IN JUNE, Texas became the eighth state to adopt legislation allowing guns to be carried on university campuses. (In a ninth, Arkansas, only faculty are permitted to bear arms while wandering about the quads.) “Campus carry” has been a priority for gun-rights groups since the shootings in 2007 at Virginia Tech. It was bound to get a hearing in Texas, even in the absence of a grim precedent: in 1966 an engineering student at the University of Texas at Austin took half a dozen guns to the top of the clock tower that marks the centre of campus, and began what is now considered to be America’s first school shooting.
By the time it was over he had left 14 people dead, more than 30 wounded, and a generation of students with terrifying memories of the day. One of them, Jeff Wentworth, was among the legislators who filed a bill proposing campus carry in Texas, back in 2009. Over the next several sessions the legislature debated the subject at length. The arguments against it have been laid out exhaustively. UT Austin has held two public forums on the subject this term, at the student union, in the shadow of the clock tower. Most of the students who spoke were opposed to having guns on campus, but that would have been old news to the university administrators, who also opposed the law, and to the legislators, who passed it over their objections.
A wrinkle has...Continue reading
Source: United States http://ift.tt/1Ss9Og1
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