'Armed with reason': Texas campus carry law sees pushback from academics

Tom Dart in Houston
Saturday 24 October 2015 13.41 BST

Bryan Jones is not anti-gun – he keeps two rifles and a handgun at his country home and is a former member of the National Rifle Association. But he does not want weapons in his workplace, and he is not alone.

The government professor at the University of Texas is one of about 800 academics there who have signed a petition opposing the campus carry law that is set to go into effect in Texas on 1 August 2016.

“There are some places guns don’t belong,” he said. “I think we’ve had enough of this. We’ve been lucky in the sense that we’ve started a little bit of a firestorm because our organisation came at about the same time as a shooting on campus in Oregon.”

Four blocks from Texas’s Republican-dominated capitol, the university’s Austin campus has become the hub of opposition to the bill allowing concealed handguns inside academic buildings that was signed into law by governor Greg Abbott on 13 June.

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