How Texas's Campus-Carry Law Poses a Threat to Students' and Professors' Freedom of Spe... - 0 views
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A faculty working group at the University of Houston recently offered these recommendations to professors preparing for Texas’s new campus-carry law, set to take effect August 1.
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The situation to which these recommendations are alluding—gun violence in response to controversial or otherwise difficult classroom discussions—is at this point only a hypothetical worst-case scenario. But critics of the legislation are still appalled: To abide by the law, and keep everyone safe in classrooms with armed students, faculty may ultimately have to resort to self-censorship.
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In the eight states that have already enacted such a law, none of the predicted nightmares have taken place—students drawing their weapons on professors who fail them, for example, or students firing on one another in heated classroom arguments.
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In fact, campus-carry supporters maintain that the law will keep the peace, enabling students and faculty to defend themselves effectively, and deter would-be shooters.
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It turns out, for example, there were armed students at Umpqua Community College in Oregon on the day of its shooting last fall. Their presence did not deter the attack, nor did they halt it; the students wisely decided not to jump into the fray for fear it would compound the mayhem.
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Stand Your Ground laws protect citizens from prosecution in cases where they feel threatened in public, and fire their weapons.
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It’s unclear whether campus carry does and will in fact undermine the freedom of expression, but if there’s one place in society where the citizenry must not tolerate such threats, it’s the college classroom.
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Few young adults have put significant thought into these kinds of issues; they must experiment with them to understand them properly and deeply, and to develop mature and critical views.
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Gun owners have shot and killed unarmed citizens—and sought Stand Your Ground protections—in cases in which they misjudged or overestimated the threats before them.
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In 2014, a Montana man invoked Stand Your Ground after he shot and killed an unarmed German exchange student trespassing in his garage.
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One University of Houston professor, Maria Gonzalez, expressed her concerns over campus carry in the context of her own classes, which cover Marxist and Queer Theory.
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Expansions of civil rights are almost always deeply unpopular at first; this was the case in the fight for women’s rights, suffrage for African Americans, and marriage equality for gays and lesbians.
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I fear that campus carry will make students and faculty less inclined to engage in the critical intellectual work that must take place in the classroom, the courageous inquiry and experimentation American democracy requires.
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It’s impossible to measure the cost of campus carry. But I wager that the cost will be evidenced in the mounting silence on college campuses, and the trepidation, timidity, and lack of creativity among new generations of voters. American democracy will be the poorer for it.