And the addition of concealed weapons on campus just [doesn’t] seem like a good idea to me.” 
 
 Hundreds of people showed up at Thursday’s Gun Free UT rally to voice their opposition to the law, which won’t take effect until August 1, 2016. The law goes into effect Aug. 1, 2016 for public colleges and universities and a year later for community colleges. The law provides that license holders may carry concealed handguns in university buildings and classrooms, extending the reach of a previous law that allowed concealed handguns on university grounds. With campus carry the risk increased and I simply don’t wish to face that risk.” 
 
 Hamermesh has publicly advocated against campus carry before, so he said his decision wasn’t just motivated by the recent mass shooting at a community college in Oregon, a campus carry state, which killed nine and wounded nine. But other faculty members in Texas have become more vocal since the Umpqua Community College shooting -- the third-most-deadly campus shooting ever, with the second-worst occurring at UT Austin in 1966 -- and another recent on-campus shooting involving two faculty members in Mississippi, another campus carry state. “Although this latest shooting took place halfway across the country, it hit close to home here in Austin,” Auyero wrote. We knew that before the campus carry law passed, and we know it now.” 
 
 Auyero is member of the group UT Gun Free, which has held several anti-campus carry forums on campus in recent weeks and garnered nearly 4,600 signatures on an anti-campus carry petition. He referred questions on Hamermesh’s departure to the group’s organizers. Paloma Diaz, a scholarly programs director and faculty liaison with the Teresa Lozano Long Institute of Latin American Studies on campus, said via email that Hamermesh’s decision “sends a strong message.” 
 
 Another member of UT Gun Free, Lisa Moore, a professor of English, also has spoken out against the campus carry law in the wake of the Oregon shooting. “I try to endow my students with the ability to talk openly about religious differences; it’s an important skill for an educated citizenry,” she said. I’ve brought it up in all of my classes, and the students are scared, almost universally. Which is fine, because something can be learned from that. But that’s different than a student pulling a gun -- no one learns anything in that situation. And maybe the student who flips the desk might refrain from doing it if he thinks his classmate is armed. In that sort of environment, I’m going to be much less willing to go into deep and controversial issues, which is a huge loss, since, later on in life, they’ll have to grapple with deep and controversial issues.” 
 
 David Smith-Soto, a senior lecturer of multimedia journalism at the University of Texas at El Paso, started protesting SB 11 earlier this year, when he put a “no guns” sign outside his classroom door. So going forward, what will you do if you have a disruptive student who happens to be carrying a gun? Then that reasoning should apply to the entire campus. Therefore, the entire university should be gun-free.” 
 
 In an interview, Smith-Soto said he still has his “no gun” sign up in his classroom, but that he’s moved it inside the door as not to foist the policy on other professors, since it could be illegal. He also started posting things online about not doing the reading and said that he would stop other students from doing the reading. “I intend to cancel the class if anybody comes in and [says] he or she has a gun, and I’ll continue to do that until there are no guns in my classroom,” he said. He said the university understands the concerns Hamermesh and other faculty members have raised about their classroom safety, and asks “that the campus community continue to work with university leadership in developing policies for implementing this new state law.” 
 
 Susswein noted that the University of Texas System's chancellor, Adm. William McRaven, retired, shared his position on campus carry -- that it would make campuses less safe, not more -- with the legislature before it made it law. As a member of the faculty at the University of Texas at Austin, I wonder if we are just supposed to forget and carry on, pretending this is not an issue, writing it off as another instance of “how things are here in Texas”? But he said recruiting top faculty members might be harder with the specter of guns in their classrooms. “This might scare away good people.”
– Starting next summer, licensed gun owners will be able to carry concealed weapons into buildings at public universities in Texas; in 2017, the same will be true at community colleges. And at least one professor is not happy about the prospect of guns in his classroom: He's resigning over the "campus carry" gun law passed earlier this year, Inside Higher Ed reports. "As much as I have loved the experience of teaching and introducing these students to economics at the university, I have decided not to continue," Daniel S. Hamermesh wrote in a letter to University of Texas at Austin administrators this week. "With a huge group of students my perception is that the risk that a disgruntled student might bring a gun into the classroom and start shooting at me has been substantially enhanced by the concealed-carry law." Hamermesh is a Sue Killam Professor Emeritus of economics at the university, and he continues in the letter that he "cannot believe that I am the only potential or current faculty member who is aware of and disturbed by this heightened risk." But, as Inside Higher Ed notes, supporters of the new law say it will make campuses safer, because those carrying guns could defend against an active shooter. Seven other states have similar "campus carry" laws, including Oregon, where a shooter recently killed nine people at a community college. Since that shooting, other Texas faculty members have voiced their opposition to the state's new gun law, including a UT El Paso lecturer who's been protesting the law (including with a "no guns" sign outside his classroom) and another UT Austin professor who gave an interview warning that the law could "shut down free speech" in classrooms. Yet another wrote a Time op-ed on the subject this week; that professor is a member of UT Gun Free, an organization that is circulating an anti-campus carry petition and has held several anti-campus carry forums.