Bryan Jones is not anti-gun – he keeps two rifles and a handgun at his country home and is a former member of the National Rifle Association. But he does not want weapons in his workplace, and he is not alone.

The government professor at the University of Texas is one of about 800 academics there who have signed a petition opposing the campus carry law that is set to go into effect in Texas on 1 August 2016.

“There are some places guns don’t belong,” he said. “I think we’ve had enough of this. We’ve been lucky in the sense that we’ve started a little bit of a firestorm because our organisation came at about the same time as a shooting on campus in Oregon.”

Four blocks from Texas’s Republican-dominated capitol, the university’s Austin campus has become the hub of opposition to the bill allowing concealed handguns inside academic buildings that was signed into law by governor Greg Abbott on 13 June.

Future students now face a scenario where it will be permissible to bring a Glock into a University of Texas dorm room but not a plug-in air freshener or a waffle maker, which are deemed potentially dangerous.

Despite the bill’s passage, anti-campus carry efforts were given fresh impetus when the Umpqua community college mass shooting happened in Oregon earlier this month, around the time the University of Texas held public forums about the implementation of the law.

The Gun-Free UT movement, which began two months ago with a small number of concerned professors exchanging emails, has gathered momentum. On Wednesday some of its members consulted lawyers about possible legal challenges to the bill, which could include a class-action lawsuit on the basis of violated first amendment rights.

“We are exploring options currently and have some big Houston law firms interested,” said Ellen Spiro, a radio-TV-film professor and co-chair of Gun-Free UT.

Resisted by Democrats, and police, the law ultimately passed with caveats: private institutions can opt out and public ones can establish “reasonable” rules about where guns can and cannot go, without “generally” prohibiting them. Its failure to clearly define “reasonable” seems to give colleges some discretion, the degree of which is likely to be hotly disputed.

The university’s chancellor, William McRaven – a former US navy admiral who oversaw the raid that killed Osama Bin Laden – already has stated his public opposition to the bill.

“It’s going to be a long fight,” Jones said. “The university doesn’t like the law and fought it, and the question is, how lenient will the areas of gun exclusion be on campus? We’re pushing for a large area of exclusion – classes, offices and bars in particular – and some members of the legislature would rather have it more narrow.”

Students arrive a public forum on the University of Texas campus last month. Photograph: Eric Gay/AP

‘Awful, sad, and dehumanizing’

Earlier this month a group of graduate students and postdoctoral fellows in the history department wrote to Gregory Fenves, the university president, to express their opposition.

“Introducing concealed firearms into classrooms and academic buildings, settings of extraordinarily emotional educational interactions, will make us less safe, despite the best intentions of those hoping to carry them,” the letter said.

“When we teach classes on institutional racism, prejudice, and violence towards non-white bodies in recent US and global history, will our students – especially those who identify as the victims of such forms of discrimination – feel safe discussing such matters in our classrooms when they know that classmates might be armed? It is awful, sad, and dehumanizing, to anticipate the fear that we and our students might then bring to those interactions.”

Daniel Hamermesh, an economics professor emeritus, even said he would give up teaching at the university and instead go to the University of Sydney “out of self-protection”.

Spiro said that she does not “fear for myself so much, in terms of it in my classroom, but I fear for students who have suicidal tendencies having easy access to guns.”

That worry was echoed by a 20-year-old student in Austin, who asked not to be named, who said she suffered from severe depression during her freshman year.

“I don’t believe that having guns on campus or guns in the dorms will make students safer because of how many people I know have mental illness, have depression and have anxiety,” she said.

“Even students without depression or anxiety, the amount of work and pressure that we’re under … is stressful and it’s terrifying and I don’t think that being around guns or having one is safe.”

She recalled one particularly difficult evening caused by medication making her depression worse: “I had nothing to hurt myself with, I couldn’t do anything so I had to just sit there. None of my windows could open.

“My boyfriend was there that night, but still, I remember that night, I was checking the windows to see if they would open. I was glad he was there, basically. I’m not really sure what I would have done if I’d had a gun … it would have been a lot easier to kill myself.”

Eighth campus carry state

Proponents point out that it is already legal to carry a concealed handgun in some outdoor areas of campuses, while the law only applies to permit-holders aged over 21 so most students will not qualify. They argue that permit-holders are trained and responsible and could help stop active shooters. About 850,000 Texans have concealed handgun licenses and the state has reciprocal agreements with most other states, where requirements vary widely.

California banned concealed carry at colleges earlier this month but Texas will be the eighth public post-secondary campus carry state. The practice is prohibited in 19 states and at the discretion of individual institutions in 23, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures.

California banned concealed carry at colleges earlier this month but Texas will be the eighth public post-secondary campus carry state, joining Utah, Mississippi, Oregon, Wisconsin, Colorado, Kansas and, since 2014, Idaho. The practice is prohibited in 19 states and at the discretion of individual institutions in 23, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures.

