by Becky Wright
Unless you avoid the news, chances are you have seen that the University of Texas at Austin has a unique protest winning national attention. “Cocks not Glocks” started the fall semester by handing out large dildos to fellow students. They have been strapped to backpacks, pocketed and holstered, all in protest of registered gun owners carrying firearms on the university campus.
If you haven’t heard the story, here is the short version. Former student Jessica Jin was outraged when she found out that firearms could be carried on her campus, but that the display of any item that resembled the human genitalia was illegal. Finding this completely absurd, Jin organized a group, went to sex-toy retailers for donations and took to the campus to protest.
Fast forward and Jin is still at it, showing a substantial support for her cause on the opening day of the fall semester – Aug. 25. Jin spoke to a gathering crowd Wednesday about how she hopes this will challenge the normality of gun culture. According to The Guardian, Jin strapped a dildo to her backpack and has been carrying it to all of her stops, including Home Depot.
“Deal with the discomfort, deal with the weird looks – that’s the way we should be treating gun culture,” she told The Guardian.
With a bit of the ‘why’ answered, I decided to do some of my own research on gun carry in Colorado and see if our campus could indeed be facing the same kind of issue. Firstly, open carry and conceal carry have different restrictions in both Texas and Colorado. After reading the Colorado Revised Statutes: Criminal Code, Title 18, Article 12. Part one of Article 12 details open carry, and prohibits concealed carry without a permit in most places. In part two, there are provisions that allow a person with a valid handgun permit to legally carry their handgun concealed. Those provisions basically say, if an individual has legally obtained their firearm, then they can openly carry both hand and long guns in our state. To conceal your weapon is a different permit and has stricter guidelines.
So, why does this matter? On the CMU campus, openly carrying a weapon is prohibited. Can you imagine sitting across from someone with a pistol holstered in a debate class? It would be intimidating. Fonzie Detréll, CMU Chemistry major agrees, “I have nothing against weapons. Everyone should be able to obtain a firearm if they want to. But that comes with a lot of responsibility,” Detréll said. “I would not be comfortable with weapons on campus.”
I decided to go to the man in-charge of campus safety, John Marshall the Vice President of Student Services. CMU is a growing community and safety has a top priority with administration. Marshall said of the current policy, “Our current arrangement works well, I can’t think of why it should [change].”
However, CMU does allow for concealed weapons carry. As do most places in Colorado. The few exceptions are K-12 schools and government buildings with security personnel and weapon detectors, along with a few other more obscure circumstances that you can easily read at www.uslawshield.com.
The fact is, you may have been debating with someone in class that has legally obtained their right to conceal a weapon in their purse. Research continues to show that gun violence is not acted out by legal gun owners. The fact is that gun violence rarely happens on college campuses. You are far more likely to contract a potentially fatal sexually transmitted disease than ever see a gun on campus.
While the “Cocks not Glocks” protest is brilliant in its ability to win headlines and attention, it is representative of what has been a growing divide in our country, and seems to be gaining momentum. It’s all or nothing. Either you are a gun supporter or you are an activist fighting against it, democrat or republican, pro-life or pro-choice, all or nothing. However, in my experience this black and white division leaves a vast number of people’s opinion out.
While winning headlines is nice, maybe the protest should be held in Chicago on the streets that are literally covered in blood from gun violence. Maybe it would have an impact on them. Instead, it is another example of jumping on a bandwagon without all the facts.
It feels good to be a part of something bigger than one’s self, something that may change our world for the better. But there is danger in shouting out about something that doesn’t affect our population. How about the absurdity of going into just shy of $40,000 in schooling debt, the national average according to www.debt.org/students, in order to get a job. Or the number of people sitting in our local jails because of petty offenses; our tax dollars are used to house them.
Moral of the story is this: “Cocks not Glocks” is a great headline. It has made a small group of young people interested in law and hopefully their local politics. However, it seems like another misguided attempt to change something that isn’t a problem. In the end, I agree with my fellow classmate Farron Khan when he said, “why aren’t people as concerned with their first amendment right as they are with their second?”
