No guns signs are posted on a side door of KU's Art and Design Building, as well as other buildings on campus, pictured in May 2015.

The Kansas University administration’s Weapons Policy Advisory Committee is officially formed, has a website and is accepting questions and comments through it, KU Chancellor Bernadette Gray-Little announced this week.

The website is weaponspolicy.ku.edu, and the committee’s email address is weaponspolicy@ku.edu. On the site is a brief description of the newly formed committee and its next steps, a timeline, links to other resources including the Personal and Family Protection Act, which is the reason for all of this in the first place, and links to news articles about campus carry (several of which you avid Journal-World readers have probably already seen).

KU’s five-member Weapons Policy Advisory Committee, convened in February, is made up of chairman Jim Pottorff, university general counsel; the Lawrence and KU Medical Center campus police chiefs; University Senate president and KU faculty member Mike Williams; and KU Medical Center Faculty Assembly Chairwoman Patricia Kluding, according to the chancellor’s Monday message to campus.

That committee is supposed to present Gray-Little with a final universitywide plan — covering all KU campuses across the state — by Sept. 1. The Kansas Board of Regents wants all state universities’ plans by October. (Background: Kansas law says that beginning in July 2017, state universities will no longer be allowed to prohibit concealed guns from their campuses. To comply with the law, the Regents approved amendments to their statewide weapons policy in January. Now state universities must develop their own policies to implement the law on their respective campuses.)

Helping KU’s main committee will be two subcommittees, or “campus implementation committees,” which are still being assembled, the chancellor said. One will determine a campus-specific plan for implementing the law at the Lawrence, Edwards (Overland Park) and Kansas Law Enforcement Training Center (Yoder) campuses. The other will do the same for KU Medical Center’s three campuses (Kansas City, Wichita and Salina).

Gray-Little also took questions about guns Tuesday, during an informal general update and Q&A session with students, faculty and staff at KU Medical Center.

Refusing to comply with the law is not an option, she said. Also out of the question is writing a policy prohibiting guns from all buildings, because universities would have to place adequate security measures at every entrance where they wanted to do that.

One estimate showed it would cost in the neighborhood of $30 million a year to secure all KU entrances statewide, Gray-Little said. “So no, we are not able on a wholesale basis to provide gun detectors and guards at our entrances.”

The two subcommittees will be important, Gray-Little said, because there are a lot of differences in KU’s various campuses. For example, guns are widely used for educational purposes at the Kansas Law Enforcement Training Center, but that campus will need to figure out a way to distinguish between those and personal concealed weapons. At the Lawrence campus, there’s a preschool and students living in dorms, which pose different challenges.

Gray-Little said the committees also will watch for evidence of how campus carry has — or has not — affected safety on campuses in states that already allow it. But so far, she said, “we don’t have anything but our judgments and beliefs.”

• KU Medical Center weapons info session: An informational session — similar to the one University Senate held on the KU Lawrence campus in December — is planned for noon to 1 p.m. March 10 in the School of Nursing auditorium at the KU Medical Center. Kluding said faculty assembly leadership is organizing the session, which is open to all KU Medical Center students, faculty and staff.

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• I’m the Journal-World’s KU and higher ed reporter. See all the newspaper’s KU coverage here. Reach me by email at sshepherd@ljworld.com, by phone at 832-7187, on Twitter @saramarieshep or via Facebook at Facebook.com/SaraShepherdNews.