Professor, Get Your Gun

Dealing With Threatening Students Used to Be Hard. In Today's Era of Gun Rights, It's Frightening

Now that Texas’ “campus carry” law, that bit of cowboy legislation that empowers everyone over 21 with a concealed handgun license to carry a pistol into a public university classroom is in effect, those of us who teach are watching with dark fascination. What could possibly go wrong?

I don’t become easily flustered at the prospect of violence. I grew up in Black Los Angeles in the ‘body count’ ’70s, and taught in an inner city high school for five years during the rock cocaine epidemic. I became desensitized to prison-like …