A UT Austin Professor has decided to quit and move to Australia rather than risk being shot in his classroom.  I’ve seen his reviews it appears to me he is safe , as his students have concluded he isn’t worth the price of a bullet.  I thought economics professors were supposed to be good with numbers….

From the Daily Caller:

Texas Professor Quits Rather Than Tolerate Armed Students

BLAKE NEFF
Reporter

6:31 PM 10/08/2015

A professor emeritus at the University of Texas-Austin (UT) has announced that he is resigning his post in protest against a recent law allowing students to carry concealed weapons on campus, saying the law drastically increases his chances of being murdered.

“As much as I have loved the experience of teaching and introducing these students to economics at the university, I have decided not to continue,” economics professor Daniel Hamermesh said in a letter to university administrators this week. “With a huge group of students my perception is that the risk that a disgruntled student might bring a gun into the classroom and start shooting at me has been substantially enhanced by the concealed-carry law.”

Starting next August, Texas’s new “campus carry” law will allow those with concealed carry licenses to bring guns into the buildings and dormitories of Texas colleges. Several hundred UT professors have signed a petition of protest against it, though Hamermesh is the first to quit over the matter.

Hamermesh’s economics course currently has some 475 students, which he cited as putting him in particular danger of being gunned down.

Instead of UT, Hamermesh plans to teach at the University of Sydney in Australia starting next year out of “self-protection.”

Hamermesh predicted that he won’t be the first faculty member to avoid Texas because of its new tolerance for concealed carry.

“My guess is somebody thinking about coming to Texas is going to think twice about being a professor here,” he said in his letter. “It’s going to make it more difficult for Texas to compete in the market for faculty.” Texas isn’t the first state to legalize campus carry, though, as it’s already legal in several states, including Utah, Colorado, Oregon, and more.

Hamermesh does not make clear in his resignation letter how a campus gun-free zone would prevent a disgruntled student from killing him.

I did some further research and found 31 reviews for him as “Rate My Professor”, nine students rated him poor.  None of those nine reviews were particularly vehement. Twenty-two rated him higher, with persistent comments that his tests were difficult because they were inconsistent and he played word games.

Having only what is included in the article and his statement to go on, I can see where a student would have problems grasping economics from his point of view. Consider the following:

• Carrying a firearm on campus is currently illegal and totally unimpeded.
• On any given day,  a student is carrying a firearm on campus is a engaging in a felony.
• People illegally possessing firearms are prone to using them.
• The good Professor does not object to that state of affairs and has taught under those conditions for a number of years.
• According to Texas Department of Public Safety statistics Concealed-Carry-Revocation-rates-by-age only 0.021% of concealed carry license holders (CHL) have had the license revoked. Meaning as a class concealed license holders tend to be more law abiding that those who do not possess a CHL.
• There approximately 13 million people in Texas over the age of 18, almost 600,000 have a concealed carry license. If you accept that 0.021% of the population is likely to carry a firearm with “bad intent” that leaves a potential pool of offenders from the general population of 273,000 verses 12,600 from the licensed to carry crowd.
• Under the existing statistics and new law it is far more likely that a legitimately armed student will step forward to save his life.
• As a practical matter, the reality is that people have been carrying firearms around the professor all his adult life he didn’t snap to it then and he is not going to be any better at spotting somebody carrying a weapon now.
• When Charles Whitman began firing from the UT tower it was UT students and construction workers that took it upon themselves,armed with deer rifles, to engage Whitman.  While they didn’t kill him they likely changed the nature of the confrontation and kept the death toll lower than it might have been.

All the years I spent in college I was always armed and I never had a problem. I suppose some idiot could ask a direct question.  Texas law requires concealed carry which means I have an obligation keep my weapon concealed. It is not against the law to lie to a turd.

Should we bother to tell Professor Hamermesh that Australia’s gun confiscation attempt left 50% of the guns in private hands?  Let him find out the hard way.

Poor Australia first we give them the F-111 and then we give them Hamermesh. Is that any way to treat a friend?