San Antonio Professor Protests Campus Carry Law By Wearing Bulletproof Vest To Class

By Dan Zimmerman via The Truth About Guns

When campus carry was signed into law and took effect at Texas four-year colleges and universities last year, students and faculty at UT’s prestigious flagship campus in Austin registered their opposition by organizing feeble foot-stamping gestures of defiance, filing frivolous lawsuits and waving rubber penises in the air like they just don’t care.

Now that campus carry has made it through its first year quietly, community colleges have become subject to the law, too. And while most instructors are probably resigned by now to the idea of students carrying firearms on campus, that doesn’t mean that they like the idea any more than their four-year educational institution counterparts did.

One case in point: San Antonio College adjunct science professor Charles Keith Smith. As theranger.org reports,

Geography Adjunct Charles Keith Smith wore a bulletproof vest and Army helmetto teach his summer school class on Aug. 1 as a visual statement of his opposition to the campus carry law as it went into effect in two-year colleges in Texas.

“This is me making a statement that I do not approve of it, and I feel threatened,” Smith said in an interview after his class, GEOG 1301, Physical Geography.

He said he borrowed the vest and helmet from his son who retired from the Army.

You have to give Mr. Smith props for managing to his express his campus carry animus in a more dignified and restrained manner than those who shape the young skulls full of mush in Austin.

Smith said that with the campus carry law, he does not know who has guns and worries that the mental state of a student who carries a gun might increase the risk of a shooting.

It apparently never occurred to Mr. Smith that he didn’t know who had guns in his classes before the law went into effect August 1 either. He’d likely be horrified to learn the probability that he had students carrying firearms for years approaches one hundred percent. Let’s not tell him, though.

“I had a fistfight break out in class over seating two years ago,” he said.

“These guys have guns,” he said. He said he cannot imagine what goes on in the thinking of students 21, 22 and 23 years old who may not be mature enough to carry a handgun.

Being  educated in the sciences rather than history, Mr. Smith may not be aware that The Founders apparently weren’t at all worried about the thinking of adults of any age when they enshrined the RKBA in the Bill of Rights.

But Mr. Smith really isn’t all that worried about any perceived danger from having licensed concealed carriers in class among those soaking up his wisdom.

Smith said he would wear the vest and helmet for only a couple of days.

So it was all just anti-gun performance art. Mr. Smith evidently put on his little show (and invited the school paper’s photographer into his class) to garner a little attention. Mission accomplished.