UT System Wants Campus Carry Drafts by February

The University of Texas System expects its 14 schools to submit rules for concealed handguns on their campuses by mid-February to comply with the state's new campus-carry law, officials said in a press release Tuesday. 

The UT System Board of Regents will review the proposals, and will have the opportunity to change them, before official guidelines detailing where guns will be allowed and where they will not are finalized sometime this spring, the system said. 

On Tuesday, a system task force issued a report on the law to university presidents and Chancellor Bill McRaven. It suggested five areas where guns should be banned — child care centers, stadiums, laboratories with dangerous chemicals, laboratories with animals and hospitals or clinics. Most individual schools were already expected to declare those areas gun-free.

The report did not make recommendations on more controversial areas, such as dormitories and classrooms. UT-Austin has suggested banning guns in dorms, though some state leaders say that would violate the new law. Many professors have been urging their university presidents to ban guns in classrooms. Lawmakers have said that would be illegal, too, and draft rules being considered at most of the biggest schools in the state don't include classrooms in the gun-free zones.  

The new campus carry law goes into effect Aug. 1. It allows people with concealed handgun licenses to carry their weapons inside university buildings, except in the limited gun-free zones designated by those schools. Those zones can't have the practical effect of banning guns campus-wide, however. 

Disclosure: The University of Texas at Austin is a corporate sponsor of The Texas Tribune. A complete list of Tribune donors and sponsors can be viewed here.