Texans brace for campus carry amid tragedy

Oregon shooting reignites debate for universities

This week’s shooting on an Oregon college campus is a nightmare scenario haunting Texas university leaders as they grapple with the state’s new campus carry law, which in a year’s time will allow some Texans to carry concealed handguns into college classrooms.

The new law gives some leeway to school leaders to determine what, if any, parts of campus should be gun-free zones — something that has sparked debate on campuses across the state about where firearms should be allowed.

At least nine people died in the latest mass shooting, at Umpqua Community College in Oregon, which has rekindled the broader national debate about gun violence. All sides in Texas are pointing to the Oregon shooting as the reason they are right.

“The events yesterday have certainly done nothing but heightened passions about this, and I think both sides are taking

the events of yesterday and saying it supports their position,” said Steven Goode, a University of Texas at Austin law professor who is leading a group of faculty, staff and students tasked with recommending where guns should and shouldn’t be allowed on campus.

Goode’s group is one of many established by Texas universities, including Texas A&M University and the University of Houston, as academic leaders try to determine which portions of campuses can be determined gun-free.

The classroom, the scene of Thursday’s shooting in Oregon, has become a focal point in the battle over where guns should be allowed. The classroom is a special space where students learn to communicate through disagreement, professors said Friday. How to protect that space for the give-and-take of ideas is a key difference of opinion among those advocating for and against gun-free zones.

Professors, students, university leaders and others have called on schools to keep classrooms — where debates over touchy subjects from religion to sexuality quickly can grow heated — free from guns. But gun rights advocates argue the only way to lower the death toll in a scenario like the one in Oregon is to let students and professors arm themselves.

‘Reasonable’ zones

The gun-free zones must be “reasonable,” according to the Texas law’s language, and cannot have the effect of wholly or generally prohibiting concealed carry on campus.

Some places are more obvious than others. The law already excludes football stadiums and other sporting venues. Other places, like medical facilities, nuclear facilities and labs with dangerous and flammable chemicals, all have basis in state law to ban guns and likely will remain gun-free zones. The state also bans guns from grade schools, so on-campus day care facilites could be protected, as well.

But many faculty, staff and students are urging working groups like the one Goode leads to designate large areas of campus — including all classrooms, offices and dormitories — as gun free.

Texas’ new campus carry law, signed by Gov. Greg Abbott in June, will allow licensed firearms owners to bring concealed handguns into those exact places beginning in August 2016.

Students at the University of Houston on Friday said more guns will only make them feel less safe.

“There’s no need for a gun on campus,” said Paloma Canel, a 21-year-old psychology major. “You’re coming here to learn.”

Garrett Crow, a 22-yearold history major, said the Oregon shooting reinforced his opinion that more guns is not the answer.

“I think that with campus carry, it is progress in the wrong direction,” Crow said. “It’s the opposite way of how we should be addressing this situation.”

Teaching in fear

Nearly 170 faculty members at the state’s flagship university in Austin have signed a petition against the law. The list, which currently includes 168 names from 30 departments and programs, was released the same day that dozens — on both sides of the debate — rallied at the system flagship.

“The classroom in particular is a special space — a space that has extra reasons for us to keep it a safe space,” said Joan Neuberger, a history professor at UT Austin. “In order to teach them, we need to encourage them to say what they need to say. People get very heated. ... If I know there’s a possibility that someone has a gun in the classroom, I’m not going to hold those same discussions. I’m not going to encourage students to speak openly.”

And this week at a UT Austin forum presided by Goode’s committee, the overwhelming sentiment was to keep guns out of classrooms and buildings.

Mixed opinions

Professors across the state have expressed similar views. David SmithSoto, a senior lecturer of multimedia journalism at UT El Paso, drew attention last month when he posted a “no-guns” sign outside of his classroom.

“The minute that the governor signed that legislation, I put up my sign outside the door,” Smith-Soto told the Chronicle of Higher Education. “Guns belong wherever they belong, but they don’t belong in my

“The classroom in particular is a special space — a space that has extra reasons for us to keep it a safe space. In order to teach them, we need to encourage them to say what they need to say.”

Joan Neuberger, UT history professor

classroom — or anybody’s classroom, for that matter.”

At Texas A&M University, which historically has been more open to the idea of guns on campus, faculty have mixed opinions, said Walter Daugherity, a senior lecturer in computer science and engineering and a member of the faculty senate executive committee.

“I feel less threatened by a licensed concealed weapon holder than some of the students I have encountered who were probably psychotic but weren’t armed,” Daugherity said.

Gun rights advocates argue that the only way to protect the classroom is to allow the people in it to arm and protect themselves. The shooter in Oregon killed nine people before he was stopped by police. Gun rights advocates argued that if someone in the classroom had returned fire, lives could have been saved.

“This guy went in there and was able to kill nine people and injure about a dozen others,” said C.J. Grisham, an open carry activist who is running for state Senate. “We won’t have to worry about such a shooter going completely unchecked until law enforcement can get there 20 minutes later. At least we’ll have a chance.”

Oregon state law allows licensed concealed carry on campus, however, colleges are allowed to prohibit it in campus buildings. The school’s code of conduct bans the “Possession or use, without written authorization, of firearms.”

The rule did little to deter Thursday’s shooting, said Jerry Patterson, the former Texas land commissioner and an outspoken gun rights advocate.

Patterson said Friday had he been in Aurora, Colo., where a gunman murdered 12 in a movie theater in 2012, “there would be fewer people dead on that day.”

“A guy who is a mass murderer does not care about your rule,” Patterson said.