John Lott has an editorial over at Fox News, talking about how some universities not only want their students disarms, but their police as well:
But citizens and police who pack heat do help, because they can stop a shooting while it is happening. Amazingly, opposition to guns on campuses is so extreme that some even oppose police being able to carry guns.
When, in the wake of the Virginia Tech shooting, campus police at Brandeis University asked that they be armed to prevent similar tragedies, the president of the Brandeis Student Union even argued that, “the sense of community and the sense of safety would be disturbed very much by having guns on campus.â€
The administration is now considering arming its officers but has not taken action. By Sept. 10, the University of Iowa, Iowa State University and the University of Northern Iowa will also decide whether to end an almost 30-year ban and allow campus police to again carry handguns.
They really do live in another world. I happens that I went to a school that did not have an armed police force. I was once a witness to an incident on campus that required immediate attention, where a group of men were threatening another man who was waving the group off with a tire iron (it was a union dispute). I watched several campus security people sit there, watching, talking in their radios, not getting involved. It wasn’t until the Philadelphia Police showed up and injected themselves quite forcefully into the situation, that the incident was quelled. Campus security was about as effective as anybody with a cell phone when the shit hit the fan.
You can’t ask people to enforce the law without being able to protect themselves, and I’d rather have campus police that can do something about a situation rather than sit there and watch. College administrators can pretend that deranged killers are going to check the student handbook, and reconsider going on a spree, but forcing everyone else, campus police and CCL holders alike, to protect your fragile and false reality with their lives is unconscionable.