See also www.GoodForTheCountry.com
According to Las Vegas News 3 and LasVegasNow.com, Nevada colleges are acknowledging not only how serious school shootings are, but are looking at arming faculty. This is entirely the wrong direction for several reasons.
1. Many Nevadans are already well trained, qualified and background-checked. Nevada is a right-to-carry state, and concealed carry of weapons is common there. If these men and women are reasonable and safe enough to carry on the street, why not on campus?
Personal safety is not checked at the Admissions Office in reliance on others, and the idea of self-defense being allowed or not allowed is unAmerican, unreasonable, and very resentful to a qualified taxpayer who instructs administrators and not the other way around. The idea that officials can overrule citizens and to their detriment as the victim disarmament zones have been is one of the major defects in official thinking. It’s not surprising that the bureaucracy is offering a bureaucratic solution, consistently one of self-interest over genuine public safety and authority.
Arming faculty is to make the very same mistake many trustees are making: freezing the citizen out of the equation in a “Don’t do anything until we get there!” bureaucratic mind-set. This is too self-dealing.
2. Arming only delegated persons isn’t going to cut it. With the firepower in the hands of a person who could be so easily known to a shooter, all the shooter needs to do is wait for the individual to go off campus, and bingo. Brilliant. The entire strategy behind concealed carry throughout Nevada is that the aggressor is never certain who is carrying and who will return fire. Or how many will answer and hold him for police as armed students have in the past. [For the model of what to do in Virginia, look to the Appalachian Law School incident of January 16th, 2002 where two armed law students there held the shooter at gunpoint long before police could arrive. Keyword: Appalachian law school shootings.]
3. News reports treat the Nevada question well, and some interviewed say they prefer to leave it to the professionals. This could make sense, but for one thing: school shootings are completed well before the police are notified, much less on scene. As we have seen, shootings move fast in taking what they really want, then the shooter commits suicide for the purpose of evading justice – itself an offense.
4. In Nevada as in the other states, police have no duty to protect individuals. Keyword: police have no duty to protect.
Friends, if we’re talking about student safety, colleges and other institutions need to accept the facts for any serious-minded approach:
1. Students and visitors are already possessed of all legal authority to stop a crime in progress, may come to the aid of another, and are within established public policy and interest throughout the rest of the state, are they not? Yes, they are. No yes, but about it.
2. Armed students are already on scene. They are immediately available in large numbers. It’s like teaching first-aid and CPR to citizens. The most critical response time is then immediately, and with that legal authority, the law is already on scene.
3. It doesn’t take 21 weeks of training to take such a situation in hand. According to the FBI, based on reports handed in by police nationwide, armed citizens de-escalate violence more than 2.5 million times a year. And that’s key: de-escalating the situation. And they use their legal authority.
Now that’s the way to student safety.
Where carrying a gun on campus is a Class E felony – even in a right-to-carry state – it’s obviously time now to de-criminalize personal decisions which serve the public interest as armed citizens do. It’s against public policy and interest to force an adult student or visitor to choose between felony and funeral. Ban the ban on handguns.
The bottom line is that in time of emergency, the target is the first line of defense, and with full legal authority to act. This authority can no longer be obfuscated or punished by officials who believe their authority trumps that of the people they serve.
When facing grave danger alone as students must, no matter what officials promise, no one can take your place as the first line of defense.
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John Longenecker is author of The Case For Nationwide Concealed Carry, available worldwide. See www.TransferOfWealth.net
