Jonathan Goldstein (University of Pennsylvania Carey Law School) has posted The Disarmed Schoolhouse: The Gun-Free School Zones Act, the Founding Duty to Come Armed, and the Federal Tradition of Arming Schoolchildren on SSRN. Here is the abstract:
The “sensitive places” doctrine treats the gun-free school as though it were as old as the Republic. It is not. This Article documents the opposite tradition: the Republic once required arms where it now forbids them. Across the colonial century Virginia’s legislature compelled free men to carry firearms to church and to court on pain of fine—the very gathering places the modern doctrine says were disarmed—and neighboring jurisdictions reached toward the same instinct, imperfectly, and, in Georgia’s case, for reasons this Article discloses rather than conceals. A century later the federal government did not tolerate the armed schoolboy; it funded him, arming schools by statute in 1914, running national interscholastic rifle leagues out of the War Department, and issuing rifles and tens of millions of rounds to affiliated civilian and school clubs into the 1990s. Against that record, the Gun-Free School Zones Act of 1990 is not the codification of a settled tradition but the reversal of one. The affirmative record is offered not as a sword—it creates no citizen right to carry a gun into a schoolhouse, which remains subject to the school’s authority over its own students and its own grounds—but as a shield-breaker. Under New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v. Bruen, United States v. Rahimi, and Wolford v. Lopez, “sensitive places” is a government-side exception the government must establish by historical tradition, and it cannot establish a tradition of the disarmed schoolhouse in a nation that armed its schoolchildren by act of Congress. Five parts follow: the sensitive-places tradition and what it actually rests on; the Founding duty to come armed to assembly; the federally sponsored armed schoolhouse; the doctrinal case; and the thousand-foot buffer.
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