On the first day of the fall semester at the University of Texas at Austin, the West Mall — a large, statue-lined pathway that serves as the campus’s designated rally and protest space — is filled with booths of students promoting campus clubs of all kinds. In a stroll from the edge of campus at West 22nd and Guadalupe streets, all the way up to where the West Mall ends at the steps to the looming clock tower, you could theoretically sign up for a 4,000-mile bike race to Alaska, join a spirit group, and find a church community in less than 10 minutes. But this year, at the very end of the line of booths, Rosie Zander, a 20-year-old history junior at UT, stood atop one of the many planters that dot the West Mall, swinging a giant dildo over her head.

She and a team of organizers and student volunteers had spent the week before school started handing out 5,000 dildos in varying sizes and shapes (some with balls, some without) to UT students, in hopes that they would zip-tie them to their backpacks and walk onto campus openly brandishing veiny, phallic dildos to prove a point about gun control. If it seems absurd and ridiculous, that’s because it’s supposed to be. The slogan of "Cocks Not Glocks" — the gun protest that had Zander wielding a giant dildo and has drawn international attention to UT Austin — is "fighting absurdity with absurdity."

As of Aug. 1, 2016, students at UT (and every other public university in Texas) with concealed handgun licenses can legally carry firearms on campus. Zander was swinging the 10-pound dildo over her head in protest of a gun law that she (and the university president, and a number of UT faculty members, not to mention the rest of the Cocks Not Glocks protesters) feels makes her campus unsafe.

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Jessica Jin, a 25-year-old UT alumna with a degree in violin performance, came up with the idea for the protest and coined the phrase last October, after she realized a Texas penal code (and UT campus policy) bans students from displaying "obscene" imagery or items on campus. The penal code explicitly lists dildos as the sort of item that qualifies as too "obscene" to carry openly on a Texas street. "I didn’t even think it would be a real protest," she told me over the phone a couple of weeks before classes started. "I thought it was just a sarcastic suggestion." But on Aug. 24, the first day of class at UT Austin witnessed the biggest gun protest (5,000 swinging dildos strong) the state of Texas has ever seen.

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Texas Governor Greg Abbott signed the campus carry bill, Senate Bill 11, into law June 1, 2015. Lobbied for by guns rights groups like Open Carry Texas, the law gives students with concealed handgun licenses in Texas at public colleges the right to carry their firearms to school — or in other words, students with the proper paperwork can bring guns (so long as they are hidden in a backpack, a purse, or under clothing) into class. While openly carrying long guns (not handguns) is legal in the state of Texas, it’s still illegal to openly carry a firearm on Texas campuses.

At least three UT professors, including one college dean, have left UT, citing campus carry as the reason.

Campus carry allows each university a bit of wiggle room to tailor the way the law is enacted on their campus. University of Texas President Gregory Fenves has been clear about his opposition to campus carry, and while he legally couldn’t opt his university out of abiding by it, UT’s policies regarding campus carry, announced in February, are some of the tightest of any school in the state. "I do not believe handguns belong on a university campus, so this decision has been the greatest challenge of my presidency to date," he wrote in a letter that accompanied the policy list. Various spaces around UT, including campus dorms and faculty offices, are designated as "gun-free" zones. But professors aren’t allowed to designate their classrooms as gun-free, and since the bill became law, at least three UT professors, including one college dean, have left UT, citing campus carry as the reason. Numbers on how many students may have left UT or decided to go to another school aren’t available.

Nine other states also have campus carry laws. Aside from Texas, students who go to public schools in Arkansas, Colorado, Idaho, Kansas, Mississippi, Oregon, Utah, Tennessee, and Wisconsin can carry concealed handguns around their campuses.

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Ana Lopez, a 19-year-old pre-med sophomore and co-founder of Students Against Campus Carry, was one of a few student organizers chosen by Jin to handle all the logistics of pulling off a protest the size of Cocks Not Glocks. The Facebook event page that Jin made as a joke last October had more than 10,000 people marked as "attending," and since Jin moved to San Francisco for work after graduating, she needed people on the ground in Austin making sure UT students were properly armed (with dildos) for class.

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To throw a dildo-themed protest at a campus of 50,000, you need a load of dildos. Since last fall, sex toy companies like Doc Johnson and Hustler Hollywood have been donating thousands of dildos to the cause by sending them directly to Jin’s house and to Dreamers, an adult shop in North Austin. Shannon Molina, a Dreamers employee, said she found out about the protest early on and immediately reached out to Jin, seeing an opportunity to both protest guns on campus and get more dildos out into the world. "It’s the perfect opportunity for us to help destigmatize sexuality," Molina said.

