PA Bill Number: HB335
Title: In inchoate crimes, further providing for prohibited offensive weapons.
Description: In inchoate crimes, further providing for prohibited offensive weapons. ...
Last Action: Removed from table
Last Action Date: May 1, 2024
Austin to Hold Public Forums on Campus Carry :: 10/02/2015
The University of Texas at Austin is hosting on Wednesday night the first of two public forums on campus carry, as it and other universities in Texas get a handle on how they will start implementing the contentious firearms law in fall 2016.
A petition from UT Students Opposing Campus Carry has more than 5,000 signatures. Private universities don’t have to comply. Supporters call it a personal safety and constitutional rights issue. They say guns will allow people to defend themselves on campus, and maybe even stop the next school shooting. The gun-free zones must be “reasonable”, according to the law’s language, and can’t have the effect of wholly or generally prohibiting concealed carry on campus.
Steve Goode, chairman of the working group and a Texas law professor, said the panel had already received more than 2,500 submitted comments. UT-Austin estimates that less than 1 percent of its students have a license, though that doesn’t take into account faculty, staff and others.
Madison Yandell, a student and president of College Republicans of Texas, said campus carry is an important self-defense measure.
House and Senate negotiators eventually agreed to give public university presidents the ability to declare parts of campus, but not all of it, off-limits to gun. Introducing a gun into that environment could be dangerous, he said.
And we are asking the public join us in opposition to campus carry. The college news site identified the signatory as a professor at Oregon State University. “That being said, we are not vigilantes”.
“We expect that everyone at our universities – including the professors who signed the petition – to follow the law”, John Wittman, deputy press secretary for Abbott, told on Wednesday.
“I’m here to say as emphatically as I possibly can: Guns don’t belong in classrooms”, said Joan Neuberger, a UT history professor. “The classroom is a very special place, and it needs to be a safe place, and that means safe from guns”. “He should not have to worry about whether the person sitting next to him or living next to him in the dorm has a gun”, said Christina Adams, the parent of a Texas student and wife a faculty member.
“If you can’t trust students at UT”, said Andrew Jackson, a sophomore, “you can’t trust the students who are going to change the world”. At Wednesday’s UT-Austin forum, a shooting instructor argued that people with concealed handgun licenses are more law-abiding than the general public.
http://www.gwsnewswire.com/austin-to-hold-public-forums-on-campus-carry/12279/
