Matt Valentine teaches writing and photography at the University of Texas at Austin. He has written about gun violence policy for the Atlantic and Salon.

When the founding fathers wrote that the right to bear arms “shall not be infringed,” did they mean guns must be allowed everywhere, even in classrooms and dorm rooms? The University of Virginia Board of Visitors took up the issue of campus carry in 1824, and didn’t have to look far for an originalist perspective—Thomas Jefferson and James Madison were in attendance. The board resolved that “No Student shall, within the precincts of the University … keep or use weapons or arms of any kind, or gunpowder.”

This week, the Texas legislature took a different tack, and voted to allow faculty, staff, visitors and students over age 21 to carry concealed handguns on college campuses in the state, provided they have a license. (In the 2013 legislative session, Texas reduced the training requirement for a concealed handgun license from 10 hours of instruction to just four. License applicants must also demonstrate the ability to hit human-sized, stationary targets at distances of 3 to 15 yards, with 70 percent accuracy.) Gov. Greg Abbott has already indicated that he will sign the campus carry bill into law. There are various caveats, and neither side of the debate feels satisfied with the final version of the bill, but the net result will be more guns in classrooms.


William McRaven, chancellor of the University of Texas System, wrote to state representatives in April, warning them that campus carry could adversely affect faculty recruitment. In a nationally representative poll of college presidents, 95 percent said they oppose measures to allow concealed carry on campus. And yet this legislation was proposed in 10 states this year. (Most of these bills have stalled for now.) Sponsors say that armed faculty and students will make schools safer from all kinds of violence. In a New York Times interview, Nevada Assemblywoman Michele Fiore said that the fear of being shot would deter rapists from assaulting these “young, hot little girls on campus.”

Those who want to arm educators often cite the example of Pearl High School, where in 1997, Assistant Principal Joel Myrick retrieved a handgun from his own truck and confronted a gunman. ( Some accounts forget to mention that Myrick was an Army reservist, and that he intervened as the 16-year-old assailant was leaving the school, following a shooting spree that left two people dead and three others injured.)

In an interview published today in British GQ, actor Vince Vaughn spoke in favor of campus carry. “In all of our schools it is illegal to have guns on campus, so again and again these guys go and shoot up these fucking schools because they know there are no guns there,” Vaughn said. “All these gun shootings that have gone down in America since 1950, only one or maybe two have happened in non-gun-free zones.” Those are common talking points among gun rights activists, but not accurate. An FBI report on active shooter scenarios indicated that they most often occur in places of business, including many that allow guns.

In fact you are less likely to be murdered on a school campus than in the general population. Beginning in 1990, the Clery Act required all colleges that participate in federal student aid programs to report crimes on and around their campuses. It’s illuminating data to swim through, and to compare to national totals. A database query of the CDC’s Fatal Injury Reports reflects 18,536 total homicides in Texas from 2001 to 2013. The Clery data indicates that only five of those were on or near college campuses. (There are currently about 1.5 million students enrolled in institutions of higher education in the state.) If campus carry will make Texas college campuses as safe as the rest of the state, they'll be deadlier than they are now.

At one point, gun rights and gun control advocates saw eye-to-eye on guns in schools. In the immediate aftermath of the Columbine High School shooting of 1999, even the NRA believed in “absolutely gun-free, zero-tolerance, totally safe schools.” In the annual meeting that year, Executive Vice President Wayne LaPierre said that even talking about guns in schools should be prohibited. “We believe America’s schools should be as safe as America’s airports. You can’t talk about, much less take, bombs and guns onto airplanes. Such behavior in our schools should be prosecuted just as certainly as such behavior in our airports is prosecuted.”

Debate on the issue intensified after the Sandy Hook Elementary shooting in 2012. Soon after the tragedy, the National Rifle Association commissioned the School Shield Program. A committee led by Asa Hutchinson (in private life at the time, after his term in Congress but before his election as governor of Arkansas), was tasked with developing strategies to stop active shooter scenarios. Their report recommended arming teachers and loosening laws that prohibit licensed individuals from carrying their weapons onto school campuses.

Within one year of the Newtown shootings, seven states passed new laws to arm staff in primary and secondary schools (joining a few states where it was already allowed). Idaho enacted a law allowing concealed carry on college campuses in 2014, following Utah and Colorado. So far, there have been no new examples of armed teachers or students interceding in a campus shooting, and indeed no mass shootings at colleges in these states for years before or after they authorized campus carry. There have been some negligent discharges by faculty, though—in a college classroom and an elementary school bathroom.

I spoke with Mary Kay Mace, whose daughter Ryanne was one of five students murdered in a mass shooting at Northern Illinois University in 2008. She says she’s heard arguments for campus carry before, and isn’t persuaded. “I think that people overestimate their abilities in an active shooter situation, that they’re going to be able to stop the shooting. I don’t think that’s true. I think it’s going to cause more casualties because you’ve got people shooting as people are running, and when the cops show up on the scene they’re not going to know the good guys from the bad guys,” Mace says. “I think that people who say that students should have been armed, first of all, they’re blaming the victims.”

Victim-blaming was the explicit message of an open letter published last month on TeaParty.org (as an exclusive, featured piece), in which firearms instructor Phil Graf addresses the parents of Sandy Hook Elementary. “ You are partly, perhaps largely, responsible for your own children’s and their teachers’ deaths,” Graf writes. “Your courageous-but-impotent teachers at Sandy Hook Elementary are dead because you, the Sandy Hook parents and town officials denied them the effective means to resist evil—and because you denied them weapons, your children also lay dead or severely wounded.”

I asked Abbey Clements, a Sandy Hook Elementary School teacher who survived the shooting, whether she felt any regret that the Newtown community hadn’t provided a gun for her second grade classroom.

“No. It’s an absurd concept,” Clements said. “I’ve been in education for 23 years and I’ve never heard a colleague of mine ask to be armed or ask to be trained with a firearm. This is not a teacher’s responsibility.”

Of course Graf’s remarks are calibrated to invoke maximum outrage—he was trolling—but in substance they aren’t much different from the many speculative Op-Ed articles published after every shooting tragedy, asserting that, if only the victims had been armed, they would still be alive.

Clements described the chaos of that day, beginning with the sound of gunfire, coming not only from somewhere in the building but also over the school’s intercom system—staff had turned it on at the outset of the attack, to alert everyone on campus. “Which actually saved many people, because everybody was aware of what was happening,” Clements said. “But you had no idea where that sound was coming from.” She said that turning left or right in the hallways that day was a life-and-death choice. In those desperate minutes, instinct overtook her. In addition to sheltering her own students, she pulled other children from the hallway into her classroom. She was scared, of course. “Ms. Clements, you’re shaking,” one of her students told her.

A teacher firing a gun at a perceived threat under those stresses “could cause worse mayhem,” Clements said. And while acknowledging that active shooter drills are now a part of life for many teachers and students, she said nothing can fully prepare you for that moment.

“I think this whole idea of arming teachers is just another way for the gun industry to promote their message of guns everywhere,” Clements said. “Teaching is the opposite of that. You’re supposed to discuss conflict. Problem-solve with words. Having guns everywhere is just the antithesis of that.”

Clements has two children of her own. A daughter who just completed her first year of college at Georgetown, and a younger son. She says she would not want her kids to attend a university where guns are allowed, except in the hands of trained guards or campus police. Texas Gov. Abbott also has a teen daughter, who is about to start college at the gun-free University of Southern California.