Before you drop them off, check these three things

My son spent this past summer on a college campus. More than twenty buildings, and a lot of walking between them.

It got me thinking about my own time as a student. I started college at 21, about two weeks after I got my first carry permit, and I carried every single day I was enrolled. I learned a lot in that stretch, and some of it I learned the hard way.

So if you are dropping a kid off this month, or you already did and you have been quietly wondering whether you covered everything, this one is for you. Some of it applies whether or not there is a gun anywhere in the picture.

I just published everything I wish somebody had told me back then. Concealment that survives a full day with a backpack on, the storage conversation with a roommate you met eight weeks ago, why the backpack is not a holster, and the one time a university police officer walked in on me at the student health center and asked if I was armed.

A student can be perfectly legal under state law and still be in violation of the student code of conduct. That is not a citation. That is a conduct hearing, and it can put housing and financial aid on the table.

Sort the country into three buckets and you will see the problem right away. A small handful of states clearly permit campus carry. Another handful clearly prohibit it. The largest group by far leaves the call to the individual school, which means the answer is not in the state statute at all. It is in a policy document somewhere on the university website.

We keep a state by state breakdown updated, and it is a starting point. It covers public institutions, so a private school requires its own homework. And this area moves fast. In the last 12 months 6 states have proposed and/or passed legislation that impacts campus carry.

If your student is going to school out of state, the home state permit may not be honored where they are living now. Worth checking before the first drive back for Thanksgiving, not at a gas station in a state that does not recognize it.

The good news is that many states will issue a permit to a non-resident, which is often the cleanest fix. Our law hub answers that question state by state alongside reciprocity, so you can see both pieces in one place.

Plenty of students are not carrying a gun. The campus does not allow it, or they are under 21, or they aren't interested.

Pepper spray. Effective, legal in most places a student goes, and it does not require the maturity and commitment that carrying a firearm demands. Check the school policy first, because some campuses restrict size or formulation and a conduct violation is its own kind of expensive. This is the one we recommend.

A real handheld light. Students walk everywhere, and a lot of it happens after dark. Between buildings, back from the library at 11pm, across a parking structure in February when the sun went down four hours ago. Low light is not an edge case for a college student, it is a daily condition.

A light does three jobs at once. It lets them identify what is in front of them, it gives them a tool that is not a gun, and it denies information to anyone with bad intentions. It is also the one defensive tool nobody anywhere has ever given me grief about carrying.

The Noxon Anark is what I would put in a student's pocket. Dedicated buttons for high and low instead of cycling through modes when you are in a hurry, an admin mode for everyday tasks so the battery is not dead by evening, USB-C charging off the same cable as the phone, and unlike lights of similar specs this one easily fits in a pocket.

Owning a light and knowing how to use one under pressure are two different things. If you want your student to actually understand what that tool does in the dark, our Defense After Dark course is built for exactly that, and it works just as well for the parent who hands it over.

A pocket trauma kit. Honestly, this one is more likely to matter than anything else on the list. Car wrecks, kitchen accidents, a bad fall off a bike, dumb people, and yes, the worst case everyone thinks about. It is legal on every campus in the country, it creates no policy conflict, and nobody thinks twice about a student carrying a backpack into every room they enter.

The Green IFAK was built to live in a bag without any fuss. Pair it with a Stop the Bleed class, which is often free and sometimes offered right on campus.

Set up the phone. Three items, and you can do all of them tonight.

Fill out the Medical ID so it is readable from the lock screen. Allergies, conditions, medications, blood type, and an emergency contact. Responders check for it, and it only helps if it is there before anyone needs it.

Save the campus police non-emergency number. Most of what a student actually runs into is not a 911 call. A stranger following them across the quad, a car that will not start in an empty lot at midnight, a door propped open that should not be. Having the number already in the phone makes the difference between calling and talking themselves out of it.

And find out where a 911 call from that campus actually routes, to the university department or the city. It varies, and it can cost minutes. Most schools also run a safety app and a late night escort service that almost nobody uses because almost nobody knows about them.

Handle the paperwork. This is the one parents never see coming. Your kid turned 18, which means you no longer have automatic authority to make medical decisions for them or even to get information about their condition over the phone.

A healthcare power of attorney fixes the first part. A HIPAA authorization is usually a separate document and it fixes the second. Talk to an attorney in your state. It is a short conversation and an inexpensive one.

Send this one to your student if it is useful.

Stay safe,

Jacob Paulsen, President | ConcealedCarry.com

P.S. The one time it went sideways for me, it was a concealment failure I never even noticed. Somebody saw something, and to this day I have no idea what. That story is the first thing in the article, and it is the reason I wrote the rest of it.