New Hampshire’s university presidents leaned on a handful of cherry-picked studies to argue that campus carry would endanger students, yet none of those papers actually demonstrated a rise in violent crime after right-to-carry laws took effect. Instead, the research they waved around measured everything from traffic fatalities to “perceived safety,” leaving the core claim—that lawfully armed students and faculty increase shootings—unsupported by their own citations. That sleight-of-hand is telling: when the data refuse to cooperate with the gun-control narrative, administrators simply change the subject to feelings and hypotheticals.

The move is especially rich in a state whose own crime statistics already show no uptick in campus violence after constitutional carry went statewide in 2017. By insisting that only Ph.D.s should decide who may exercise a enumerated constitutional right, these presidents reveal a deeper institutional bias: an assumption that ordinary citizens, including the very students they claim to protect, cannot be trusted with the same tools of self-defense that campus police carry daily. The 2A community should treat this episode as a cautionary tale about administrative overreach; every time a public university substitutes “trust us” for empirical evidence, it hands future litigants another exhibit in lawsuits that could finally force these institutions to honor both the Second Amendment and the state constitution they are sworn to uphold.