Florida’s firearm school property law, Fla. Stat. § 790.115, doesn’t care whether you meant to leave your gun behind. A professor at Palm Beach State College’s Palm Beach Gardens campus was grading papers on the afternoon of August 26 when she noticed a small black bag sitting alone in a physics and calculus classroom. Nobody claimed it for about fifteen minutes. She searched it looking for a name or a phone number and instead found a loaded Springfield Hellcat 9mm. Campus security removed the magazine and secured the gun. When the owner, a student named Kobey Obrian Parchment, came back for his bag, he told officers it belonged to him and that he’d left it behind by accident. His driver’s license and his concealed weapon license were in the same bag. Police said records showed the gun wasn’t stolen. He was arrested anyway, on a charge tied to Florida’s law on firearms on school property, then processed at the Palm Beach Gardens Police Department and taken to the Palm Beach County Jail, according to WPBF’s report.
I want to be careful here, because an arrest report is not a conviction and the case hasn’t gone through court yet. But the facts as reported are worth sitting with, because they describe exactly the situation I warn students about every time this topic comes up in a Boynton Beach CCW class: a concealed weapon license doesn’t mean you’re covered everywhere, and fifteen unattended minutes is all it takes to turn a licensed carrier into a felony suspect.
What Florida law actually says about guns on school property
The statute is Fla. Stat. § 790.115, and it doesn’t leave much wiggle room. Under subsection (2)(c)1, a person who willfully and knowingly possesses any firearm on the property of any school, whether that’s a public university, a private college, a K-12 campus, or a career center, commits a felony of the third degree, punishable under sections 775.082, 775.083, or 775.084. A third-degree felony in Florida can carry up to five years in prison and a $5,000 fine. That’s the exposure for simple possession. It doesn’t require pointing the gun at anyone or even taking it out of the bag.
This is education, not legal advice, and if you find yourself facing a charge like this you need a Florida criminal defense attorney, not a blog post from a firearms instructor. But knowing the shape of the law before you’re standing in a parking lot with your gun in your backpack matters.
The exception almost every CCW holder half-remembers
Florida does carve out one major exception, and it’s the one people get wrong constantly: a firearm that stays inside a vehicle, securely encased, is not a violation. Securely encased means locked in a glove compartment, snapped into a holster, zipped into a gun case, or otherwise inside a container that requires some deliberate act to open. It does not mean tossed under a seat, and it does not mean sitting loose in your center console. The moment you take that gun out of the vehicle and carry it onto campus, encased or not, the exception stops applying and you’re back under 790.115.
Some schools have gone further. Under 790.115(2)(a)3, school districts can adopt policies that waive even the vehicle exception for student and staff parking, which means the rule that protects you at one campus might not protect you at another fifteen minutes down the road. If you carry regularly and you’re a student or you work near a campus, you need to know your specific school’s parking policy, not just the state default.
A concealed weapon license does not open the door
I hear this misunderstanding all the time, usually from someone who just finished their CWFL class and feels like the license is a general-purpose permission slip. It isn’t. Florida’s concealed carry statute, section 790.06, specifically excludes any school, college, or university property from the list of places a license covers, aside from the narrow vehicle exception already described. Having a valid CWFL, like the one Parchment reportedly had in the same bag as his gun, does nothing to change the analysis under 790.115. If anything, it can make things look worse to a prosecutor, because it establishes that the person understood how to carry legally and still ended up out of compliance.
Why the “I forgot” defense doesn’t help as much as you’d think
The statute’s language turns on “willfully and knowingly” possessing the firearm, and that phrase does real legal work. Courts have generally read it to mean you knew you had the gun and you knew you were on school property, not that you specifically intended to break the law. Forgetting a bag in a classroom for fifteen minutes doesn’t erase the fact that you knowingly brought a loaded handgun onto a campus in the first place. I’m not a lawyer and I won’t tell you how a Palm Beach County prosecutor or judge will apply that standard to this specific case. What I will tell you, from years of running range days and CCW classes, is that “I forgot” is a sentence I hear after almost every negligent-discharge story and almost every left-behind-firearm story, and the law doesn’t build in much room for absent-mindedness when a gun is involved.
What this means if you carry and you’re on a college campus regularly
If you’re a CWFL holder taking classes at PBSC, FAU, Palm Beach Atlantic, or anywhere else, treat the transition into your car as a checklist moment, not an afterthought. Before you get out of the vehicle: gun stays in the securely encased case or holster inside the car, bag gets checked for anything that doesn’t belong on campus, and you take thirty seconds to actually look at what you’re carrying into a building instead of grabbing the bag on autopilot. That thirty seconds is cheaper than a felony charge by a margin that isn’t close.
For students specifically, I’d add one more habit: don’t store your firearm inside your backpack at all if you’re commuting to a campus building regularly. A glove compartment or a locked console is a fixed, predictable location. A backpack moves with you into classrooms, libraries, and dining halls, and it only takes one distracted moment, a phone call, a forgotten assignment, someone waving you over, to leave that bag somewhere it should never be.
The bigger lesson for every CCW student
I tell people in my classes that carrying a gun responsibly is less about the gun and more about your relationship to your own habits. Most negligent storage cases I’ve read about, and most school-property cases like this one, don’t start with bad intentions. They start with a routine that has a gap in it. Where do you put the gun when you get out of the car? What’s in the bag you grab without thinking? Those are training questions, not gear questions, and they matter more than which pistol you carry.
If you carry near a campus, take twenty minutes this week and actually read your specific school’s weapons policy instead of assuming the state default applies. Palm Beach State publishes its policies online, and so does every other college in the county. Know the rule before you’re the one explaining to a police officer why your gun was fifteen minutes from your hand in a classroom.
Mike Kneuer is a firearms instructor based in Boynton Beach, Florida. Questions about concealed carry training or where your gun can legally go? Call (561) 213-2974 or email Mike@suburbanprotector.com.