A University of Kansas professor has decided to protest campus carry law by wearing a bullet proof vest to class all year.
Filmmaker and professor Kevin Wilmott wants to make a statement about students walking around the University of Kansas campus armed to the teeth by protecting himself for the inevitable.
"One of the things I told them was, 'You try to ignore that I'm wearing a bulletproof vest, and I'll try to ignore that you could be packing a .44 Magnum,' " he told The Washington Post.
According to Kansas law, students are allowed to carry guns on campus because of the perceived belief that a good guy with a gun can stop a bad guy with a gun. The law created in 2013 was enacted this past summer despite opposition from university employees.
In a 2016 report from NPR, 20,000 employees from all Kansas Board of Regents schools found massive disapproval for the new law.
The survey the report mentions concluded that 70 percent of those responded said that the law will have a negative effect on their classrooms while 20 percent said it would not. Two-thirds or 66 percent said that the law would prevent educators from teaching the material by encouraging spirited discourse. And most of all, nearly half surveyed believed that guns on campus would contribute to crime.
"If everybody had to walk around with guns strapped on their hips like in the Old West, I think people would be a lot less comfortable with it," Wilmott said. "So me walking around with a bulletproof vest reminds everyone that this is actually going on."
The feature filmmaker is at odds with the school's policy on this issue and he wants students to be prepared too for possible violence. So, he added an amendment to his syllabus that permitted students to wear a bullet proof vest.
School policy states that guns should not be seen by others, it should be kept in a safe space and if the gun is openly displayed, a student can be asked to leave campus.
"We've seen what happened in these horrible incidences at Sandy Hook and Virginia Tech and a bunch of places around the country," he explained. "And I don't think it's the students' job to turn into Rambo to try to take on somebody that might be out to do us harm."