Texas-Campus Guns

Matthew Short, public relations director with Come and Take It Texas and DontComply.com, is shown at the Capitol in Austin, Texas, in January. The gun-rights groups that planned to stage a mock shooting at the University of Texas are moving their event off-campus after getting a warning from the school.

(Jay Janner, Austin American-Statesman file photo via AP)

Members of two groups supporting open carry of guns will stage a mock "mass shooting" this weekend near the University of Texas campus in Austin, saying the event is meant as a show of support for gun rights.

Demonstrators originally planned to hold the rally on the college campus, but school officials warned they could be arrested for criminal trespass, the Austin American-Statesman reports. A school spokesman tells the Houston Chronicle that only the university, faculty, staff or student groups can hold activities on campus.

Organizers have moved the rally to a street adjacent to the campus, according to the Associated Press.

"We will move forward with the event on the adjacent public land using UT as the backdrop," Murdoch Pizgatti, a founder of the gun rights groups Come and Take It Texas and DontComply.com, tells the American-Statesman.

The Austin campus was the site of a mass shooting in 1966, when Charles Whitman killed 16 people while firing from the top of a clock tower.

Saturday's rally will include people holding cardboard cutouts of weapons and fake blood. The performance is intended as a show against "gun-free zones".

"It's basically going to be a hostage situation where people are shot and then the one person with a concealed handgun will come in and save the situation and reduce the body count," Pizgatti tells the Chronicle. "It's pretty much going to be portraying the incidents in gun free zones and why they happen. The bad guys don't obey gun free zone signs and good people do."

Jason Orsek, who helping organize the event, says the group has printed T-shirts to resemble those worn by a campus anti-gun group, Gun-Free UT, and the "victims" will be wearing the shirts.

"We were going to show the hypocrisy of how gun-free zones don't work," he tells the Chronicle.

Gun-Free UT supporter Christina Adams tells the Los Angeles Times she's upset by the timing of the event, which is during finals week and also just days before the anniversary of the mass shooting in Newtown, Conn., in which 20 elementary students and six teachers were killed.

"It's just insane, crazy they even want to stage this," Adams tells the Times. "What kind of people are these? No conscience? They're not students. They're not faculty. They're just adults who love their guns."