AUSTIN, Texas — Three professors at the University of Texas at Austin have sued the state over a new law that will allow the carrying of concealed handguns on campus starting Aug. 1.
Jennifer Lynn Glass, Mia Carter and Lisa Moore filed the lawsuit Monday in federal court. They’ve named Attorney General Ken Paxton, University of Texas-Austin President Greg Fenves and the nine members of the University of Texas System Board of Regents as defendants. They noted that the law takes effect on the 50th anniversary of the day Charles Whitman stood atop the school’s tower and shot dead 14 people.
“In a cruel irony, the Texas Legislature has mandated that fifty years to the day after one of the worst gun-related massacres ever on a college campus … UT-Austin must begin allowing the concealed carrying of handguns on campus and in classrooms,” the professors’ attorneys wrote in their lawsuit brief filed Monday. “Worried about much more than cruel irony, the three plaintiff professors seek to at least retain the option of maintaining their academic classrooms as gun-free zones.”
Beginning next month, the campus-carry law will allow anyone with a state-approved handgun license to carry a concealed weapon in most buildings at Texas’ public universities. They were previously allowed only in public spaces, like sidewalks and quads. But the law also allows schools to propose some carve-outs where guns will be banned.
The Austin campus is the only school in the state that has asked that professors be allowed to ban guns in their offices, but system regents have not yet approved that request. Indeed, they delayed making a decision on how to implement the new law at all 14 of the system’s campuses and health institutions.
Glass, Carter and Moore say that forcing them to allow guns in their classrooms violates their rights to free speech, due process and equal protection. They also argue that the campus-carry law violates their Second Amendment rights “by compelling them as public employees to passively acquiesce in the presence of loaded weaponry in their place of public employment without the individual possession and use of such weaponry in public being well-regulated.”