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Molina and the Cocks Not Glocks team set up a dildo handout hub at Spider House, a coffee shop and bar a few blocks north of campus, two days before classes started for students to come pick up free dildos as long as they could show student ID. And at 5 p.m. Tuesday, the evening before classes started, the group held a dildo rally on the West Mall. Jin brought thousands of zip-ties so students could attach their fake penises to their backpacks on the spot. Dozens of signs, handmade by Jin and her friends who were "up ’til 3" the night before making them, were also available, with catchy slogans like "Dicks out for Bevo" (the school mascot) and "Longhorny." Lopez and Jin yelled into a small microphone and volunteers threw translucent blue dildos into a throng of students with their hands up. A couple of boys juggled dildos like tennis balls and chanted "cocks not glocks" while they did it.

In the presence of a gun, a lot of people are going to censor themselves.

One of the main reasons Jin and her team of Cocks Not Glocks organizers give for wanting to keep concealed handguns off campus is that guns effectively force censorship on the cozy, safe space of academia — an environment well-suited for trying out ideas and airing them out with peers. Lopez said she wouldn’t feel safe freely expressing herself in a class where she knew someone was carrying. "This law really does chill freedom of expression," she said. "I’ve been in classes that talk about slavery, sexual assault, and sexual identity, and for that kind of meaningful discussion to happen in the presence of guns ... I feel like that’s just not going to happen. In the presence of a gun, a lot of people are going to censor themselves, and that’s just not fair."

But their grievances don’t stop at issues of free expression. Kailey Moore, a 21-year-old English and theater senior and Cocks Not Glocks organizer, says she felt compelled to join the protest is because she’s known three people to kill themselves with a firearm since she graduated from high school. "I think those kids that I knew who aren’t alive anymore, I think that their stories are really what influenced me to just be more against guns," she said. And a few years ago, as a freshman, Moore battled with depression herself and said that knowing a gun might be in anyone’s backpack on campus would’ve been dangerous for her. "Freshman year, when I first came to UT, I was very depressed and I had to be on antidepressants for a while," she said. "I feel like this law does not take mental illness into consideration at all. I think that it’s way too easy to just pick up a gun and shoot yourself."

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Jin also explained that gun violence is a women’s issue and disproportionately affects women. On the first day of school, in between yelling things like "As long as you’re packing heat, we’re packing meat" to passersby on the West Mall, Zander stepped aside and pointed out that all of the organizers of Cocks Not Glocks are women. "The movement is actually led by women, it’s all women," Zander said. "But the open carry movement is all led by men."

And it seemed in April, the open carry activists might get more ammunition for their cause. Eighteen-year-old dance freshman Haruka Weiser’s body was found in a creek bed on the east end of the UT campus, not far from the theater and dance building. As the police reports state, she was abducted on campus by a non-student who was wandering among the buildings, sexually assaulted, strangled, and then left on campus not far from where she disappeared. Guns rights activists were quick to use the tragedy as a platform — girls like Weiser might be safer, they suggested, if they had guns on campus to keep them safe.

Moore walks the same path where Weiser was killed almost every day on campus — and still, she said a gun in her backpack isn’t what’s going to make her feel safe.

Moore remembers the week of Weiser’s death well. She remembers walking into the theater and dance building, a few yards from the creek where Weiser was taken and later found, and hearing silence and sniffling where there was once music. She remembers the media camping outside the building, trying to get a touching quote from a student who might have some new detail about Weiser’s life. Moore walks the same path where Weiser was killed on campus almost every day — and still, she said a gun in her backpack isn’t what’s going to make her feel safe.

Shortly after the murder, a private Facebook group called Walk Together UT cropped up and quickly drew a membership of more than 6,000. The purpose of the group is to provide a space for female-identifying UT students to find other female-identifying UT students who can safely walk with them around and near campus. Jin and the rest of Cocks Not Glocks have always discouraged other gun-free advocates from using Weiser’s death as a political platform, but in the privacy of the Facebook group, Jin posted to ask the women what would make them feel safer on campus. "The consensus that I heard is that no, guns are not the way to make women feel safe," Jin said. "It’s an incredibly male-dominated narrative, and it’s highly offensive that the people who have made these laws largely have not lived the experience of feeling the real, legitimate fear of what it’s like to be a woman surviving day to day."

But the Cocks Not Glocks organizers do not speak for every woman at UT. Emily Hickey, a 20-year-old government and journalism junior, isn’t old enough to have her concealed carry license (Texas law says 21 and up), but said she "can’t wait" to get it and looks forward to carrying on campus. "A gun is an equalizer, that’s what I believe," she said. Hickey’s opinion is shared by guns-rights advocates who argue that women carrying handguns on college campuses might prevent sexual assault.

