The University of Colorado banned all firearms from its campus in 1994. Last March, however, the state Supreme Court overturned that policy, saying it violated the Colorado law that allows gun-owners with the proper permits to carry concealed weapons in all areas of the state. The university’s compromise creates separate off-campus housing for students with concealed carry permits (CCPs) who insist upon living with their guns, and does not allow them to carry their weapons on any other university property:

The university said Thursday that both campuses will establish a residential area for students over the age of 21 with a permit. In all other dormitories, guns will be banned, the new policy states.

“The main dorms on the main campus will not allow any concealed carry weapons,” CU Boulder spokesman Bronson Hilliard said.

In addition, attendees at ticketed athletic and cultural events, such as football games and theater, on both campuses, will not be permitted to bring their guns, officials said.

The university maintains that these amendments to the student housing contract are legal because, as opposed to other public buildings, students living in dorms are essentially entering a landlord-tenant relationship with the university. As a University of Colorado Boulder press release explains, this approach will likely impact only a small number of students — “[a]n analysis by the University of Colorado Police Department shows that 0.6 percent of the faculty, staff and students on campus possess a CCP. A full 96 percent of CU-Boulder undergraduate students are under the age of 21, and are thus ineligible to have a CCP.”

For the 99.4 percent of CU-Boulder students who do not have a concealed carry permit, this policy will hopefully enable them to wander the halls of their dorms without having to worry that a fellow student is packing heat.

Thirty gun-toting activists protested a public library’s concealed carry policy this week, startling the patrons inside by taking the demonstration — and guns — indoors. The protesters had taken offense to a single sentence explaining the rule: “Carrying concealed weapons is prohibited, except as permitted by law.”

Philip Van Cleave, the organizer of the protest and President of Virginia Citizens Defense League, compared the library’s gun “discrimination” to racially discriminating against African-Americans:

“What if they had said “We don’t allow African-Americans, except if allowed by law. Would that be okay? I don’t think so… [The rule] implies that no one is allowed to protect themselves on the property.”

Another protester told the Richmond Times-Dispatch that public areas shouldn’t be firearm-free, and suggested that if people had been armed during the Colorado movie theater shooting, the mass murderer would have been stopped.

Gun regulation in Virginia is weak enough to permit gun owners to carry almost anywhere they would like, including openly in parks, in grocery stores, and the very library the group protested. This summer Virginia voted to further weaken its gun regulation, repealing the law against purchasing more than one handgun per month and weakening criminal background checks for concealed gun permits.

Colorado Secretary of State Scott Gessler (R) sent a letter to approximately 4,000 registered voters asking them to prove that they are actually eligible to vote. The letter targets voters who “presented a non-citizen document when [they] applied for a driver’s license,” although it admits that the fact that someone once applied for a license before becoming a citizen is not proof that they did not become naturalized before registering to vote. The letter includes a form and instructions to return it if the voter is indeed a citizen.

It’s not yet clear what Gessler plans to do to people who do not return the attached form — according to the Denver Post, Gessler merely said that he would “work with county clerks to decide what to do with registered voters who do not respond.” Gessler does have a history, however, of heavy-handed efforts that disenfranchise lawful voters.

In 2011, Gessler prohibited elections officials from mailing ballots to voters who did not vote in 2010 and had not returned a postcard asking them to reactivate their registration. When Denver’s county clerk defied this order, a judge ultimately ruled in her favor, warning that Gessler’s order could irreparably prevent voters from casting their ballot in the next election. Notably, Gessler’s 2011 voter suppression effort was so overbroad it even targeted many military voters who were deployed overseas.

The Jonesboro police department has released the dashboard video from the night they claim 21-year-old Chavis Carter shot himself while handcuffed in the back of a police car. Police Chief Michael Yates has said the video, along with witness accounts, supports the involved officers’ account that Chavis Carter shot himself.

But the footage, which is 90 minutes long and includes interviews with witnesses, does not capture video or audio of a gunshot itself, or the aftermath. The local channel, WCMTV, which is sorting through the footage, noted:

You can see the White Truck pulled over by Jonesboro Officer Ron Marsh’s car. Marsh gets out and heads over to the Passenger side where Chavis Carter gets out the car. Two other men are also in the truck. The audio on this dash cam is inaudible at times, but parts of the conversation are audible. On the footage, we hear Marsh ask if Carter has ID before patting him down and escorting him to the back of the patrol car. From inside the cruiser, we hear an officer quiz Carter once again about his ID. Also in this video, we can clearly see a bag of what is reportedly drugs sitting on the hood of the cruiser. What is not clearly seen or heard on the tape is a gunshot. Nor is there any dash cam video or audio of officer Marsh finding Carter shot in the backseat.

