Gunman Drill in North Carolina

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.

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8 thoughts on “Gunman Drill in North Carolina”

  1. apparently some of the students said later that they couldnt tell that it was fake because they were under such stress…

    good thing NC is a gun free school state or an officer might have been shot…

    IMO, this is a really good way to get innocent people killed

  2. What, exactly, is the law in NC regarding CCW on college campuses? It’s pretty crappy to think that if a CCW holder had stepped up to fight back, they might be facing a murder charge right now. . .

  3. I don’t check my university emails that often and I suspect that at least a few of the students are probably carrying despite the illegality. Would sure be tragic if a cop got shot while engaging in security theater.

  5. Hell, “future”? These kids are sheep now!

    I suppose, to someone observant and versed in such things, the red gun would have been a dead giveaway as to the “drill” nature of the event. ‘Course, then perverse people like me would have done all manner of stupidity with that revelation, but at least it might give the kids some manner of excuse for not reacting.

    That said, how you practice is how you perform, and if these people were unwilling to protect their lives and the lives of their classmates in a drill situation, it only goes to show how they will react in a real situation as well. Unfortunately, the shootings at Virginia Tech proved just how proactive the current college generation is in relation to their own self-defense and self-perpetuation… You would think that a largely instant-gratification, me-first group of people would be a little more interested in their own survival. That said, I guess none of us can know for certain how we will react in a given situation, such as a college shooting, until it actually transpires.

    All of that said, the school is horribly remiss for not announcing that this drill would be held on campus… Had someone been injured during its execution, God alone knows what would have come to pass.

  6. Textbooks, backpacks, chairs, the students had more than enough weapons to fight back with. To do nothing at all…. Well, breda was on the mark.

  7. thanks for the link, Sebastian. I heard the story earlier in the week and just couldn’t stop thinking about it. After all the school shootings we’ve been having lately, you’d think someone would have done something!

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