Campus carry: Loaded debate, bad idea
No one has offered a more creative protest than Jessica Jin ... who hatched the idea of bringing a sex toy to campus as a silent protest to the campus carry law.
What do adult sex toys and a loaded Glock 9mm pistol have in common?
Both may soon be seen in backpacks across the campus of the University of Texas-Austin.
A law passed this year and signed by Gov. Greg Abbott in June will allow students to carry concealed weapons at Texas’ public universities. The law, known as “campus carry,” passed despite written protests from the chancellor of the nineschool University of Texas System and will go into effect next Aug. 1.
I wrote about the bill’s swift journey through the state Legislature earlier this year, but the issue has gained national interest and sparked debate in the wake of the deadly shooting in Roseburg, Ore., early this month. In that incident, loner Christopher Harper-Mercer shot and killed an assistant professor and eight students at a community college before turning the gun on himself. Eight days later, a Northern Arizona University freshman opened fire on a group of fellow students on the Flagstaff campus during a confrontation, killing one and injuring three others.
Supporters of the Texas law say that guns in the hands of students and professors make campuses safer from serial killers and lower the risk of campus rape. Critics argue it creates a tense setting in what should be a peaceful learning environment.
Texas joins seven other states — Colorado, Idaho, Kansas, Mississippi, Oregon, Utah and Wisconsin — that allow concealed weapons on public post-secondary campuses, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures. In 23 other states, that decision is left up to the college or university, and 19 states ban weapons outright on public campuses.
Here on campus, the debate has roiled from study halls to online forums, but no one has offered a more creative protest than Jessica Jin, a recently graduated UT violin performance major who hatched the idea of bringing a sex toy to campus on Aug. 1, 2016, as a silent protest to the campus carry law.
She put her idea up on Facebook. Within a week, she had more than 9,000 confirmed attendees — that’s 9,000 sex toys of various shapes, colors and sizes bobbing in the backpacks of thousands of students on the same day guns are welcomed in class.
Naturally, her idea prompted a flurry of protests and even death threats from pro-gun advocates, who insist that guns make campuses safer.
“People want me dead for a (sex toy),” Jin told the Houston
Chronicle.
She added: “It’s the type of reaction that we could only hope to see from them when they hear of a child being gunned down in a classroom. It’s a little scary and absurd, but it still sounds like progress to me.”
I can’t help but think back to my days on campus at the University of Florida, more than two decades ago. Those days are a blur of late-night study sessions at Denny’s, awkward socializing in crowded bars, steady supplies of alcoholic drinks and the occasional booze-fueled fisticuffs between frat dudes. Injecting loaded handguns into that equation seems like an awful idea.
Besides the risk of a chaotic classroom shootout, guns on campus pose another risk: a chilling effect on classroom discussions and debates.
Daniel Hamermesh, a UT professor emeritus of economics, said he won’t return next year to teach his Introduction to Microeconomics class. He teaches the class in an auditorium with 500 students, and it’s a subject he’s taught for nearly five decades. Along the way, he’s faced plenty of irate students disgruntled about grades or other things. An angry student with a holstered handgun creates a potential threat he’s not willing to face, Hamermesh told me recently.
Also, professors will be less inclined to hold robust debates in their classrooms if they know some students are carrying concealed weapons, he said. Expect recruitment of quality professors to drop. “It’s a bad idea in so many ways,” he said.
It’s a bad idea to trust a scarcely trained gun owner to stop a potential mass shooter. Seems like a particularly bad idea to do so on campus.