On Monday, when the University of Texas at Austin commemorates the 50th anniversary of sniper Charles Whitman’s murderous on-campus shooting spree, many of the routines of public mourning will be followed: Flags at half-staff, a solemn speech from the university president and the unveiling of a new memorial honoring the 16 adults and one unborn child Whitman killed that day.
But there will be one unusual specter looming over the day. On the same day the school mourns a seminal moment of gun violence in American history, a new state law known as campus carry will go into effect, allowing students, faculty and visitors to carry their guns into university buildings.
The timing is a coincidence, but it’s hard not to link the two milestones. Still, UT-Austin officials are doing their best to keep the two events separate.
“Regarding the time of the implementation date of Senate Bill 11 [the campus carry law], I have no comment on that,” university President Greg Fenves said in a recent interview. “That is the way it is. They are separate issues. We are not connecting it in any way.”
That won’t be easy. People on both sides of the campus carry debate have brought up the 1966 shooting. Opponents of the law cite it as an example of why guns don’t belong on campus. Some supporters argued that civilians limited the casualties that day.
In the version of the bill that initially passed the House and the Senate, the implementation date was Sept. 1, 2015, the start of the fiscal year. But a last-minute change in conference committee moved it 11 months later, giving universities more time to prepare.
The anniversary of the UT Tower shooting wasn’t a focus during the session, and the bill’s author, Sen. Brian Birdwell, R-Granbury, has said that stopping mass shootings wasn’t his main goal. His focus, he said, was keeping government-run schools from infringing on students’ Second Amendment rights.
“It is public property that belongs to the people of the state of Texas,” Birdwell told The Texas Tribune late last year. “We’re going to make sure that we preserve their rights.”
But Fenves said that’s a discussion for another time. On Monday, the campus, which is in the middle of summer school, will focus on the lives lost.
To read the complete Texas Tribune story, go here.
