Texas Figuring Out How to Handle Campus Carry Law
Posted by jhingarat21 on 16th Oct 2015
Austin, Texas (CNN) – One of the most prominent opponents of the “campus carry” bill that passed in Texas this year was University of Texas System Chancellor William McRaven, a former Navy SEALs admiral responsible for directing the raid that killed Osama bin Laden.
“I’ve spent my whole life around guns. I grew up in Texas hunting. I spent 37 years in the military. I like guns, but I just don’t think having them on campus is the right place,” he told CNN.
McRaven is responsible for implementing Senate Bill 11. The Republican-run Legislature passed the bill to make Texas the eighth U.S. state to allow concealed handguns to be carried into classrooms, dormitories and other buildings at public and private universities, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures.
Texas joins Colorado, Idaho, Kansas, Mississippi, Utah, Wisconsin and Oregon — which suffered a mass shooting last week at Umpqua Community College in Roseburg.
The bill many know as the “campus carry” law is scheduled to go into effect August 1, the 50-year anniversary of the UT Tower sniper shooting, one of the first mass murders on a college campus in America.
“We are going to follow the law, and we are going to have to figure out the best way to do that to maintain the appropriate campus life, to keep our faculty and our staff and visitors as safe as possible,” McRaven told CNN.
Groups known as “working committees” at each Texas college are researching ideas on how the laws should be implemented, and will report their findings later this year to the Chancellor’s office. McRaven said the law creates an “environment of unknown.”
“I have been shot at before. And so I know what and how people react when they are being shot at. So if you aren’t trained in that environment you probably aren’t going to react the way people think you will react naturally. And consequently having another armed individual in the middle of an active shooter profile, in some cases could create more confusion than helping to resolve the problem.”