When Neil Vickers first heard about the May 3 active shooter situation at North Lake College in Irving, he said it really hit home.

“No doubt those [emergencies] kind of resonate, and you can’t help obviously but to start to really look inwards again and ask,  ‘Are we as prepared as we should be?’” the Austin Community College interim executive vice president of planning and operations said.

Texas is one of eight states that allows campus carry. Below is some data related to the law.[/caption]

He said as his staff works to implement campus carry—also known as Senate Bill 11, which allows licensed handgun carriers to bring their concealed guns onto certain areas of campus—a broader conversation about safety and security has emerged.

Concerns from faculty, staff and students were raised during campus carry forums this spring as ACC collected feedback before the Aug. 1 implementation.

Annalise Flores, an ACC student and mother of three, said at one forum she had not received any training on what to do in an active shooter situation at ACC.

“Honestly, I am still clueless as to what we’re supposed to do in the event of emergency,” she said.

According to www.everytownresearch.org, a website that tracks school shootings and advocates for gun safety, 11 community colleges have faced school shootings that either involved an attempted or completed suicide, an unintentional firing of a handgun or an attack using a gun since 2013. The May 3 North Lake College active shooter situation, in which police said a man killed a woman before killing himself, brings that number to 12.

Vickers said ACC is having discussions on better ways to enhance training for the community in the event of an active shooter.

“What we really want to do is just have a broader awareness ... and training effort,” he said.

One of the challenges ACC had in communicating the new law to students was the misunderstanding that campus carry is open carry, a law that allows licensed Texans to openly carry a handgun in certain public places and was passed in the same legislative session as campus carry.

“It bears mentioning and underscoring this, because this is a question we’ve received a lot,” said Chris Cervini, head of the ACC Campus Carry Implementation Task Force.

He said development of ACC’s policy—which CEO and President Richard Rhodes is set to approve in the next few weeks—was modeled after the policies of four-year universities, which began implementing the law in August 2016.

ACC’s policy will include certain “exclusion zones”—areas on campus where licensed-to-carry individuals may not bring their guns—such as polling places, locations where prekindergarten through 12th-grade school-sponsored activities are held and laboratories with dangerous chemicals.

“At the end of the day, the onus of the law is on the gun owner to ensure that while they are on campus, their handgun remains concealed at all times,” Cervini said.