A Texas law that will permit the carry of concealed handguns on university campuses will go into effect on Aug. 1, nearly 50 years after the University of Texas at Austin Tower shooting — one of the first mass killings on a college campus in the United States.

Steven Goode, a professor of law at the University of Texas at Austin and the chair of the university’s Campus Carry Policy Working Group, led a discussion titled “A High-Caliber Education: Gun Rights, Gun Violence, and College Campuses” in Bird Library on Friday about gun rights on campus and the Texas law.

Goode said UT had had campus carry on the grounds of its campus for 20 years before the new law was passed.

“Almost nobody knew that, and I didn’t know it,” he said.

The significance of the new law is that it will allow license holders to bring concealed handguns not only on campus but inside campus buildings, Goode said.

Goode said one must be at least 21 to apply for a concealed carry license. He said this restriction eliminates a number of students who could potentially qualify for a license. He added that the number of students who will be qualified is low.

“If you look at demographic data, less than 1 percent of students are qualified to carry a concealed weapon in academic buildings,” Goode said. “It’s not a big number.”

Jaclyn Schildkraut, an assistant professor of public justice at the State University of New York at Oswego, joined the discussion with Goode. Her research focuses on mass shootings.

Schildkraut said there are a lot of different debates about the number of mass shootings in the United States. She said President Barack Obama’s estimates for the number of these shootings that occur are “highly inflated.”

She added that the FBI has a different definition of mass murder, which requires that four or more people be killed. Schildkraut said, for example, a shooting incident that leaves two people dead and 20 others shot should not be counted as a mass shooting because there aren’t enough deaths.

“We don’t have a national database of mass shootings the same way that we do with anything else,” Schildkraut said. “There are no real legitimate statistics.”

William Beese, a junior mechanical engineering major at Syracuse University who took part in the discussion, said SU’s Department of Public Safety has a video regarding campus emergency preparedness, but added that not many people know about it.

Beese said SU should put more efforts into raising the awareness of campus safety. It should be a continuous process rather than only educating students during orientation at the beginning of freshman year, Beese said.

“Being aware of it makes everyone in the room safe — even just one person,” Beese said. “We need to spread this out a little more.”

Published on February 28, 2016 at 9:47 pm

Contact Chieh: chchen@syr.edu