Colleges' gun-free zones don't necessarily keep out guns, but it turns out that schools are exceptionally good at shutting down free speech -- particularly when the school deems it "triggering."

Portland State University student Christian Britschgi came up with the idea for his conservative campus group to create a fake “murder-free zone” as a critical look at "gun-free zones." Gun-free signs don't stop criminals from carrying guns, just as making "murder-free" signs wouldn't make someone more or less likely to get murdered.

But the school didn't quite see it that way.

Britschgi described the trouble he ran into in a post on The College Fix:

Though the university makes tables freely available for registered students groups such as the College Republicans, we needed an adviser to sign off on the event first. At Portland State, one person advises all political groups, liberal and conservative. Naively assuming this would be a quick process, we stopped by our adviser’s office on the morning of our event to get her permission. Though she described her approval of our table as a formality, she asked what the subject was. When we explained the character and intent of the murder-free zone and showed her our posters, she didn’t just caution us about the reaction we could expect on the left-wing campus. She said our posters were “triggering” – and she wanted approval from her supervisor before we could proceed. This, despite her acknowledgment that nothing in our event violated university regulations. Our adviser called her supervisor out of a meeting he was in, and had us explain once more what we were tabling for. His response was even more negative, and his warnings even more extreme: Our “murder-free zone” posters were not only triggering, but “libelous” and dangerous. With no degree of irony, the supervisor claimed our posters were so inflammatory that they could get us physically attacked by another student.  Apparently there exists a large number of pro-murder partisans at Portland State.

Peter Bonilla, director of the Individual Rights Defense Program at Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, called the incident "ludicrous" in an interview with Fox News. 

“It is insulting to students to assume that if one sees the word “murder,” they might be sent off into a violent range,” Bonilla said.

Britschgi told Fox that he won't give up trying to push for the right for his views to be expressed on campus.

“College is a place where ideas collide, and the administration should be there to foster an environment where that can take place,” he said.