Under Missouri law, it’s not legal to carry a gun onto a school campus. That includes colleges and secondary education. Now, what if you’re picking up your kids, and you have a firearm in your car? If you have a firearm in your car, you can drive onto school property as long as you don’t take the firearm out of the car or brandish your weapon in any way.
Federal law prohibits guns within 1,000 feet of any secondary education facility, but there’s also a loophole to that law. The loophole is that states may authorize individuals to carry. If they do so within one of those zones, then the federal law does not apply.
If you’re a concealed carry permit holder in Missouri, you should still avoid carrying a gun in unauthorized places. However, if you do so by accident, it’s not a crime. You will be asked to leave, and you can be cited for trespassing on a first offense (up to a $100.00 fine).
There is not any specific signage in Missouri that’s required to designate a school as a gun-free zone. All schools are presumed to be gun-free zones under the law. In fact, they are gun-free zones unless you meet one of the exceptions, such as being a designated school protection officer.
Now, there are schools in Missouri which have begun a program of privately training their teachers with the permission of the school board, to be armed on campus. How this is going to play out in the future, we don’t know. However, it is an interesting development in the law that there are teachers who are privately training.
As of today, there are no teachers in the State of Missouri that have actually registered as school protection officers.
The post Guns and School Zones: What is the Law in Missouri? appeared first on U.S. & Texas LawShield.