Los Angeles Community College (LACC) has canceled its National Rifle Association (NRA) class because of new restrictions laid down by the school’s board of trustees.

Campus Reform writer Katherine Timpf files this report:

The new regulations, which apply to all nine campuses of the LACC system, will begin this year, and ban all firearms, including those that are “non-operational and in the instructional setting” from school grounds.

The rules make an exception for “non-operational” weapons used in “theatrical performances,” but not for the non-credit firearms class which the school has offered in conjunction with the NRA for the last six years.

Board of Trustees Vice President Scott Svonkin, author the resolution that ushered in the new rules, told Campus Reform last Monday he believes school’s have no place teaching students how to use guns —but that its educators and faculty do have a responsibility to “promote gun control.”

“We should make sure that students don’t come to campus being afraid to run into somebody with a gun,” Svonkin said.

He argued it was necessary to ban “non-operational” guns, because although they could not hurt anyone, they could scare students.

Gerry Koehler, the teacher of the now cancelled gun classes at Los Angeles Pierce College for the past six years, however, said the idea that a student might “run into somebody with a gun” due to NRA classes was ridiculous — considering they were taught in a locked classroom with the shades pulled down.

He added that the classes were incredibly popular, with each session filling up and resulting in another full overflow class.

Koehler said the college informed him last month that he would not be teaching his summer class — which was supposed to begin on

August 3 — after a member of the Woodland Hills Warner Center Neighborhood Council complained about it.

“They said, ‘Let’s cancel it for the summer, and hopefully it will die down and we can continue it for the fall,’” he said.

Koehler said neither he nor any other gun advocates were invited to the meeting in which the class was cancelled. He said he did not find out about the cancellation until Sunday — in an email from an NRA lawyer — that the classes were cancelled permanently.