In the wake of the 2025 shooting at Florida State University, which left two people dead and six injured, Rep. Michelle Salzman, a Pensacola Republican, said Florida should give public colleges and universities the option to arm more people on campus.
Now, Florida lawmakers have approved her plan and sent it to Gov. Ron DeSantis after both chambers passed the bill in March.
House Bill 757 would take a school safety program created for K-12 campuses after the 2018 Parkland shooting and open it up to public colleges and universities. If a school opts in, certain employees could be designated as armed “guardians” on campus after completing extensive firearms and de-escalation training and passing psychological and drug screenings, with regular requalification each year.
According to the bill, university presidents would choose which employees serve as guardians, while county sheriffs would handle their training and certification. Guardians would not have general police powers; their role would be limited to responding if there is an active attacker on campus.
Salzman has framed the proposal as a response to campus violence, arguing that if professors, TAs and other university employees had been armed, people might have been safer.
“While law enforcement responded quickly, that incident exposed gaps in communication, coordination, preparedness and protection, particularly in our post-secondary institutions,” she said during a House session on Feb. 25.
However, the proposal has drawn pushback from faculty members, students and school safety researchers, who say it raises unresolved questions about how such a program would function on a large university campus and whether it would make emergency situations more difficult to manage.
For Emily Stewart, an assistant professor of geology at Florida State University, those questions are tied to what she saw after last year’s shooting. Stewart said she started paying closer attention to campus gun violence after witnessing the aftermath of the attack. When she saw HB 757, she said, the provision allowing faculty and staff to be armed stood out immediately.
“What I spoke to the [House Education and Employment] Committee about on Monday was my concern about how having armed faculty and staff on campus would create more confusion in the event of another shooting,” Stewart said.
Stewart said even trained law enforcement struggled to make sense of the scene after the FSU shooting, and that adding more armed people, especially people not immediately identifiable as law enforcement, could increase the risk of accidents or misidentification.
Researchers who study school safety said that question is one of the central issues raised by the bill.
Chris Curran, a University of Florida professor of educational leadership and policy, said that problem already exists in K-12 settings, where officers may encounter someone in plain clothes with a gun and have no immediate way to know whether that person is a designated guardian or the shooter. On a college campus, he said, the challenge could be even greater.
Universities are larger, more open and less controlled than K-12 schools, with thousands of people moving across shared spaces at any given time, Curran said. That makes it harder to assume a program designed for one setting would translate cleanly to the other.
This concern was echoed by Jen Kent, a UF clinical assistant professor whose dissertation focused on Florida’s guardian program. She added that many of the biggest questions are practical ones.
“I had a lot of implementation questions,” Kent said. “How many can we have? What weapons will they carry? Where do they put them?”
Kent said the state still has not fully resolved those questions in K-12 settings. She also said there is limited research showing that arming school personnel deters mass shootings, which makes the proposed expansion to universities difficult to evaluate with confidence.
For students, the bill lands in a state where school shootings remain a painful reality. Isaiah Sloan, a UF student and gun safety activist, said many Florida students are still living with the trauma of Parkland and, more recently, the FSU shooting.
“When there is an act of gun violence, especially on such a large and vast college campus, everyone is in a sense of panic,” Sloan said. “Nobody knows what’s going on. Nobody knows who’s a threat.”
Sloan said adding more armed non-law-enforcement personnel could make those first moments harder for both students and responding officers to navigate.
JJ Glueck, president of Tallahassee Students for a Democratic Society, said the bill also raises concerns about overpolicing. Glueck said more armed personnel on campus would likely intensify fears among some students, particularly Black, brown and international students, and argued that the bill expands force on campus without addressing deeper causes of violence.
If HB 757 becomes law, public colleges and universities would be left to decide whether to opt in. Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis will ultimately decide whether the expansion of the guardian program reaches college campuses.