It is the law, suck it up, buttercups.
Three professors duking it out in court for the right to ban guns in their classrooms were told Monday they will be punished if they do, according to the latest legal back-and-forth prompted by Texas’ new campus carry law.
“Faculty members are aware that state law provides that guns can be carried on campus, and that the president has not made a rule excluding them from classrooms,” attorneys representing the University of Texas at Austin and Attorney General Ken Paxton wrote in a legal brief filed Monday. “As a result, any individual professor who attempts to establish such prohibition is subject to discipline.”
The warning was meant as a clear message to UT professors Mia Carter, Jennifer Glass and Lisa Moore, who sued the university and state in federal court last month to temporarily block the implementation of campus carry. The new law, which went into effect just last week, allows licensed gun owners to carry concealed handguns into most buildings on college campuses, where they were previously allowed just in common areas like quads and sidewalks.
The state’s lawyers, in their Monday filing, asked Judge Lee Yeakel to throw out the professors’ lawsuit. The educators fired back in their own brief, calling again for Yeakel to halt the law for one semester so they can hold a public trial on whether campus carry violates their constitutional rights to free speech and equal protection.
The professors’ lawyers say the law and UT’s own campus carry rules are too vague for his clients to know if and how they might be punished if they tried to keep gun owners out of their classrooms.