• Give voters who sign a petition until July 1 to have their signatures removed. Safe Havens said this gives initiative opponents a month to persuade people to remove their signatures while supporters cannot gather more signatures. But the court ruled "the potential difficulty this provision may cause to initiative sponsors" is outweighed by "the importance of protecting the rights of a voter to withdraw his signature."

• Require sponsors to gather enough signatures within a year of filing an initiative application. Safe Havens argued that provision was passed only to make the initiative process more difficult, but the state argued it was "designed to ensure . . . that there be an orderly, known and efficient process." The court agreed.

Assistant attorney general Thomas D. Roberts said he was pleased by "the recognition that the Legislature has a difficult job in trying to balance their need to regulate the process of getting something on the (ballot) and the citizens' right to have a matter placed on the ballot as an initiative."

But Safe Havens spokeswoman Maura Carabello is concerned the guns-in-schools issue is now more firmly in the hands of lawmakers, who have been "very unresponsive."

Sen. Bill Hickman, R-St. George, who sponsored the Senate version of the state's initiative law, could not be reached Tuesday for comment.

Carabello said volunteers continued collecting signatures as the court deliberated, but they do not yet have enough to get the issue on this year's ballot.

She said the executive committee will meet Thursday to decide whether to undertake a "full-on effort" to gather enough signatures or to wait and try again in 2006.

"We are as deeply committed as we ever have been to keeping guns out of Utah's schools," Carabello said.

Utah's difficult initiative process has resulted in only 18 initiatives making it to the ballot. Only four of those became law.

In 2002, before lawmakers decided signatures on initiative petitions should be distributed among Senate districts rather than counties, a bipartisan foundation rated Utah among the five toughest states for geographic distribution requirements for an initiative.

The foundation, Ballot Funding.org, said at the time that Utah could be at the top of the list because of its sparse population. The other states cited in the 2002 study as having fairly stringent geographic provisions were Ohio, Mississippi, Nevada and Wyoming.

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Contributing: Lisa Riley Roche

E-mail: dsmeath@desnews.com