"I think anyone that says guns don’t give us an equal footing against our male counterparts is just ignorant," Hickey added. Then she turned to her friend, who was wearing an American-flag tank top, and said she’d asked the police officers who were standing off to the side of the protesters about why the dildos were allowed on campus that day. "They wouldn’t give me a straight answer," she said. "All they said was, ’Talk to the Travis County district attorney, he said it’s OK.’"

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Gun violence has come to UT before. The last time an active shooter was on the UT campus was in September 2010 , when a mathematics sophomore named Colton Tooley pulled a loaded AK-47 out of his backpack, fired 11 rounds at the street and buildings at one of the busiest intersections on campus, and then ran into the sixth floor of UT’s Perry-Castañeda Library (a quiet study area that’s usually silent) and fired a 12th round, killing himself. No one else was injured.

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And the most infamous incident occurred Aug. 1, 1966 when Charles Whitman shot and killed 14 people from a hidden perch in the university clock tower in the deadliest mass shooting on a U.S. college campus until Virginia Tech in 2007. It would have been even deadlier, some guns rights advocates say, if there hadn’t been students with guns of their own on the ground, shooting back at Whitman. Exactly 50 years after Whitman’s shooting spree, on Aug. 1, 2016, campus carry went into effect in Texas. For most campuses in the state, the date probably feels arbitrary. But for those at UT, where the clock tower’s bells serve as an hourly reminder that it exists, and one time a guy climbed up its steps and shot students like them, some said the date felt like a special kind of "cruel irony" (state lawmaker Allen Fletcher has said the coinciding dates "never even crossed somebody’s mind").

’I don’t mind being shot accidentally as long as the guy can take out the shooter.’

It’s because of potential active shooter situations like Whitman that C.J. Grisham, the 42-year-old president of Open Carry Texas (a guns rights group), supports campus carry. He knows that not every single 21- or 22-year-old college student with a concealed handgun license is necessarily going to be the sharpest shooter in the South and possess the incredible ability to successfully disarm an active shooter without causing harm to anyone else. (In a December 2015 New York Times op-ed , the founder of UT Students Against Guns on Campus wrote about how easy it was for him to get a license despite having "almost zero training.") But Grisham thinks that’s OK. "I don’t mind being shot accidentally as long as the guy can take out the shooter," Grisham said. "The alternative is just being slaughtered until the police show up."

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Grisham also dismisses the idea that colleges are environments that fuel suicide rates. "That’s just more ignorance," he said. "What they’re saying is that students can’t control their emotions, but you have to be 21 to have a license and college is not as stressful as real life."

Grisham was on campus Wednesday with a couple of other supporters of Open Carry Texas as a counter-protest to Cocks Not Glocks, but he isn’t a UT student. He goes to Texas A&M, a longtime rival of UT. He decided to go to A&M after he saw the way UT implemented the campus carry law — he thinks the policies in place are too limiting. "A&M’s policy was more about complying with the law than trying to find loopholes in it, which is actually why I’m going to A&M," he said. "I’ve always been a Longhorn, I’ve always wanted to be a Longhorn, but after watching for the last 18 months the behavior of UT professors, I just don’t trust them with a quality education anymore. I got rid of all my UT stuff except for the nice watch my aunt gave me, and enrolled in A&M."

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Like Grisham, Elyse Avina, a 22-year-old rhetoric and writing senior, also always wanted to go to UT, and transferred in as a sophomore after taking classes at a community college. This fall is her last semester at UT before graduating, and while she isn’t strapping a dildo to her backpack for class (she’s worried about how it might look for potential future employers), she helps out with Cocks Not Glocks by writing press releases and helping organize rallies. She said she never could have anticipated spending her last semester in college on a campus where guns can be carried.

"It’s definitely changed the way I think about the school," Avina said. "I used to look at the tower with such pride, and I’ve probably been doing that since I was 5. It’s kind of jarring to have these two things — like, guns on campus at one of the most liberal colleges in the state. It just doesn’t seem like it fits."

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On Wednesday afternoon, after the main Cocks Not Glocks rally on the West Mall ended, and the congregation of dildo-carrying students dispersed around campus, and the last of the penis cupcakes melted under the hot Texas sun, the fake penises essentially disappeared from campus. They may have been 5,000 or so strong, but on a campus the size of UT, that’s a tiny, penis-shaped drop in the bucket.

Some might say the lack of visible dildos means Cocks Not Glocks, for all the uproar, wasn’t a success. But that would be wrong. From a sarcastic joke on Facebook, Jin and her crew of women organizers caused such a commotion on campus that news crews from all over the world (as far away as the Netherlands) came to UT to see a bunch of dildos hanging from backpacks. The dildos were never going to get the campus carry law repealed, anyway. The protest was always just a way for students to show the Texas lawmakers, who meet down the street from the UT campus, that they don’t want guns on their campus.

"This is an academic institution," as Moore put it. "It’s not the Wild West."

Lead photo by Marshall Tidrick.

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