With Campus Carry legislation coming before the Texas House this week, University of Texas Chancellor Bill McRaven submitted a letter to state representatives describing campus carry as “conduct” that could hurt UT by dissuading new professors from coming in, thereby making the university system less competitive.
According to the Houston Chronicle, McRaven wrote the letter last month to representative Chris Turner (D-Dist. 101) and it was “distributed House-wide” on May 25–one day before Campus Carry is supposed to come up for a vote.
In it, McRaven wrote:
The presence of handguns on Texas campuses, where we would be one of fewer than 10 states to allow this conduct, may well cause faculty to be discouraged from relocating from other states. The intuitive answer is that the presence of concealed weapons will make us less competitive.
According to the National Conference of States Legislatures, Campus Carry is the law of the land in Colorado, Idaho, Mississippi, Oregon, Utah, and Wisconsin. It will be the law of the land in Kansas on July 1, 2017. Reports on how this has diminished the competitiveness of Colorado University, Boise State, Ole Miss, Oregon State, University of Oregon, University of Utah, or the University of Wisconsin, have yet to surface.
What has surfaced are various reports on the fact that college age concealed carry permit holders are law-abiding citizens who do not cause problems on campus. Moreover, reports on Campus Carry in Colorado have shown that the the presence of armed students correlates with zero high profile public gun crimes.
On April 20 Breitbart News reported that Campus Carry has been the law of the land in Colorado since 2003 and there have been no mass shootings and, apart from one incident in which a gun was accidentally discharged by a Colorado University employee, there have been no crimes by permit holders.
No one was harmed in the accidental discharge and the employee was dismissed.
And while there have been no offensive uses of a weapon, The Washington Post explains how Campus Carry can play an important role in the lives of women who need to defend themselves from sexual predators.
The U.S. Census Bureau conducts in-person interviews with several thousand persons annually, for the National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS). In 1992-2002, over 2,000 of the persons interviewed disclosed they had been raped or sexually assaulted. Of them, only 26 volunteered that they used a weapon to resist. In none of those 26 cases was the rape completed; in none of the cases did the victim suffer additional injury after she deployed her weapon.
Note–over 2,000 instances of rape and sexual assault. In 26 of those instances, the rape was stopped. How? With a gun.
Follow AWR Hawkins on Twitter @AWRHawkins. Reach him directly at awrhawkins@breitbart.com.