Pro-Gun Groups Plan Mock Mass Shooting At University Of Texas

Critics Say Event Is ‘Deep Insult’ To Memories Of Victims

Two pro-gun advocacy groups plan to stage a mock mass shooting Saturday on the campus of the University of Texas in Austin to protest gun-free zones. 

The dramatization will take place just 10 days after the San Bernardino massacre, but organizers deny it’s in bad taste. 

Members of Come and Take It Texas and DontComply.com plan to use cardboard weapons and fake blood, along with bullhorns blaring gun-shot noises, during the event, according to media reports.    

“It’s basically going to be a hostage situation where people are shot and then the one person with a concealed handgun will come in and reduce the body count,” organizer Murdoch Pizgatti told The Houston Chronicle. “It’s pretty much going to be portraying the incidents in gun free zones and why they happen. The bad guys don’t obey gun free zone signs and good people do.”

Asked whether he thinks the event is in bad taste in the wake of San Bernardino shooting and the Paris terror attacks, spokesman Matthew Short told The Austin Statesman: “Not at all. People were able to be murdered people because no one was armed.”

The University of Texas was the site of the first documented mass shooting on a college campus, when sniper Charles Whitman gunned down 16 people from the UT Tower in 1966. 

The school has also been the site of intense debate over Texas’ new open-carry law, which beginning next August will allow people with concealed weapons permits to carry handguns into classrooms and dorms.

A gun-control group led by UT professors, Gun Free UT, has called for the school, which is drafting a plan to implement the open-carry law, to interpret it as strictly as possible. 

Members of Gun Free UT are also speaking out against the mock mass shooting. 

“This is a deep insult to the memories and lives of every American that we have lost to gun violence,” professor Ellen Spiro told the Chronicle. “Gun Free UT will treat them as if they are invisible. They do not deserve to be seen and heard by our children via the nightly news.”

 

Image: Come And Take It Texas/Facebook