When I return to the University of North Texas for the fall semester, I’ll have no way of knowing who is carrying a firearm. As of August 1, students, faculty, and staff with concealed weapon permits may carry guns on public university campuses, under a law approved last year.
I’m a black female professor working in a Texas town with a prominent Confederate memorial.
Howdy. I'm a white male professor working in Chicago with a prominent BLM movement. Nice to meet you.
All the Confederates are dead now. They won't hurt you.
I teach journalism courses that spark debate about race, gender, and nationality. I have serious reservations about campus carry.
If you're so worried about it, get a gun.
| Or don't. It's a choice, not a requirement. |
Proponents of the new law claim that if more people are armed at institutions of higher learning, we will all be safer. Days after he signed the bill, Governor Greg Abbott declared that would-be shooters in Texas would now understand that “somebody is going to be watching them and have the ability to do something about it” if they open fire on a college campus.
Makes sense to me.
But I don’t feel safer. The idea of working in an environment where anyone may have a gun makes me feel perpetually under threat.
Why? If they were carrying knives, clubs, brass knuckles or flamethrowers would you feel less threatened? If they weren’t carrying weapons at all but had huge ham hands and hairy knuckles, would you feel less threatened?
I’m afraid of accidents, mostly, but also of misplaced anger and emotional distress.
But the gun carriers aren't progressives, so misplaced anger and emotional distress are a lot less likely...
I’m afraid that situations that occur every day on college campuses, like a classroom debate or an office visit about grades, will escalate into deadly shooting.
They could do that without a student with a concealed gun. The point is that a shooter with mayhem on his mind can be stopped much more quickly by another armed individual. Or does that make too much sense?
Classroom debates and office visits occur every day as you say, perfesser. Very, very, very few of these provoke violence. Why would that change now?
My mother wants me to quit. Friends send me job ads in other states. A few high-profile academics — including a University of Texas dean and a professor emeritus — have already made a public show of leaving.
They were attention whores. Do you wish to be an attention whore?
| She wrote this. The answer is obvious. |
She's making a fine show of pearl-clutching...
But the job market makes it hard for me to consider leaving my first tenure-track position. Even now, while guns are still technically banned from campus, they often show up in campus crime reports. It would be naive to think those incidents won’t increase when more permit holders can legally bring their guns to campus.
It would be naive, but for the fact that experience shows armed citizens are a factor in preventing shotings.
To be absolutely clear: I am not anti-gun.
No, no, certainly not!
I have never touched a firearm, though I’ve long been interested in obtaining a license to own and carry one. I live alone, and I’m often on the road. Having a tool that would allow me an extra measure of protection is attractive. I’ve also considered carrying a gun as matter of liberation — the kind preached by black militants like Malcolm X and Fred Hampton, who advocated for gun ownership as a means of protecting black bodies like mine from all types of threats.
You should so do that.
Harriet Tubman was also armed. Good example...
| Not to mention Martin Luther King, Jr. and Condoleeza Rice's father. But notice which Black exemplars the perfessor chose for their shock value. |
But I’m unsettled by the notion of entire university communities being motivated by fear to take up arms.
It's not fear that motivates them, nor hatred. When you understand that you'll get why they carry.
I also wonder how people will react to black students, staff, and faculty who choose to arm themselves.
Most likely the black faculty and students will be invited to the gun range for socials. It happens.
It’s clear not everyone is so keen on black folks using guns for self defense. I’m mindful of Marissa Alexander, a black woman who fired a warning shot in her own garage to ward off an attack from her abusive ex-husband. That shot – which injured no one – earned her a 20-year jail sentence in Florida, a state that allows people to “stand their ground” when they cannot escape imminent threat.
Not everyone will be armed. Those who do decide to "take up arms" will be forced to consider the notion that someone on the campus is willing and able to return fire. That has to help.
As for the warning shot: the law is clear. You can fire if you are under immediate threat, or if you are under fire. Warning shots are not regarded as a proper response to a physical threat.
| The Marissa Alexander case was very odd, indeed, compounded by mandatory sentencing. But at any rate, she was released to house arrest after only three years in a plea deal, with two more years of semi-house arrest. (Wikipedia has the details here.) Our perfessor has not been keeping up. |
The lesson I took from her case? Black women do not enjoy the same privilege of self defense as others.
Dumb conclusion.
Indeed, incorrect. If you're going to carry you have to know and follow the law. Prosecutors and police are pretty particular about that.
While I remain ambivalent about guns, I fear that gun violence on campus isn’t a matter of what if. It’s a matter of when.
Earlier this semester, I thought that day had come.
I’d stepped out of my office for a moment, and when I returned, a student I’d never seen before was perched in one of my chairs. She was a waif with lavender hair and headphones shaped like cat’s ears looped around her neck.
Must have been a Rethuglican right? It's the lavender hair, gives us away every time...
“Dr. Clark?” she said.
Her eyes struck me immediately. I can’t recall their color,
Lavender?
but I remember the jolt of panic I felt when I noticed that her pupils were huge. Dilated. At 8 in the morning.
“I’ve read about your work, and I wanted to ask you some questions,” she said.
She wanted to talk about “what the black community wants,” and the protests linked to Black Lives Matter.
I felt the familiar heart palpitations I’d had during my days as a newspaper columnist, when readers from God-knows-where would call and offer their critiques sweetly enough, only to devolve into screaming and swearing, threatening to stop me from writing about all that “black shit.”
Colleges today are wall to wall psychopaths. Guns are a potentially effective way of dealing with them, or failing that, putting them away.
Any time a stranger — from any background — seeks to engage me about my positions of black existence, I am on guard and prepared to defend myself.
I invited her to sit down.
She was hard to follow. At one point she asked me about racial inequalities then offered her thoughts before I could answer her question.
I began to worry that this young, erratic woman might become violent,
Why? How was she different than half two-thirds four-fifths almost any other Oberlin student?
and I scanned the room to see what I could grab to defend myself. A picture frame? My computer monitor? Then I felt silly. I was twice her size, but fear of what could happen kept me on edge. As I sat, cornered in my own office, I realized that I’d never been so glad to be unarmed. If I were, I’d have had one hand on my gun.
When she finally left, I felt relief, then a flood of guilt. Had I been carrying a weapon, and had she made too sudden a move, what would have happened? I am still unsure of her motivation for seeking me out, but it seems likely she was simply a confused young woman, under the influence of drugs. If I’d had a gun, I might have overreacted that day, brandishing it out of a heightened sense of fear. I might have caused irreparable harm, even if I never fired a shot.
And that’s what frightens me most.
Well no. What frightens you the most is that you still don't have a grip on your own emotions. Carrying a firearm won't help that. But the proper training to carry, followed by some range time, followed by some quiet discussions with a gruff but kindly former Marine at the range, followed by some introspection, will give you a certain, quiet confidence that will carry you when you don't have a weapon handy, and will teach you on the rare, rare moment that it is necessary to draw a weapon.
| Next time lock the office door when you leave. |
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