Self-impressed with its own cultivated “weirdness,” the college town of Austin, Texas, is a blue redoubt in a red state, so it’s no surprise that some students vulgarly protested the state’s concealed-carry law, which now allows concealed handguns to be carried on campus. New York Times reporter Dave Philipps couldn’t get enough of it, celebrating the protest in Thursday’s edition: “Texas Students Wield Absurdity as a Weapon.”
It makes quite a change from the horrified reaction the Times has when conservative Texas A&M students mount protests.
On the first day of classes at the University of Texas in this city that revels in its own oddball creativity, students protested a law allowing concealed handguns on state college campuses by carrying something they thought was just as ridiculous and out of place: Thousands of sex toys.
“These laws won’t protect anyone. The campus doesn’t want them,” said an organizer of the protest, Jessica Jin. “It’s absurd. So, I thought, we have to fight absurdity with absurdity.”
On Wednesday, Ms. Jin, a recent graduate who majored in violin, helped distribute brightly colored dildos to hundreds of students gathered to protest the law that took effect Aug. 1.
Their plan was to carry the toys openly to class, attached to their backpacks, to show that they think that guns have no place on campus and could stifle the open exchange of ideas.
“For the state to deny research about gun safety and allow this in classrooms is kind of obscene,” Ms. Jin said. “What better way to show how we feel?”
Contrast that celebratory vibe over public vulgarity with the horrified manner in which the Times has treated more tasteful protests by conservative students at Texas A&M.
Texas has long issued concealed handgun permits but banned guns from college campuses. After repeated efforts, the Republican-controlled State Legislature passed a law in 2015 lifting the ban. Similar laws and court rulings have allowed guns onto campuses in a handful of others states in recent years, including Idaho and Colorado. The chancellor of the University of Texas system and the president of the flagship university in Austin have said that they are against guns on campus but that they have no choice but to implement the law.
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Many students have not been so acquiescent. Rather than turn to traditional marches or sit-ins, millennials raised on satirical news programs like “The Daily Show” have turned instead to satire as the most sincere form of expression. The campaign is a protest in the age of Instagram -- neatly packaged and ready to go viral.
The self-congratulatory libertine-liberal vibe was obvious.
Students took selfies with their new toys and shot video of crowds chanting, with the toys raised like fists. Then Roy Wood Jr., a correspondent for “The Daily Show” who travels the country doing satirical sketches, appeared to cheers of the smitten students. With a camera crew trailing him, and a producer shooing would-be Instagram users out of the way, Mr. Wood led the crowd on a march that veered from ridiculous to dead serious.
Philipps was actually courteous to the pro-carry side, perhaps because it was “notably quiet" and presumably harmless (or perhaps just hassled into apathy).
Students in favor of guns on campus have been notably quiet on Wednesday. Though a spokesman for the nationwide group Students for Campus Carry said it had several members on the campus of 50,000, Brian Bensimon, who identified himself as the group’s lone member at the university, said the local chapter was “essentially defunct.”
On Wednesday. Mr. Bensimon silently held up a sign amid the protesters, suggesting a peaceful coexistence.
Times reporter turned columnist Frank Bruni was petrified last October about the prospect of concealed carry at UT, and infantilized the students in the process: “Maybe just a few more guns find their way onto campus. Isn’t that a few guns too many, especially in an environment where excessive drinking occurs, among people at an age when anxiety and depression can be acute? Do we really want to do anything at all to unsettle young men and women in the phase of life when they’re trying to polish the confidence and optimism that will help them tackle the world?”
