Campus News

UH Faculty Senate reaches resolution in opposition to campus carry

The University of Houston’s Faculty Senate reached a resolution in opposition to campus carry.

Senate Bill 11 was signed into law by Gov. Greg Abbott June 2015 and is expected to enact in all four year public universities beginning Aug. 2016.

The law gives public universities the privilege to regulate where concealed handguns may be prohibited, while not infringing upon an individual’s right to own and have a licensed concealed handgun. However, UH Faculty Senate deem “weapons designed to end human life have no place in the academic life of the University, except when carried by dully-authorized law officers.”

Their resolution hits many points of objection including physical and financial standpoints.

“The Texas State Legislature through Senate Bill 11 in 2015 has mandated that concealed handguns on University campuses to be carried by persons who may have only a minimal level of training.” UH faculty said. “The Texas State Legislature made no financial provisions for the implementation of Senate Bill 11.”

The faculty constantly noted the students’ and professors’ safety as a priority and believed the inclusion of weapons on campus through campus carry will disturb the University’s educational motives.

“The Faculty of the University of Houston asserts that it cannot carry out its core mission of excellence in education, research and public service where guns are present in educational spaces.” UH faculty said.

The faculty urge the Regents and Chancellor to petition the Texas State Legislature “to restore the protected academic space envisioned by the founders of the United States of America.”

The resolution was signed by UH Faculty Senate’s President Wynne Chin and will be presented to President and Chancellor Renu Khator.

Khator has yet to make a decision about campus carry as data and opinions by the UH community is being collected.

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61 Comments

  • “to restore the protected academic space envisioned by the founders of the United States of America.”

    Document this fantasy please.

    • Not a fantasy. If you knew your actual early 19th century American history as some of us do who’ve studied it academically, you’d know this document, which is often quoted. Note who two of the members of U. VA Board are. This is the original source. No it’s not a bumper-sticker. It’s an actual historical document recording an actual historic policy at one of the great Universities at the time. The recital in question begins, “No Student shall, within the precincts of the University…”
      http://rotunda.upress.virginia.edu/founders/default.xqy?keys=FOEA-print-04-02-02-4598

      • You show your ivory tower fantasy view of the world and not the reality that surrounds you. Your time to protest and make a difference was during the legislative session.

        • You are definitely talking about yourself Opa. No one from my ENTIRE extended family has ever needed a gun to protect themselves EVER. Never.

    • Opa … don’t be rattled by the lunacy here that objects to you. Besides, professors are just people who have failed in real life, and run back to safe-space of the university for protection from the real World.
      And they will be joined in the fall by newly minted May graduates with worthless degrees that can never find a place in an obsessively failing ObamaCare influenced market.

      • The “safe space” you hold in such contempt, is the place that trains future scientists, engineers, poets, historians, mathematicians and other experts in a a universe of ideas and concepts shaping our world. Your anti-intellectual garbage would have us all living in caves lit only by fire and hunting cows in rocks.

        • Live in caves? GFUH, your projecting again.

          That’s the goal of the Global Warming Alarmists like our great and precious fuhrer* Barack Hussein Obama. A fuhrer who wants to skyrocket electricity costs with his policies, which will have us burning wood again to keep warm. But you know full well that the SocDem Inner Party elites will have all the comforts of warmth, the best food. While you GFUH, a self-proclaimed elite, will never be allowed in the inner circles of the Most High SocDems. You are just another Winston Smith, a petty Outer Party member, who will never amount to nothing. And just like today’s SocDem Common Core, in Smith’s World (as well as yours) 2+2=5.

          And I’m chuckling at your definition of Safe-Space. There is no “safe space” on our campus … it’s an illusion of the SocDem mind. The only person that I can see with a security detail is The Chancellor, and it’s second rate at best. And unless she has a Safe-Room, she is ultimately vulnerable. But if she does have a safe-room, rest assure my SocDem friend; it is a room of which you, will never see its four walls nor be allowed inside.

          *- means leader (not Adolf Hitler)

  • Evidently, the UH Faculty Senate believes that the only ones authorized to carry weapons in educational areas … are “dully-authorized law officers” … and ON-CAMPUS SHOOTERS.

