AUSTIN, Texas – When was last time an unbalanced individual committed an act of mass violence with a vibrator?
Never.
That’s the message students at the University of Texas tried to get across to lawmakers on Wednesday with the “Cocks Not Glocks: Open (Dildo) Carry” on-campus rally to protest an addition to the state’s criminal code.
The new provision, known colloquially as the campus-carry law, was signed by Republican Gov. Greg Abbott in mid-2015 and went into effect Aug. 1, 2016 — three and one-half weeks before the first day of Fall classes at the 50,000-student UT. The law allows students at public universities to tote concealed handguns in dorms, cafeterias, classrooms, labs and other university facilities. Private universities and colleges may opt out as long as they notify students, faculty and staff about gun-free zones.
The law is particularly troubling for UT students, faculty and staff. In August 1966, former U.S. Marine and then-UT-engineering-student Charles Whitman opened fire from The Tower on the campus, killing 16 people and wounding 32 others before he was shot to death by Austin police.
Under the new statute, university students may not openly display their weapons, although since Jan. 1 the state’s notorious “open-carry law” has allowed residents to tote sidearms in shoulder or hip holsters almost everywhere else in the state. Exceptions include schools, polling places, courtrooms and secured areas of airports.
According to Moms Demand Action for Gun Sense in America, more than two-thirds of Texans, including two-thirds of the 925,000 who possess concealed-carry licenses, opposed the open-carry law. The overwhelmingly Republican-dominated state legislature didn’t care.
Texas law has allowed licensed residents to carry concealed weapons since 1995, but universities were among the gun-free zones specified in the legislation. The campus-carry law was meant to rectify what lawmakers characterized as a mistake in the concealed-weapons legislation.
Cocks Not Glocks organizers, who distributed more than 4,500 free sex toys during the rally, said their open-dildo-carry protest was meant to call attention to a mistake in legislators’ thinking. While handguns are legal, Texas law prohibits the sale or display in public of — even the ownership of six or more — “obscene device[s].” The criminal code defines an obscene device as any item, “including a dildo or artificial vagina, designed or marketed as useful primarily for the stimulation of human genital organs.”
Though rarely enforced, the obscene devices law has been on the books since 1973. The legislature updated the statute in 2003.
“We are fighting absurdity with absurdity,” Cocks Not Glocks leader Jessica Jin told Reuters. “Texas has decided it is not at all obnoxious or illegal to allow deadly concealed weapons on campus, but walking around with a dildo could land you in trouble.”
