Last month saw the largest anti-gun rally in Texas when students at University of Texas in Austin carried dildos to class in protest of a new state law that makes it legal for gun owners to carry concealed firearms into public university campus buildings. Last October, University of Texas student Jessica Jin started a campaign called ‘Cocks Not Glocks‘ to protest against the legislation but sadly the Senate Bill went into effect on August 1st.
Even though she and her supporters weren’t able to stop the legislation, they went ahead with their demonstration anyway. “It offers a visual representation of what it would look like if the gun lobby really got what it wanted, which is the complete normalisation of gun culture,” Jin told reporters. “A lot of our American culture is still so puritanical and we see that in the continual normalising of gun culture, while shutting down sex culture, which is pretty harmless and happy.”
She went on to say, “If the guns around you aren’t making you uncomfortable, then maybe this dildo protest will make you think twice about what it is that makes you feel uncomfortable, and why.” The University of Texas campus in Austin has a population of around 50,000 students and at the time of going to press, around 10,000 people had RSVP’ed to take part in the demonstration, according to the campaign’s event page on Facebook.
At a pre-rally event, Jin and her team gave out 4,500 dildos that had been donated by local vendors to supporters. “Hopefully students will leave dildos on their backpack as long as there are guns in students’ backpacks,” Jin said. Visit www.cocksnotglocks.org for more information about the movement.