Hundreds of colleges across the nation have purchased a training program that teaches professors and students not to take campus threats lying down but to fight back with any "improvised weapon," from a backpack to a laptop computer.
I hope the academics don't forget the proven deterrent value of STDs, vomit and rat tail combs...
These are the folks proposing this band-aid. I feel safer already knowing their top men ("top men") have, among other qualifications, "a Master of Science Degree in Counseling and Human Resource Development," a degree from "the School of Large Church Management," and "a Bachelor’s degree in Biology from Penn State University."
What they don't tell us is how many active shooters these experts have personally successfully warded off while unarmed.
And here is a trailer for their program. Say--aren't those LEOs praising this legally armed wherever they go?
I was hoping to see if there was anything on the Internet we could readily use to illustrate the success of groups of unarmed people taking on a lone shooter, and this was the best I could come up with on short notice. I quit after several rounds of successful kills because, even though you need to reload for each shot, it didn't really reflect a swarm.
What would?
I suppose a modified version of this--but to truly assess benefits vs. costs, you'd need to compare it to what would happen if there was an armed good guy or two in the room.
Some will no doubt say we shouldn't automatically dismiss this baby step toward campus safety. I've always said one of the things I like about Jackie Chan movies is how he takes ordinary objects and deploys them as weapons--and I recommend that identifying such objects in our surroundings should be part of our everyday situational awareness. I also think it's useful that people start thinking about going through threats rather than running hopelessly from them or freezing. But this presupposes that a campus culture that teaches self defense is wrong--and that men in uniform are the "Only Ones" competent, qualified and trustworthy enough to serve as protectors--would produce a sufficient number of courageous souls willing to lead the charge into blazing hell and take some gaping chest wounds for the team.
Who's first? Who wants to be a zombie?
Adults don't need baby steps. We know what the real solution is.