Texas is getting ready for their new campus carry law which will allow permit holders to carry their weapons on campus and even in classrooms. While popular with voters, there has been a predictable backlash among more liberal university administrators and student leaders, leading to a patchwork of implementation. One of the provisions of the law, for example, specifies that private universities can “opt out” of the law after consultation with students and faculty, and that option has already been exercised by Texas Christian University and Southern Methodist University. But for the colleges run on the taxpayer dime, the rules are going into effect. That’s led to some dissent of a different form.

The most dramatic example is found at the University of Texas, where two professors have begun a petition drive and released a venom filled manifesto which declares that guns are the new segregation. (Daily Caller)

“As professors, we don’t see classroom carry to be about our own personal security,” the manifesto says early on. “We will most likely never be shot in our offices or classrooms, even if we were to piss off some white male students with sacrilegious ideas about race, empire, evolution, or god.”

Canizares-Esguerra and Timmons explicitly frame the conflict as a racial one, with supporters of gun rights cast as white racial oppressors who are the heirs of slavery, Jim Crow, and other acts of “settler colonialism.”

“We are witnessing the great ideological return of settler colonialism,” they say. “America has all along been about the sheer display of white male power (with guns): over Indians, over slaves, over females, over Mexicans, over Asians, over African Americans, and over Arabs. [The] return of the vigilante movement is a giant, collective white push back against the Civil Rights Movement and against the unintended consequences of globalization,migration, and demography.”

One hardly knows where to begin with that breathtaking indictment. For starters, I thought we weren’t supposed to refer to Native Americans as “Indians” these days. Isn’t that a rather racist way of calling everyone else racists? And how did the Arabs get involved in “settler colonialism” in all of this? I thought they came along much later.

Either way, guns are an equal opportunity business. They may have been more prevalent in the possesion of white settlers a couple hundred years ago, but we’re supposed to be “moving on” with our lives and heading into the 21st century. (Or so I have been repeatedly assured.) Anyone on campus of the minimum age and having a clean record can carry if they fill out the proper forms. That includes women, minorities, and even Marxist sounding professors.

They also go into some sort of a half-baked First Amendment argument, claiming that the presence of guns is intimidating to others and chills free speech.

The manifesto ends by suggesting that those who carry guns are no different from those who attempt to hurt others by causing a panic.

“What differentiates an individual who seeds mistrust and puts people at risk by shouting ‘fire,’ in a crowded theater, from the individual who carries a gun into our classroom? Neither the shouter not the carrier can avail himself from constitutional protection.”

I really hope these two aren’t law professors because that’s some painfully convoluted self-justification they’ve got going on there. In any event, they can pass all the petitions they like. The law has been passed and the school is funded by the taxpayers. Americans appreciate not only gun rights, but the chance to protect themselves rather than being in a free fire zone for the insane. It’s time to move out of the way of progress, gentlemen. And while you’re at it, take some gun safety classes, send in your forms and pick up some iron.