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They're trying to avoid a 30.06 sign for some reason. Surely they're not worried about advertising the office as a gun free zone.

But they also seem not to want to professors to use the syllabus, presumably because the wording on written notice must be identical to 30.06. Again, they seem to be avoiding the promulgated words for some reason.

I'm not sure how oral notice is going to work. Maybe they expect the professor to just announce it on day one, and that's expected to cover all students in the class at the time for the remainder of the semester? What if someone else comes into the office - is the professor supposed to announce "I don't allow guns in this office" every time a non-student enters?

Unless there is a quirk in the campus carry law that I am not aware of, this stuff about "oral notice is the only legally effective notice" seems patently untrue.

I hope Birdwell comes down hard on this nonsense. This is exactly the kind of stuff he told them not to do.

koine2002 wrote:This. There's no way it would've passed (it probably would've been chubbed to death on the house floor) had it been more specific or been more restrictive in terms of university determination. This got the law on the books. It's much harder to get a law on the books than it is to incrementally modify it to what you initially wanted. Once it's on the books it's very hard to take off.

Exactly. It was mushed up a bit to get the law on the books, and Birdwell was clear in his comments that they would be looking closely at what was prohibited and why, and would revisit the law in future sessions if necessary.

If they let UT allow its faculty and staff to post their own offices, I imagine the faculty and staff at every other institution will demand the same option and the law would essentially be invalidated. Therefore, I can't imagine the Legislature is going to let this stand.

Soccerdad1995 wrote:I am not an expert on the law here, but are there no guidelines on what areas can be declared off limits and also on who is authorized to make this determination? It seems that this decision may be counter to the actual law.

At a minimum, this is more evidence that the folks running our universities cannot be trusted with discretion in determining areas that meet the legal requirements for exclusion of LTC holders. Much as with government owned property, I think we need to take this discretion away and just eliminate the ability to restrict carry on any publicly owned land or premises.

This. I don't recall the exact words but the law said something to the effect that any restrictions could not have the effect of prohibiting carry generally. The debate surrounding the bill as it went through the Legislature mainly contemplated discretion for things like labs with volatile chemicals or machines that couldn't operate in the presence of metal (like MRI machines). I can't imagine arbitrary postings of offices for no reason other than the officeholder said so wouldn't violate the spirit of the law, if not the letter.

They do have to furnish a report to the Legislature justifying these areas they allow to be posted, so hopefully this nonsense will be knocked down pretty quickly.