AUSTIN, TEXAS – -(Ammoland.com)- In an op-ed published in the July 20 edition of The Dallas Morning News, Joanna Cattanach, Democratic nominee for Texas House District 108, writes:
Three years ago, after the passage of the campus carry laws in Texas, I opted to resign my full-time college teaching position. At the time, after going through active shooter training and drills on how to handle an armed student in the classroom, I felt, as so many teachers feel, that dealing with guns in classrooms was just one more thing in an already demanding profession.
It’s worth noting that, although this could be interpreted as suggesting that Cattanach resigned her position shortly before the law took effect, because the resulting active shooter drills made her fear for safety, her LinkedIn profile states that she resigned her North Lake College teaching position approximately 15 months before Texas’s campus carry law took effect at North Lake and other two-year community colleges.
Cattanach’s resignation took place approximately eleven months before the Dallas County Community College District, to which North Lake College belongs, issued its District Concealed Carry Committee Final Report; therefore, any active shooter training she took part in almost certainly had nothing to do with the campus carry law.
Interestingly enough, Cattanach’s LinkedIn profile states that she held on to a concurrent teaching position at the University of North Texas, where campus carry took effect one year earlier than at North Lake College.
In the Dallas Morning News op-ed, Cattanach goes on to write:
A year later, a student on the same college campus was shot and killed by another student in the campus art gallery. The victim was 20.
On the day of the shooting, I watched on television as my former students poured out of the campus, many crying. I heard a former colleague barricaded in a room talking to a TV reporter on the phone. I searched my class rolls to see if the victim was a former student. I also searched for the shooter’s name. He died as well of a self-inflicted gunshot wound.
What Cattanach fails to mention is that the victim was being stalked by the gunman—who left a suicide note—and that the shootingtook place three months before campus carry became legal at North Lake College.
Students for Concealed Carry believes that Joanna Cattanach needs to answer three questions raised by her op-ed:
- If campus carry is the reason she quit her teaching position at North Lake College, why did she quit more than a year before the law was scheduled to take effect before the school had even announced its campus carry policies?
- Why didn’t she also quit her teaching position at the University of North Texas, where campus carry took effect a year earlier than at North Lake College?
- Why is she trying to tie Texas’s campus carry law to a shooting that took place on a “gun-free” campus before the law took effect?
Texas’s campus carry law took effect at public four-year universities on August 1, 2016, and at public two-year community colleges on August 1, 2017. To date, no public university or college in Texas has reported a resulting injury or threat.
Nationwide, more than 350 college campuses allow the licensed, concealed carry of handguns in classrooms and have done so for a combined total of more than 2,000 biannual semesters, with no reports of resulting fatalities, assaults, or suicide attempts.
Quinn Cox, Southwest regional director for Students for Concealed Carry (SCC), commented, “Given both the success of campus carry throughout the Lone Star State and the political makeup of Texas House District 108, we’re confident in saying that Ms. Cattanach probably shouldn’t have quit her day job.”
ABOUT STUDENTS FOR CONCEALED CARRY
Students for Concealed Carry (SCC) is a national, non-partisan, grassroots organization comprising college students, faculty, staff, and concerned citizens who believe that holders of state-issued concealed handgun licenses should be allowed the same measure of personal protection on college campuses that current laws afford them virtually everywhere else. SCC is not affiliated with the NRA or any other organization. For more information on SCC, visit ConcealedCampus.org or Facebook.com/ConcealedCampus. For more information on the debate over campus carry in Texas, visit WhyCampusCarry.com