Agency Reporter
USA- Universities in Texas are set to be forced to allow students and academics to carry guns on campus, in a victory for a firearms lobby unbowed after last month's massacre in Arizona, the Telegraph reports.
A new law that looks certain to pass through the Texas legislature would mean that its 38 public colleges, which are attended by half a million students, must permit concealed handguns on site.
It would become only the second state, after Utah, to enforce such a rule.
More than 20 states have rejected similar proposals introduced since the Virginia Tech massacre in April 2007.
At present, colleges in Texas - along with churches and businesses - are free to ban firearms from their premises. Guns are prohibited from university buildings, dormitories and surrounding grounds.
The plan is likely to astonish most who recall the mass shootings at Virginia Tech, where a student killed 32 people, and in Northern Illinois the following year, where five people were murdered.
It also comes just six weeks after six people were killed and 13, including the United States Congresswoman, Gabrielle Giffords, were wounded during a shooting spree in a supermarket car park in Tucson, Arizona.
Texas for Gun-free Schools, a group campaigning against the measure, said that it was supported by only one in four Texans and just 15 per cent of students.
"Guns do not belong in classrooms, and the incredibly low violent crime rate on college campuses demonstrates the success of this policy," the group said.
While the plan provoked anger among opponents, supporters said that allowing everyone to carry a hidden weapon was the only way to prevent more massacres...
"It's strictly a matter of self-defence," said Jeff Wentworth, a Republican state senator. "I don't ever want to see repeated on a Texas college campus what happened at Virginia Tech." "Some deranged, suicidal madman goes into a building and is able to pick off totally defenceless kids like sitting ducks."
Before Virginia Tech, the University of Texas was the site of America's worst college shooting, when a student killed 16 people and wounded dozens more in August 1966.
Students for Concealed Carry on Campus, a pro-gun group, said crime rates at universities in Colorado had dropped since the state allowed them to permit guns on campus.
