Gun Activists Plan to Stage a Fake Mass Shooting This Weekend

Gun rights activists plan to conduct a “theatrical performance” of a mock mass shooting this Saturday on the University of Texas at Austin’s campus – an attention-grabbing effort to highlight their opposition to gun-free zones. These target rich environments are letting our children be murdered by evil people. Matthew Short said they’ll use fake blood, cardboard weapons, gun noises played from bullhorns, and people to play first responders. Short said his group does not want any such zones, which it calls “victim-killing zones”.

“When seconds count, cops are minutes away”, Short said.

The university, the site of the nation’s documented mass shooting on a college campus in 1966, did not immediately return request for comment.

Short told the Statesman he wasn’t anxious “at all” that the demonstration would be met with criticism or look in bad taste following the Paris and San Bernardino mass shootings in the past month. “People were able to be murdered people [sic] because no one was armed”.

“We want criminals to fear the public being armed”, he told the newspaper. “An armed society is a polite society”. It’s all in the name of ending gun-free zones.

Guns are now banned on the Austin campus but will be allowed next August after a new law goes into effect.

The “crisis performance event” itself will involve actors being “shot” with mock guns, just over a week after the San Bernardino mass shooting took 14 individual lives.

The staged shooting will be proceeded by an open carry march by the groups.

UT faculty, staff, students and the community have been embroiled in a bitter fight regarding campus carry ever since Republican Gov. Greg Abbott signed legislation that would allow for campus carry in June.

More than 1,800 students, parents and faculty members belong to the Gun Free UT group, according to the group’s Facebook page, which has been made private.