw a story about a 14-year-old who was running for governor of his state. I don't remember which state it was, but I remember teasing by daughter a bit about it because she's been talking about wanting a job when she's old enough and running for governor would definitely be a hilarious option.

There's a long history of young people running for office, though generally not quite that young, and they sometimes win through things like youth and energy, even if they don't have a solid grasp of everything else.

Mostly, they tend to lean leftward, because most young people do.

So imagine my pleasant surprise when I found out that the state lawmaker pushing the campus carry bill in New Hamshire is a senior at the University of New Hampshire.

On March 2, New Hampshire state Rep. Sam Farrington, R-Rochester, and about a dozen supporters walked into a Durham Town Council meeting fully armed.

They were there to protest the council’s resolution against Farrington’s campus carry bill, which would prohibit public colleges and universities from regulating guns on campuses. 

The council said the bill would make the University of New Hampshire and the surrounding community less safe. Farrington disagrees.

“You are tyrants because you are stripping lawful adults of their individual rights,” Farrington said to the council. 

Farrington's bill to allow campus carry has ignited a firestorm around the state. The bill has garnered over 800 online testimony submissions, with 643 against and 231 in support, and students have spoken both for and against the bill in Concord. A UNH Student Senate Survey found 85% of students oppose the bill, and in early March students and faculty held a walkout in protest. And on April 11, the NHGOP added campus carry to their platform.

The man behind it? Farrington, a sixth-generation resident of Rochester who is a UNH senior and a first-term state representative. 

Who is Sam Farrington?

Farrington, who is in his last semester at UNH, said he wanted to run for office to keep New Hampshire a haven for freedom. He said he's long been passionate about the state and wants to keep it from becoming like its neighboring states of Massachusetts and Maine.

So here we have a senior at a university, someone who is old enought to carry a firearm in all 50 states at this point, and he wants to have the ability to do so on campus.

You just gotta love it.

I know nothing else about Farrington, to be clear, so he might be whacked out of his mind, or he might be awesome as hell. I don't know, and right now, I don't actually care. What I see is a vehemently pro-gun lawmakers who actually has skin in the game for the law he's trying to pass, and he's being aggressive about pursuing it.

"But all of those other college students oppose it."

So? This is a matter of people's rights, not people's feelings. Besides, most of those people think campus carry is a problem because of a biased media that's filled everyone's heads with doomsday prophecies following any restoration of gun rights that never come to pass, but always seem to lurk in the minds of people who don't know any better. Never mind that every school shooting in the country on a college campus that I can recall was in a state that didn't allow campus carry.

Never mind that would-be mass shooters don't care and people who are carrying guns tend to be very, very careful about confrontations because they don't actually want to shoot anyone. No, none of that matters, because the media has continued claiming that the streets would run red with blood.

Farrington is there. He's in the colleges. He sees his peers, and he was elected to office. There, he's making a stand that someone should have made decades ago.

I mean, this is New Hampshire. Live free or die, and all that. This is one of the most libertarian states in the nation. This is the destination of the Free State Project. How was this not already a thing?

It wasn't, but I respect the hell out of Farrington for doing it, and doing it at such a relatively young age.

As side-hustles during college go, he could do worse.

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