Mass shootings have become a grisly routine in America, with each new event settling into the now-familiar pattern of “active shooter” alerts, helicopter shots of students running out of classrooms, and the media scrum as reporters rush to interview the survivors and the neighbors of the shooter.
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The University of Texas has expressly forbidden the re-enactment from occurring on campus. The law has met resistance from students and the faculty.
The recommendations are far from final – since the ultimate decision about UT-Austin’s gun policies must be made by President Gregory Fenves and the reviewed by UT’s Board of Regents.
“Some of these so-called gun rights groups seem to be little more than anarchists cloaking their legitimacy in the legitimacy of the Second Amendment”, said Wes Lewis, former spokesman for the group Students for Concealed Carry.
“I’m offended that there’s politicians out there saying they want to take guns away”, Short said, “California already has restrictive gun laws, and it created a victim killing zone when police are minutes away”.
“Keeping them out of on-campus residence halls is a tiny sliver of our population”.
“We felt we could not recommend that handguns be excluded in classrooms without violating that charge”, Goode said.
According to The Houston Chronicle, the demonstration’s organizers want to demonstrate how the concealed carry of a weapon can end a mass shooting and limit the damage done by the shooter(s).
The university made recommendations in the report, including that handguns must be kept away from patient care areas, formal hearings and laboratories where “a firearm might cause great harm, such as laboratories with extremely unsafe chemicals, biologic agents or explosive agents”. Students can keep their guns secured in a backpack, or handbag as long as it close enough to the gun-owner to get to it with out moving positions.
The flagship campuses of the Texas A&M and Texas Tech university systems have not yet released proposed gun zones.
While the university could not defy the state law, it could have gone to court to fight the measure. Several schools, including Rice University, will uphold their current weapons bans thanks to a clause in the law that allows schools to opt out of some of the bill’s provisions.
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Opponents and supporters cite the 1966 mass shooting at the University of Texas, when Charles Whitman killed 16 people and wounded dozens more from his perch atop the campus clock tower.
