The shooting at Florida State University was, unfortunately, just one of a number of mass shootings on the campus of various colleges throughout the United States. It's not surprising that the state of Florida decided to act, and this time they did something that wasn't gun control.
They voted to expand their guardian program to colleges. There's a problem, though.
See, the colleges aren't subject to school boards that answer to the voters. As a result, it's up to administrators to decide if they want to opt in or not, and since university administrators tend to lean so far left they're practically horizontal, we have a grand total of zero opting to take part in the program.
No Florida college or university has yet to opt in on a new law that allows staff to act as armed guards, a coalition of gun safety groups assert — leading them to question whether state lawmakers are out of touch on the issue.
The Legislature passed HB 757 during the 2026 regular legislative session. It includes a controversial provision allowing professors and other people appointed by a university president to carry weapons on campus. They would have to complete 144 hours of training and pass drug tests and psychological evaluations.
The proposal represented an expansion of Florida’s School Guardian Program, created for K-12 schools following the Feb. 2018, shooting massacre at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, in which 17 people were killed.
Angela Ferrell-Zabala, executive director of Moms Demand Action, said students, staff, and families made it clear as the bill was being debated in committee meetings that they didn’t want more guns on university campuses.
“That’s why not one school has opted into this program,” she said. “The people have spoken. Now lawmakers need to listen. This November, voters will remember who catered to the gun lobby and who stood up for the safety of our communities.”
The thing is that colleges, as noted above, aren't like public school systems. That means this whole "out of touch" thing was lawmakers believing that anti-gun administrators and the boards that picked them would somehow be open to allowing people they work with and, in theory, trust already to opt to carry a firearm on the university campus.
There is no "the people" speaking here, though.
The truth is that academia was one of the first institutions captured by the Left, and they've maintained an iron hand on it, making it virtually impossible for anyone pro-gun to even get a strong foothold within it. This is a self-selecting cabal of people who have picked an ideological position to govern their every decision, and that includes anything on the subject of guns.
It's like taking a straw poll at a Moms Demand Action meeting and deciding that the results of that straw poll represent what the people want. In fact, the Venn diagram of general leftist sentiments, including gun control, between Moms Demand Action and academia would look like a top-down view of a stack of pancakes.
But there's a couple of reasons the program won't go anywhere, even if there aren't any takers at the moment (the University of South Florida did say they were reviewing the requirements, while others never replied to questions about it).
One is, of course, this is brand new. Academia is, at its heart, a bureaucracy. Bureaucracies never move quickly, and this was passed earlier this year. It hasn't been a priority, so there's really been no time to see if the program will get any takers.
Even if there aren't, though, this is the Florida legislature actually putting something in place that would actually work. If or when a new mass shooting happens on a Florida college campus, they can at least point to the fact that they did something that would have allowed the university to act, and it didn't. That's just smart politics, especially in Florida.
