Texas lawmakers pushing bill to allow college students to carry concealed weapons...

stringer bell
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edited February 2011 in The Social Lounge
http://www.nydailynews.com/news/national/2011/02/21/2011-02-21_texas_lawmakers_pushing_bill_to_allow_students_to_carry_concealed_weapons_on_cam.html?r=news/national
Texas lawmakers pushing bill to allow students to carry concealed weapons on state campuses


Texas lawmakers are poised to provide new ammunition to the nationwide debate on gun laws.

More than half the members of the Texas House are listed as co-authors of a bill that would allow concealed weapons on the campuses of state universities there in a bid to protect students from mass shootings, The Associated Press reported.

"It's strictly a matter of self-defense," state Sen. Jeff Wentworth (R-San Antonio) told the AP. "I don’t ever want to see repeated on a Texas college campus what happened at Virginia Tech, where some deranged, suicidal madman goes into a building and is able to pick off totally defenseless kids like sitting ducks."

Gun safety advocates, however, worry that adding more firearms to a chaotic incident may make a bad situation worse.

"You can never protect against this kind of incident," Dana Schrad, executive director of the Virginia Association of Chiefs of Police, told the Christian Science Monitor in the aftermath of the 2007 Virginia Tech shooting in which 32 students were gunned down by a lone gunman.

"I have my own concerns that, had there been a number of people who had been in that classroom with guns, [there could have been] additional persons killed just as a result of poor judgment calls," Schrad said.


Though the Texas bill is still in committee and hasn't come up for an official vote, there's a strong chance it will eventually pass into law. Heat-packing Gov. Rick Perry has already publicly stated his support for the measure.

The issue is one that resonates deep in the heart of Texas. Before the Virginia Tech massacre, the 1966 shooting at the University of Texas - in which Charles Whitman climbed to the top of the Austin school's famed clock tower and shot 16 students dead - was the deadliest campus shooting in U.S. history.

If passed, the law would cover the state's 38 public universities and more than 500,000 students.

Texas would join Utah as the only states allowing concealed weapons on campuses.

The Texas legislature has been busy in recent weeks delving into hot-button issues. On Thursday, the Texas Senate approved a bill that requires doctors to offer a fetal sonogram to women seeking an abortion to hear their fetus' heartbeat.

Sen. Dan Patrick (R-Houston), the author of the sonogram bill, told the Dallas Morning News that the measure was leavened with "wisdom, counsel and the hand of ? ."

they sure do love their guns in texas...

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