This is pretty crazy. Elizabeth City State University decides to hold a mock gunman drill:
The News & Observer of Raleigh reported in Wednesday’s editions that an armed man burst into a classroom Friday, threatening to kill students. The drill came eight days after a gunman killed five people and himself in a classroom at Northern Illinois University.
Anthony Brown, vice chancellor of student affairs, said ECSU was testing its response to such shootings. E-mail and text messages were sent five days before the drill, notifying students, staff and faculty, he said.
“The intent was not to frighten them but to test our system and also to test the response of the security that was on campus and the people that were notified,” Brown said.
But not everyone got the word, including assistant professor Jingbin Wang, whose American foreign policy class was held hostage.
“I was prepared to die at that moment,” Wang said Tuesday of the moment the gunman entered the room.
What would you do in that situation? The report says it was a “red” plastic model gun. I’m guessing the type that officers use for training. Breda notes, relaying a story about a mouse she found in her garage:
A campus police officer posing as a gunman burst into a classroom, where he proceeded to hold the students hostage and terrorize them with a fake gun for 10 minutes. Not one of the students fought back. Not one thought to pick up a chair or a desk, or even a book, to defend themselves. They all lined up against a wall and passively waited for death.
One of the students said, “I was prepared to die at that moment.” Several students say they considered leaping from a window.
My mouse had more courage than this. Against insurmountable odds, it growled at me and prepared to fight, even to its death. The college students who meekly bared their throats to those who wanted to rip them out are dead already – they just don’t know it.
The will to live is life.
Even with an obviously fake gun, I would at least challenge the “attacker”. Hell, he might even get drawn on if he’s acting really erratic. I sincerely hope that most of the students knew this was the drill, and decided to play along.