An eyewitness recalled, “The other officer jumped out the car, ran and opened two back doors of the vehicle and next thing I know that’s when the ambulance pulled up but other than that I didn’t hear a gunshot or nothing like that.”

The police also recently released a non-evidentiary video demonstrating how someone could shoot themselves while in handcuffs after Yates said it was “quite easy” to do. The Carter family’s lawyer said, “It’s odd that they would release that video instead of just releasing evidence if they have any.”

Watch a clip of the dashboard video:

Gov. Rick Scott (R-FL) has been relentless in his push to restrict the right to vote. He’s advanced an illegal voter purge that would have disproportionately impacted the minority citizens in his state. And a federal court blocked his effort to suppress voter registration last May. On Thursday, a federal court in Washington, DC concluded that another part of Scott’s anti-voting agenda cannot take effect because the state’s new restrictions on early voting negatively impact minority communities.

Last year, the Republican-controlled legislature cut Florida’s number of early voting days down from 12 to 8. However, because minority communities tend to utilize early voting days, the federal court ruled that fewer options for early voting “would make it materially more difficult for some minority voters to cast a ballot.” The court rejected the state’s early voting changes based on their discriminatory impact:

We conclude that we cannot preclear Florida’s early voting changes at this time because the State has failed to satisfy its burden of proving that those changes will not have a retrogressive effect on minority voters if the covered counties offer only the minimum number of early voting hours required under the new statute, which would constitute only half the hours required under the prior law.

The proposed cuts to early voting days came before the court under Section 5 of the national Voting Rights Act, which requires areas with a history of racial discrimination to preclear changes to their election laws by either a federal court or the Justice Department. Several of Florida’s counties are covered by Section 5, and the federal court concluded those counties must make additional early voting hours available to voters.

Other states are also in the process of making it more difficult for citizens to exercise their right to vote by restricting voting hours. After controversy over the fact that Ohio’s proposed restricted hours would only go into effect in Democratic-leaning counties, Ohio is now choosing to restrict voting hours to weekends in every single county.

This January, Montana Supreme Court Justice James Nelson will retire after nearly twenty years on the bench. He is going out with a bang. ThinkProgress first noticed Justice Nelson after he wrote a truly outstanding dissent explaining that, while he is obligated as a lower court judge to follow the U.S. Supreme Court’s election-buying decision in Citizens United, he doesn’t have to like it. As Nelson explained, “the notion that corporations are disadvantaged in the political realm is unbelievable. Indeed, it has astounded most Americans.” In a more recent opinion, he warned of the impact corporate money will soon have on the judiciary: “I understand the frustration with the certain knowledge that soon corporate America will be in control of the judicial branch of government as well.”

In an surprisingly candid interview with ThinkProgress, Justice Nelson explains one other way that high-dollar campaigns to remove a sitting state supreme court justice can harm the law — a sitting justice does not have enough time to do their real job well if they want to keep their job. Nelson explained what happened after he had a serious primary scare during his 2004 race:

A couple of people who wanted me to get reelected sat down and had come to Jesus talks with me and said “You know, you’ve got to recognize that this campaign is a full time deal. You’re not going to be a judge for the next 8 or 9 or 10 months. You got to be a campaigner.” . . .

So I walked into the office the morning after the primary and I told my two clerks “here’s the deal” — I read all the briefs. Every brief that comes up there I read it. The clerks do, usually, the first draft of the opinions, but I work a lot of the opinions — “I said, here’s the deal, for the next ten months, I’m not going to be reading briefs. What you’re going to have to do is read the briefs and prepare a memo for me about what the case is all about. You’re going to be more involved in the opinion writing. I’m gonna go on like nothing has happened, but we’ve gotta — if I want to keep my job and you want to keep yours, this is how it is going to work.”

And that’s what happened, I became a full time politician for ten months.

Watch it:

The problem Justice Nelson describes is only going to get worse. As a recent Center for American Progress report explains, corporate interest groups are funneling more and more money into state supreme court races in an effort to seize control of judiciaries, and this flood of money will distract sitting justices who buck corporate parties even more from their core job of being judges.