AN OPEN LETTER TO UTSA PRESIDENT RICARDO ROMO

Dear President Romo,

We, the undersigned members of the UTSA community, write to you with a simple request: use the authority given to you by the Texas state legislature to keep our classrooms, labs, offices, and dormitories safe and GUN FREE.

The recently passed bill (SB11) permitting concealed weapons permit holders (CWPHs) to carry guns on campus explicitly gives you the discretion to establish rules to protect the safety of our campus community, so long as those rules do not generally prohibit or have the effect of generally prohibiting CWPHs from carrying guns on campus. We believe that designating classrooms, labs, offices, and dormitories as gun-free zones will help to ensure the safety of our community, while ensuring that CWPHs generally maintain the ability to carry guns on UTSA’s vast 747 acre campus.

Gun free classrooms, offices, and dormitories are essential to the physical safety of the UTSA community. These are all places in which students, faculty and staff must congregate to live and work, and spaces we have no choice but to occupy. We should all be able to presume safety and security in such campus spaces.

As you know, gun violence may occur intentionally, unintentionally, and even accidentally. No student, employee, or faculty member should ever be forced to inhabit a workspace under threat of any type of gun violence. Furthermore, and given the natural controversy surrounding most if not all worthwhile academic and intellectual endeavors, students, faculty, and staff must maintain a strong sense of physical security in order to perform their jobs. Anything that would intimidate our campus community from speaking freely and practicing true academic freedom will either threaten the physical safety of those who choose to exercise their First Amendment rights or have a chilling effect on the exercise of those rights. For these reasons, gun-free classrooms, dormitories, and offices are absolutely essential not only to physical safety on our campus, but also to civil liberties on campus.

We know that you desire to protect our community’s safety while upholding fundamental constitutional rights and carrying out the mandates of the state legislature. We strongly believe that designating classrooms, labs, offices, and dormitories as gun-free will achieve those objectives. Please have the courage to do so—make our classrooms, labs, offices, and dormitories gun-free zones.