A demonstrator helps to hold a "Come and Take It" banner at a rally for open carry gun laws in Austin, Texas.
(AP Photo/Eric Gay)
Two gun rights groups are planning a mock mass shooting near the University of Texas Austin campus to protest gun-free zones after a spate of deadly attacks that have rattled the U.S.
Come And Take It Texas and DontComply.com on Saturday plan to "take to the streets armed with rifles and pistols on display," followed by a mock mass shooting just feet away from the UT campus, organizers announced on Wednesday.
“We reference gun-free zones as victim zones or target-rich environments,” Murdoch Pizgatti, president of both Come and Take It Texas and the gun rights news site DontComply.com, told BuzzFeed News. “It’s fish in a barrel for someone who wants to do harm.”
The groups plan to meet at noon on the west side of UT Austin’s campus and march down Guadalupe Street openly carrying pistols, rifles, and other legal guns. They’ll then hold a mock mass shooting and hostage crisis to demonstrate the “repercussions of an unarmed area," Pizgatti said.
Crisis actors will play the roles of the general population and hostages, as well “criminals or bad guys who don’t follow the law and concealed license owners who are armed” with fake guns, Pizgatti added.
The “visual performance art,” as Pizgatti describes it, will also include audio of gunshots and other “sounds of a mass shooting,” he said.
The groups originally planned to hold the mock mass shooting on campus. But on Wednesday, UT Austin spokesman J.B. Bird said that the campus is not "open to outside groups for assembly, speech, or other activities."
Violators of the university's policy may face trespassing charges, he added.
With the university as the backdrop, the aim of the event is to demonstrate an ongoing argument in the gun rights debate that gun-free zones will lead to more deaths during a mass shooting event, Pizgatti said. He pointed to the claim that James Holmes singled out a gun-free location at the Aurora theater in Colorado in 2012 before opening fire and killing 12 — a claim that has since been debunked.
“Seconds count when police are minutes away,” he said. “Most of these shootings are over in a matter of seconds or minutes way before law enforcement can respond.”
The event underscores the next battle in Texas’ ongoing debate about how to limit weapons on public university and college campuses, if at all.
Concealed guns are currently allowed on campuses, but not inside buildings. But that will change in August 2016, the 50th anniversary of the UT sniper shooting that killed 14 people.
A new Texas law will also allow public university students and faculty to carry concealed handguns on campus except in certain “gun-free zones” that may be determined by the university.
Julie Gavran, the western director of Campaign to Keep Guns Off Campus and graduate student at UT Dallas, told BuzzFeed News that she was “very shocked” to learn the two groups were planning the mock shooting in light of the recent attack in San Bernardino, California.
“They’ve tried tactics like this before,” she said. “But with the increase in mass shootings and terrorism, we don’t need a reenactment of something that is happening everyday to some extent.”
Gavran pointed to several studies that show conceal-and-carry policies do not reduce violent crime. While there are cases of gun owners thwarting a mass shooting, it is doubtful that a concealed carrier can unholster a gun and quickly subdue an active shooter without being harmed, Garvan added.
Xavier Rotnofsky, UT Austin’s student body president, told BuzzFeed News that the bigger issue for some students is that it’s planned during finals.
“I, and many other students, have a final on Saturday,” he said. “It’ll be distracting that there are grown men playing with fake guns on campus. I suggest they do something better with their Saturday afternoon, like volunteer at an animal shelter or soup kitchen.”
Pizgatti said the organizations are working with the university's dean so the demonstration does not disturb any test taking.
from BuzzFeed - USNews http://ift.tt/1HVDTnV
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