JOHN COFIELD'S 'OXFORD & OLE MISS' – Gun Tags on Campus

Some Rebel sportsman will remember well the days of Ole Miss Gun Tags on campus. Ole Miss Alum George Lewis recalls, “When I first started school, you could keep hunting rifles and shotguns in your dorm room. That stopped when some idiot fired a 30-06 into the ceiling one night and almost hit the dude in the room above. This was about 1967 or 1968 if my memory is working right”
Due to that close call, the Ole Miss administration came up with the policy of letting the Campus Police store student’s guns in the central office. They issued these gun checks, which allowed you to check out guns when you wanted to go hunting. It was a perfectly sensible solution that worked well for years. The policy stopped back in the ’80s after the first rash of mass shootings on high school campuses. Those incidents caused the state to pass a zero-tolerance gun law for all public schools.
Lewis adds, “This gun check was given to me by my brother in law, Eldrid Hodge, when they had to stop the gun checking practice. He was an administrator with the Campus Police and a reserve officer. I’ve kept it on my key chain ever since. Eldrid passed at the age of 50 in 2001, so it has a great deal of personal meaning over and above its interesting history.”