By Robert T. Garrett
The Dallas Morning News
AUSTIN, Texas — The University of Texas shooting stoked a simmering conflict Tuesday about allowing handguns on campus – an issue that’s already roiled the governor’s race and sent hundreds of students marching in protest last year.
Gov. Rick Perry says he favors allowing guns at colleges, giving owners a chance to intervene. Police groups and others say that would only confuse what are potentially chaotic situations.
Perry’s Democratic challenger, Bill White, says state policymakers should stand down and let individual campuses decide.
The debate unfolded on the same day that an outspoken advocate of guns on campus, University of Maryland research scientist John Lott, was to speak at the UT Law School.
Lott’s appearance was switched to a bookstore near campus after at least one sponsoring student group was reluctant to proceed after the day’s events, said Robert Butler, executive director of the state Libertarian Party.
Butler said Texas’ concealed handgun license holders should be able to carry on campus – which is now prohibited.
“The record shows that when people are able to defend themselves, they have a better chance of survival,” he said, citing delays in police response to crime scenes.
John Woods, a UT graduate student who organized an anti-gun rally last year, disagreed. He said that having more guns on campus wouldn’t improve security.
“If there were multiple students running around with guns, it would’ve made the police’s job a lot harder this morning,” Woods said Tuesday. He was a student at Virginia Tech University in 2007 when a gunman killed 32 people, including Woods’ girlfriend.
He said gun backers don’t understand that training to get a concealed carry license is “just eight hours in a classroom and a couple of shots at a target that’s not moving in a range – a very, very controlled situation.”
The march by students to the Capitol last year protested a bill that would have allowed students, faculty and administrators to carry concealed handguns on campus. It passed the Senate but was derailed in the House.
In the past three years, lawmakers in 21 other states, including Arkansas, Louisiana and Oklahoma, rejected bills allowing students to carry concealed handguns at colleges and universities.
Andy Pelosi, president of GunFreeKids.org, said that of more than 500 public four-year colleges and universities, just over 20 – mostly in Utah and Colorado – allow guns on campus.
But Daniel Crocker, Southwest regional director for Students for Concealed Carry on Campus, which is active at UT, said: “Students and faculty deserve options beyond relying on the altruism – or poor aim – of a madman.”
Katy Bacon, a White spokeswoman, said “Perry wants to mandate allowing guns on campus” but White believes “students, parents, administrators, and security personnel should decide.”
Perry spokesman Mark Miner played down the Republican governor’s differences with police groups on the issue and said Perry is “a strong believer and supporter of the Second Amendment, and Bill White isn’t.”