ATLANTA – Debate over whether firearms should be allowed in colleges has been revived, as a group of Georgia lawmakers renews their bid to allow licensed gun-owners to carry on campus.

A bill filed this week allows permit holders, who must be 21 years old, to tote their weapon anywhere on the campus of a public college, university or technical school. They cannot carry them into sports venues or student housing, including fraternity and sorority houses.

Those restrictions will likely limit how many people actually start carrying on a campus.

But the co-sponsor of the measure, Rep. Rick Jasperse, R-Jasper, said any number of “good Georgians who have been vetted by our courts system” will make campuses safer.

“We’re saying we’re going to change that percentage so that bad guy who’s walking into the Georgia State library to rob a student again, there just might be a Georgia citizen there to stop that,” he said, referring to a string of robberies at the downtown Atlanta university’s library.

For now, it’s “easy pickings” on Georgia’s campuses for someone with bad intentions, said co-sponsor, Rep. Mandi Ballinger, R-Canton.

Students “have a right not to be a victim,” she said. “And they have the right to prevent that. And that’s at the heart of the bill.”

Some state colleges, however, appear less enthusiastic about campus carry

“Dalton State’s position is that we support the law as it currently stands,” said Pam Partain, the college’s director of communications, in a statement. “That has always been our position, and it does not change in light of the proposed bill.”

At the other end of the state, a Valdosta State University spokeswoman put it more simply.

“We support current state law,” said Jessica Pope in a statement.

But in the state House, where the bill was introduced Thursday, support is strong.

Rep. John Meadows, R-Calhoun, chairman of the House Rules Committee, signed onto the bill with two dozen other lawmakers.

“It’s not their decision, really,” said Rep. Steve Tarvin, R-Chickamauga, of leery administrators, before citing the Second-Amendment rights of students and faculty.

“I think it should be an individual right to carry a firearm, where they want to,” he said.

Even so, the bill falls short of what Tarvin would like to see.

Tarvin, who signed onto the bill, said 18-year-olds who are old enough to join the armed forces should be allowed to carry on campus. He doesn’t care for banning firearms in student housing, either.

But, he said, the bill is a start.

“Take what you can get passed through, when you can get it passed through,” he said.

The call for “campus carry” was originally part of what’s known as the state’s “Guns Everywhere” law. Passed in 2014, that law allowed licensed gun owners to carry firearms into churches, bars, government buildings and other establishments – but not college campuses.

Jasperse said he believes the proposal will fare better this time, now that people have had time to observe the aftermath of the 2014 law.

He hasn’t backed off what was originally proposed. The freedoms and limitations proposed two years ago, which Jasperse and Ballinger say seek to strike a balance, are back in the new bill.

“We are restoring the rights of Georgians,” he said. “It’s their Constitutional right to defend themselves.”

Jill Nolin covers the Georgia Statehouse for CNHI’s newspapers and websites. Reach her at jnolin@cnhi.com.