      • David … you have no idea of the presentable realities that can affect our campus. You’re more likely to be robbed going to a convenience store, than having one hair on your small head hurt by a CHL holder.
        I gather that you haven’t been under fire, or you wouldn’t have gone all out showing your gullible card with your five word elementary response.
        You know if something does happen on our campus, under the UHFS’s and your plan; who knows how many students and faculty a well-prepared and fanatical Islamic Terrorist group can take out before a UH Cop even steps foot in the building.
        So go ahead and rebury your head in the sand thinking that a gun free campus will be your personal safe-space. As for me … I will be shooting back.

        • There is no evidence of an armed student stopping a live shooting event. To the contrary, all mass shootings on college campuses since 1966 were by secretly armed students of the campus they attended as students. They were not outsiders. They were all — except in one case, in possession of legal guns, who each slaughtered their peers and professors. In one case, the assailant was a licenced CHL permit holder, and in another, the CHL holder stayed away. Just as now, there was then no way to determine in advance whether a person with a legal gun or CHL permit would not do harm. Just having a CHL permit is no guarantee said permit holder will not commit murder. You could be that next psycho, for all we know. Moreover, your grossly inflated sense of heroism is not a state of mind based on reality.Please seek professional help. Paranoia is not liberty.

          • Well GFUH … in Texas it is hard for legally armed students to protect themselves when they are not allowed to carry on campus yet. The last time I checked CO, ID, and UT already have campus carry and I don’t see any daily Wild West shootouts happening there.

            You are trying to equate CHL students with the same role as Campus Police … and I don’t see it that way. CHL holders will protect themselves, and those around them when threatened. They won’t go out like Rambo and seek out shooters.

            If there is anyone paranoid in this conversation, it is you GFUH. I’m not the one who condemns the legal with your left field delusional comments. In fact, you are more likely to get shot at any nearby McDonald’s than by a CHL holder on campus.

            • You’re presumption and disjointed allegiance to the notion that CHL holders come with halos is just bizarre. But there are many cases reported, later, of mishaps by CHL holders, many involving accidents, etc. CHL holders are no more “law-abiding” than are car drivers. There is no empirical evidence anywhere that supports that — despite whatever John Lott’s widely discredited CPRC and his fabricated data says.Everyone knows who he works for and why, and how tired and worn out the SCC and LI talking points are. In many cases the status of the gun used by an assailant is not in police reports and so that data is not captured. Moreover, the lack of prosecution by those falsifying info on gun licence apps (Dylan Roof, for example,) is not a reflection of a low conviction rate so much as it is a discretionary choice by prosecutors. Rather than be combative, you should be trying to work toward improving closing loopholes. Being antagonistic does not help your stance one little bit. It gives you the appearance of an intractable moron, steeped in propaganda.

              • All I see is the fact … that more people are at least have a better chance at protecting themselves, that those who don’t have CHL’s.

                • You have not established any “facts” that have been quantified or documented anywhere. If schools actually believed that an armed student body could do a better job of crime prevention on college campuses than their trained, professional police forces, surely they would have saved themselves millions of dollars over the decades by replacing one with the other. That has NEVER happened. Or do you think not allowing armed students to walk about freely is just one, big nasty liberal conspiracy all these years?

    • Meanwhile, the witless conservatives of this nation champion a new fascist Führer for the next president of our country who calls for the branding and banning of an entire population of people. Reminds me of someone else in WWII.

      • Organite … did Santa Claus not bring you that Hillary Benghazi Action Figure Set that you asked the Jolly One for Christmas.

        And O … I’ll take my fascist fuhrer … with a Capitalism bent.

        • No, but I did get the Darling Donald Dolly complete with removable toupee and swast;ka armband with a pull-cord that makes him randomly say one of eight fantastically racist quotes.

          And I knew you were a fascist at heart. You may want to work on your German, though. I can’t imagine
          Der Führer will be all too happy when you get his title wrong.

          • I was never gut with the German extended Latin alphabet mein freund.

            Organite … I got a complete set of Hillary Clinton wigs and three pounds of wrinkle eraser … which I donated to a local women’s shelter.

            I also got a 1st Edition “Rules for Radicals” by Socialist author Saul Alinsky, with a written dedication by Alinsky to Hillary Clinton. Clinton, Obama, and Sanders are all promoters of Alinsky’s Socialist Theory.
            I’ll sell you the book for $1595.00 … since it is considered a Socialist Democrat Bible.

