THE TEXAS STATE Senate has approved a measure allowing concealed handgun license holders to carry weapons into public college buildings and classrooms, moving forward on a measure that had stalled until supporters tacked it on to a universities spending bill.
Republican senator Jeff Wentworth had been unable to muster the votes he needed under Senate rules to pass the issue on its own, after the measure met stiff resistance from higher education officials, notably from within the University of Texas system.
The measure seemed all but assured easy passage when the legislative session began in January. The Senate had passed a similar bill in 2009 and about 90 lawmakers in the 150-member House had signed on in support this year.
But the Bill stalled on its first three votes in the Senate and required some manoeuvring by Wentworth to get it through.
Supporters hope yesterday’s vote will help shove the measure past a roadblock in the House, where a similar bill has been stuck without a vote in that chamber with just a few weeks left in the legislative session.
“Campus carry has more momentum than a runaway freight train,” said W. Scott Lewis of Students for Concealed Carry, a nationwide group backing the measure.
The Senate’s 12 Democrats had mostly worked as a block to stop the measure, but were powerless to stop it on Monday when all it took was a simple majority in the 31-member chamber to get it added to the spending bill as an amendment.
Even with large numbers in support, the campus guns measure quickly boiled into one of most controversial issues of the session.
Supporters call it a critical self-defense measure and guns rights issue. University of Texas chancellor Francisco Cigarroa wrote to lawmakers and Governor Rick Perry outlining worries from university officials that guns on campus will lead to more campus crime and suicides.
Hearings on the measure were dominated by powerful testimony from supporters who had been raped or assaulted on college campuses, and several people who had survived the 2007 mass shooting at Virginia Tech University when a gunman killed 32 people.
Democratic senator Judith Zaffirini, who was a student at the University of Texas in 1966 when sniper Charles Whitman killed 12 people and wounded dozens of others, vigorously argued against the guns measure.
She predicted mass chaos if police respond to a call and find several people with guns drawn. ”I can’t imagine the horrors if this passes,” she said.
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