Texas students use sex toys to protest new campus gun laws
Students, teachers, and staff protested the new laws on the first day of classes at the University of Texas at Austin
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Your support makes all the difference.Students, faculty, and staff members opposed to the controversial new law that allows guns on Texas’ college campuses joined in a rather unusual protest at the state’s flagship university, as they brandished sex toys instead of firearms on the first day of classes.
The Wednesday “C**ks not Glocks” protest called for participants to strap the phallic sex toys on to their bags on the University of Texas at Austin campus in protest of campus carry gun law.
Signed into law by Gov Greg Abbott last year, campus carry went into effect on 1 August this year, coinciding with the 50th anniversary first high profile mass shooting in US history on that very campus that killed 14 people.
The law allows licenced gun owners, aged 21 and older, to carry a concealed firearm in most of the state’s public universities.
On Monday, a federal judge threw out a request filed by three UT professors to put an injunction on the law. They argued that campus carry infringed on freedom of speech in the classroom as the presence of a gun could stymie discussion of heated topics.
“It’s scary to think that at any moment you could be next to a person carrying a gun,” second-year student Bianca Montgomery told Reuters. “And if they go off their rocker, like a lot of people do in college, it is game for anybody nearby.”
UT alumnus Jessica Jin announced the protest in October and told Reuters her aim was to “fight absurdity with absurdity”. Ms Jin’s group passed out hundreds of the rubber phalluses at the Wednesday event.
“Texas has decided it is not at all obnoxious or illegal to allow deadly concealed weapons on campus,” she said. “But walking around with a dildo could land you in trouble.”
“Let’s put a dildo in the hands of every pissed off college student who hasn’t been heard in this safety conversation,” she added. “Strap it on, feel the discomfort, feel the weird looks. We’re it loud, wear it proud, and don’t take them off until people take their guns home."