  • One item that has not been discussed is the possible reaction of the Legislature to universities that overreach on their prohibitions of non-firearm areas. UT has 20 or so buildings in which firearms will not be welcomed, and arguably those gun-banned areas do not give concealed carriers adequate opportunity to protect themselves when in a classroom or on the way to a classroom; should an incident occur. The law is not going away, and chances are that concealed carry will be improved on in a Special Session in 2016 or in 2017, mostly to give CHL holders more freedom to carry in the proposed banned areas on campus.

    Even though less than 1% of UT students are CHL carriers (not sure of UH numbers), I believe only Conservative CHL holders should be allowed to carry on campus. Why? Has anyone ever heard of a GOP or Conservative shooter? No.

    Even though the SocDem media tries to link each and every mass killing with a Republican or Conservative, in reality each and every shooter that has mass-killed has been a SocDem loon. Even the San Bernardino male shooter was a SocDem. Of course, the SocDem media does not stress the political ideology they brown-nose, but people with common sense know. That’s why you have Trump and Cruz heading up the GOP PrezRace; while Clinton is nose-diving, despite the best efforts of the SocDem media to hurt the Trump and Cruz campaigns, and prop up the train wreck in the Hillary camp.

    ** – On another note, I hope you have received your 1095-B, Health Coverage IRS form, because it’s gonna be fun to see the frustration of SocDems who have to pay fines for not having ObamaCare policies. 1095-B is a consequence to voting for our beloved Socialist fuhrer, and I will take schadenfreude in not feeling your pain when you can’t buy that computer or X-Box you were planning on purchasing with your 2015 return because of your fine.

    • Yes, because a guy yelling, “no more baby parts,” before shooting up a Planned Parenthood, and a fundamentalist Islamic terrorist in California just screams left-wing terrorism.
      The tin foil is strong in this one.

      • Organite!! …. I hoped that you listened to Perry Como’s song “There’s no Place Like a Safe-Space for the Holidays”

        In short to left-wing terrorism … Yes. For every effort to find a sane right-wing terrorist, none can be found.

        I guess you tacitly approve of my suggestion that ONLY Conservative CHL holders should be allowed to carry concealed weapons on campus.

        • Hmm all of them seem perfectly sane to the prosecution.
          I don’t know how you can twist these obvious fundamentalist motivated right-wing terrorist attacks into something that they’re clearly not. What a fabulous spectacle of a world you must live in. If someone hands you a steaming pile of dung, you must believe it’s a diamond. There’s no other way to explain your lot’s infatuation with buffoons and nuts like Trump and Cruz.

          And requiring CHL holders to check the “I believe in ludicrous right-wing ideology” box before they can carry a firearm defies the spirit of the law you so blindly purport.

          By the way, how do you propose to go on now knowing that any of the muslim folk your kind so fervently fear are covered under campus carry as well? What a stressful existence. If you have a stroke I’ll be sure to send flowers.

          • David … until you can formulate a strong multi-paragraph defense of your borrowed thoughts from Leftist Profs and misguided elementary people who you hang around with.

            Go back to playing Cowboys and Indians.

            You make it so easy for me … one who does not cower to being called names or being fitted … for a tin foil hat.

        • Hmm all of them seem perfectly sane to the prosecution.
          I don’t know how you can twist these obvious fundamentalist motivated right-wing terrorist attacks into something that they’re clearly not. What a fabulous spectacle of a world you must live in. If someone hands you a steaming pile of dung, you must believe it’s a diamond. There’s no other way to explain your lot’s infatuation with buffoons and nuts like Trump and Cruz.

          And requiring CHL holders to check the “I believe in ludicrous right-wing ideology” box before they can carry a firearm defies the spirit of the law you so blindly purport.

          By the way, how do you propose to go on now knowing that any of the muslim folk your kind so fervently fear are covered under campus carry as well? What a stressful existence. If you have a stroke I’ll be sure to send flowers.

  • Looks like if you hold a different opinion that the Democrats on campus. Your opinion will be drowned out.

    • You almost sound defeated.
      Is this the elegy of Bobocefus Jones?
      I’ll hold your tin foil hat to my chest as a sign of respect.
      Goodnight, sweet prince.

      • Organite … I was shedding President Obama like tears as I was typing it. Hey check out Clarion Projects take on the new Jihadi John. He could have been a successful bouncy castle salesman, but chose Jihad instead.

    • Your combative rhetoric demonstrates an inability to deal “reasonably” with rejection or even the reality that gun violence in this country has reached epidemic proportions and the Congress enables it by doing nothing tangible about it. Your allusion to various autocratic governments as an analysis to the actions of sitting U.S. President demonstrates clearly you have no understand of what Executive Actions are or how they differ substantially or fundamentally from tyrannical edicts. Conspiracy theories are not liberty. Please seek professional help.

      • GFUH … Combative Rhetoric? Evidently it seems anyone who disagrees with you with reason …. is combative.

        At least I understand the difference between Executive Orders and Presidential Overreach. How many times has Obama said he cannot change gun law unless it is initiated by Congress?

        I’m not the one demanding a safe space free from non-Approved Socialist Speech … you are. I’m not the one descending into issuing petty insults to prop up your elementary comments.

        GFUH … what you see as conspiracy theory … I see as incrementalism, or little baby steps to an eventually conclusion. For example, homosexuality was considered a disease just fifty years ago … now it is seen as an accepted practice for the less than two percent of the population who are gay.

  • Who is printing the “Come to Campus and Shoot Us” banners that should be placed at all entrances if this silly resolution is adopted? Criminals can carry as they wish but I couldn’t even with my TX CHL? Licensed people like me (all age 21 up BTW) are not the problem, and there will be no checkpoints anyway to determine who is carrying. The point is not to open up campuses but merely to have the same CHL law apply everywhere, with very limited exceptions like the admin bldg for example. The new TX law is clear that a public university cannot simply adopt a blanket prohibition. We don’t want shooting meccas, which is recent history beginning with Va Tech. BTW, one major reason for campus carry is to make sure a licensed CHL person can carry on the way to and from campus, not so much that they need a handgun on campus.

    • Your implied wish for gun violence is despicable. But demonstrates a pathology for a shootout. Your implied licence does not guarantee your accuracy in any live shooting scenario nor does acquiring it require any other “training” other than an hour or so at a shooting range, and thereafter none whatsoever for renewal. One can determine this easily enough by looking at any number of many “certified” trainer’s blogs advertising their CHL classes. Moreover, your insistence that your implied “rights” should supersede all others’ rights, speaks to an ego-centered pathology whereby the will of the vast majority of UH students, faculty, staff, alumni, parents and supporters who collectively and overwhelmingly reject Campus Carry as an unjust law, should be subordinate to your peculiar desire to walk around a college campus as an untrained neophyte armed with a lethal weapon. Please seek professional help. Paranoia is not liberty.

      • GFUH … you are more safe with a campus full of CHL holders … than you are just a few blocks away from campus. Where the unlicensed concealed carriers do not have training. Perhaps our President can issue an Executive Orders to have gang-bangers trained.

        And again with the stats … you won’t convert anybody.

        • There is no empirical evidence to support the idea that armed students have played any significant or quantifiable role in crime reduction on any campus since CHL holders were allowed. Thus the claim to any degree of enhance safety is not credible by any known standard. If this were actually true, one would expect to see a noticeable decrease in the types of crimes we are told one arms himself to protect against, Yet these crimes have not decreased, either on campus or in the neighborhoods surrounding the UH campus, despite a significant increase in the number of CHL permits issued.

    • Again, incorrect Bob, in fact Schaumburg, the Ill.-based Career Education Corp., which owns the schools, cited recent federal regulations that limit federal funding to for-profit schools.

      So it was the cutting of federal funds that was the reason, the regulations came about because for-profit schools were abusing the system, especially when it came to our veterans.

      Always question, always research.

      • Again … Obama policies including ObamaCare, were a causal factor in the decision to close.

        Hilton Hotel and Restaurant Management majors will probably be sad.

        • Show me the proof of your claim and I will happily agree with you otherwise you are only guessing and guesses don’t count.

          • I know for a full-on Socialist my LHM … it’s hard to believe anything else but infallibility in the PrezCan you support … as well as the FedGov … when it is run by SocDems. So I’ll tell you of a little adventure I had when I was a kid.

            I visited my uncle in Germany (FRG) in 1989. He was a Captain in the Army at the time, and I was about 11 years old. This was the summer before the Berlin Wall fell. It was great trip … I saw my first topless girls at the local schwimmbad, and got to try German beer, which now I have a taste for the darker beers. But I digress.

