In their manifesto, University of Texas professors frame campus carry as a return to colonialism.
"THE LAW, CLASSROOM CARRY, SETTLER COLONIALISM, AND THE MEANINGS OF TRUST AND COMMUNITY Jorge Canizares-Esguerra and Patrick Timmons "
http://www.scribd.com/doc/289364219/The ... -Manifesto
Those battling against classroom carry have largely misidentified the very nature of this struggle. This has to be a large, raucous, political, cultural, and legal movement to ascertain and defend very different meanings of community than those championed by licensed carriers. As professors, we don’t see classroom carry to be about our own personal security. We will most likely never be shot in our offices or classrooms, even if we were to piss off some white male students with sacrilegious ideas about race, empire, evolution, or god. This is a struggle over the meaning of education, the classroom, and open society. This is a struggle over the meaning of trust and community.
The great debate (at least ours) has been centered on proving that guns do not make us safer from mass shooters on campus. That guns do nothing to lower crime rates. That guns instead increase the number of accidents, suicides, sexual assaults, and deaths. That licensed carriers are not the benign actors that the statistics on crime seem misleadingly to suggest. Ever since the massacre of Virginia Tech this country has been committed to the idea that to fight mass shooters (themselves the product of the pathologies of gun culture), we need more guns in dorms, in classrooms, in university offices. It has become a sweeping wave that is now crushingly moving into K12. To fight crime in schools, to discipline the diseases of race and poverty, we need to deputize teachers as armed marshals.
We are witnessing the great ideological return of settler colonialism. Well, it never went away. The vigilante, the deputized marshal, the good guy lying in wait to shoot the bad one is at the very core of how this country got to be made from coast to coast, from the sixteenth-century to the closing of the American frontier. And beyond. We have been told that what made America exceptional is dying, that kids are no longer able to secure better lives than those their parents enjoyed. No. What has made America really peculiar throughout has been the fiction of the triumph of the self over community. How to secure myself from physical threats? Get a gun and fictionally shoot your way into the safety of your own den. How to protect myself from the frying pathologies of power, poverty, and racism? Deputize yourself to discipline those who stubbornly resist. America has all along been about the sheer display of white male power (with guns): over Indians, over slaves, over females, over Mexicans, over Asians, over African Americans, and over Arabs, now The return of the vigilante movement is a giant, collective white push back against the Civil Rights Movement and against the unintended consequences of globalization, migration, and demography.
It is a pic of a woman holding a sign saying:
