The Guardian
October 24, 2015
Bryan Jones is not anti-gun – he keeps two rifles and a handgun at his country home and is a former member of the National Rifle Association. But he does not want weapons in his workplace, and he is not alone.
The government professor at the University of Texas is one of about 800 academics there who have signed a petition opposing the campus carry law that is set to go into effect in Texas on 1 August 2016.
“There are some places guns don’t belong,” he said. “I think we’ve had enough of this. We’ve been lucky in the sense that we’ve started a little bit of a firestorm because our organisation came at about the same time as a shooting on campus in Oregon.”
Four blocks from Texas’s Republican-dominated capitol, the university’s Austin campus has become the hub of opposition to the bill allowing concealed handguns inside academic buildings that was signed into law by governor Greg Abbott on 13 June.
Future students now face a scenario where it will be permissible to bring a Glock into a University of Texas dorm room but not a plug-in air freshener or a waffle maker, which are deemed potentially dangerous.
Despite the bill’s passage, anti-campus carry efforts were given fresh impetus when the Umpqua community college mass shooting happened in Oregon earlier this month, around the time the University of Texas held public forums about the implementation of the law.
The Gun-Free UT movement, which began two months ago with a small number of concerned professors exchanging emails, has gathered momentum. On Wednesday some of its members consulted lawyers about possible legal challenges to the bill, which could include a class-action lawsuit on the basis of violated first amendment rights.
“We are exploring options currently and have some big Houston law firms interested,” said Ellen Spiro, a radio-TV-film professor and co-chair of Gun-Free UT.
Resisted by Democrats, and police, the law ultimately passed with caveats: private institutions can opt out and public ones can establish “reasonable” rules about where guns can and cannot go, without “generally” prohibiting them. Its failure to clearly define “reasonable” seems to give colleges some discretion, the degree of which is likely to be hotly disputed.
The university’s chancellor, William McRaven – a former US navy admiral who oversaw the raid that killed Osama Bin Laden – already has stated his public opposition to the bill.
“It’s going to be a long fight,” Jones said. “The university doesn’t like the law and fought it, and the question is, how lenient will the areas of gun exclusion be on campus? We’re pushing for a large area of exclusion – classes, offices and bars in particular – and some members of the legislature would rather have it more narrow.”