            My uncle escorted me from Helmstadt, West Germany, and on the road to West Berlin. I remember seeing my uncle saluting and presenting our passports and Berlin Movement Orders to the Soviet Army personnel.

            We were then on to East Berlin, and I was shocked. Just going through Checkpoint Charlie I saw a dreary place; cold, dark, no advertising, crappie cars, and most importantly for me at the time. no arcades. Socialist East Berlin had nothing for me that a kid would say “this is right place for me.”

            I went into a GDR state-run department store in East Berlin, that barely had anything on the shelves. A young Filipino girl approached my uncle. She was virtually trapped in East Germany; the young woman fell for an advertisement in the Philippines saying that the German Democratic Republic was a workers paradise, and she thought it was better than what she had in the PI. When she arrived in the GDR her passport was confiscated, and assigned a job and place to live. Thankfully, later that year East Germans were freed from Socialist control, and allowed freedom of movement. But I witnessed what an oppressive Socialist Government is capable of, that is why I am so adamant about countering UH socialists.

            I am confident in saying that I am the only American-born student on campus that has seen with my own eyes the results of an oppressive Socialist government. Seeing the fear in the eyes of that young Filipino girl really leaves an impact.

            You TB, and a great many people on campus have only heard of the great promises of Socialism, but you haven’t directly lived it. Not the way that Barack Obama or Bernie Sanders really want you to live … the GDR way. And I’m willing to bet that when you are directly exposed to GDR-style governance, you won’t be putting down Capitalism the way you have been.

            I know the words Profit and Capitalism are dirty words to you. I know you have been taught that a private individual running a business is a bad thing. But what you don’t know is all the hoops that these people have to jump thru just to stay in business. Most of the people that run businesses aren’t rich at all, and they are true to their employees . I’m proudly call myself a member of that club. Thankfully I haven’t had to lay-off any employees, even with the increased hoops, but I don’t think a lot of companies can take four to eight years of Clinton or Sanders.

            I’m back on campus to further develop what I learned as an undergrad, and set examples to family, friends, and employees, that there is always more that we can learn when it comes to education. And with the education, I’m looking for ways to … go around the hoops. I’m tired of jumping.

            • Bob, let me reiterate what you should know by now, I am NOT a fan of Obama. Have said it many times so you don’t have to keep claiming I am.

              Now as to my question, you chose to answer with an anecdotal fallacy, i.e. using a personal experience or an isolated example instead of sound reasoning or compelling evidence. I asked a simple question, show me your proof that Le Cordon Bleu and Walmart’s closing were a result of Obama Care, and not for the reasons I stated in both of my comments, which were taken from their quotes in articles I linked.

              The government as it is now is not socialist, its an Oligarchy, it is beholded to the large corporations, and special interests of the most wealthy. I was never in East Berlin but I was in Noriega’s Panama and Egypt under Mubarak and in South Korea and saw the Demilitarized Zone.

              I am not, nor have I ever, advocated for a socialist government. There are things I think should be left to the states and things I think the fed can do and should do. I am support the second amendment but I think it is right to keep guns out of the hands of people that are crazy, felons and on terrorist watch lists and no fly lists. I believe in the constitution and fought to protect it from all enemies both foreign and domestic. So lets not pain me with such a broad brush my favorite RepCon.

              I look forward to sparing with you this semester so fasten your thinking cap, you’re gonna need it. *wink*

    • ObamaCare had nothing to do with the closings. They are closing them for purely capitalistic reasons, they are not making money. This is what CEO and president Doug McMillan said, it had nothing to do with obamacare. In fact “Walmart plans to open stores worldwide in the coming fiscal year. Domestically, Walmart intends to open 50 to 60 Supercenters and 85 to 95 Neighborhood Markets in Fiscal 2017, which begins February 1. In the same period, Sam’s Club plans to open in seven to 10 new locations. Internationally, Walmart intends to open between 200 and 240 stores during the coming year.”

      Reported in NACS http://www.nacsonline.com/News/Daily/Pages/ND0118162.aspx

      Always question, always research.

      • Who cares my Love Handle Mama … Happy New Year BTW.

        Of course the company will not blame ObamaCare, but you can be sure the unprofitable stores being closed had ObamaCare as being one of the causing factors for closure.

        • Where’s the beef, i.e. the proof of your claim? If you can’t back up what you say with proof, then its only conjecture at best. So prove that is why and I will agree with you. And a Happy New Year to you my favorite contrarian.

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