Florida, Michigan and Ohio are debating permitting it, while Wisconsin lawmakers last week launched a bid to loosen the state’s rules. The recent fashion for campus carry proposals is a consequence of high-profile shootings, increased Republican control of state legislatures, and activist pressure.

As in the aftermath of the Sandy Hook school shooting, a massacre prompted calls for firearms to be more easily accessible on educational sites. On 16 April 2007, a 23-year-old student killed 32 students and teachers at Virginia Tech. In response, Chris Brown, then a political science student at the University of North Texas, formed a group called Students for Concealed Carry on Campus (SCCC).

“As a college student, and a concealed handgun license holder, when I step on to campus, I am left unable to defend myself. My state allows me to carry a handgun in public, but there is some imaginary line drawn around college campuses for silly reasons. And those silly reasons are getting people killed, raped and robbed,” he wrote on SCCC’s website that year.

SCCC describes itself as a non-partisan group with more than 43,000 supporters nationwide, and organises an annual “empty holster protest”.

It lobbies hard for concealed carry and its mission is promoted by Gun Owners of America – an organisation that considers the NRA too soft – and the Leadership Institute, a Washington-area group that trains conservative activists and runs Campus Reform, a news website that “exposes bias and abuse on the nation’s college campuses”.

As the anti-campus carry crowd is intensifying its efforts in Texas, so, too, is the pro-gun lobby, fueled by a very different sense of injustice: that the new bill does not go far enough.

“We’re not happy with the bill in its entirety right now. Particularly because gun-free zones are a part of the law. We think that’s going against what the intention is, to make sure that CHL holders are able to carry wherever, including wherever on campus. We don’t want what happened in Oregon to happen in Texas,” said Antonia Okafor, SCC’s Southwest regional director and a graduate student at the University of Texas at Dallas.

“We did as much as we could in the last legislative session but we do think it’s a failure in the part of gun-free zones and private schools being able to opt out entirely.”

Changing rules at a cost

Despite a recent death at Texas Southern University, federal statistics suggest that on-campus killings are rare in the state: one murder in each of 2013 and 2014 and none in 2012, 2011 or 2010.

In the states that have introduced campus carry, the most glaring effects appear to have been the occasional mishap – an accidental shooting of a colleague in the dental school here, a professor shooting himself in the foot during chemistry class there.

More guns create the potential for confusion and false alarms. Art Acevedo, Austin’s police chief, told a Texas senate committee earlier this year that campus carry places a burden on departments who have to respond to more firearms-related calls. Many are likely to be false alarms, but those can still be time-consuming and frightening.

If someone spots a gun, Texas A&M University advises calling 911 to let the university police department make contact to determine if the holder has a license. A report of someone carrying a rifle on the A&M campus in 2010 prompted a campus-wide emergency shelter alert. The incident lasted two hours but the weapon proved to be a replica.

Idaho’s experience also indicates that changing the rules comes at a cost. Prompted by the law’s passage to revise their security protocols, schools there spent an estimated $3.7m on new staff, training and equipment, the Idaho Statesman reported. Boise State Broncos football fans found themselves having to walk through metal detectors to enter Albertsons stadium.

This comes in the overall context of more armed law enforcement on university campuses nationwide. According to federal statistics, in 1995, 81% of public and 34% of private campuses used armed officers. By 2011-12 the figures had risen to 91% of public and 36% of private campuses.

For Ellen Spiro of Gun-Free UT, the law plays into the hands of pro-gun groups who want to make carrying weapons so routine and pervasive that it is normalised.

“They want to sell more guns, they want everybody to feel like they need to have a gun and they want to get guns into places where they’re not currently allowed, like classrooms and churches,” she said.

“And it’s not OK because there’s a direct correlation between the proliferation of guns and gun violence. It’s a very simple equation; but they have a lot of money and power to promote their aims.”

Also on 13 June, governor Abbott visited a shooting range to fire off some rounds and put his autograph on legislation that from January will allow licensed Texans to openly carry holstered handguns in many places.

When signing the open carry bill, he thanked the NRA for their help in turning the proposals into reality – which was only polite, since some of the body’s lobbyists were in the room with him.

Educational institutions are not the only gun-free zones receiving increased attention from politicians. The Texas attorney general, Ken Paxton, has a website inviting citizens to file complaints about local governments that may have posted “no guns” signs that do not comply with the law. Under pressure from a gun rights group, the city of Houston last month forced the Houston Zoo to remove its “no guns” signs on a technicality.

The climate in the Lone Star State is increasingly friendly towards gun owners, wherever they are.

As for Students for Concealed Carry, Antonia Okafor said that they aim to improve their “ground game” and media profile and hope to stir grassroots support to expand the Texas law in the 2017 legislative session. And SCC spies an opportunity after a fatal shooting at Northern Arizona University on 9 October.

“They have a lot of interest, students who want to get involved there,” Okafor said. “We’ll definitely be helping them out.”