Campus safety follies

When the Columbine shootings took place in 1999, my son said; “This will bring out the stupid in everyone”.  That observation still holds following the ‘08 Valentine’s day shooting at NIU, and it could hardly get any stupider than this:

An armed man who burst into a classroom at Elizabeth City State University was role-playing in an emergency response drill, but neither the students nor assistant professor Jingbin Wang knew that. “I was prepared to die at that moment,” Wang said Tuesday…

Charlotte News-Observer: Mock Gunman terrifies students

There’s lots of entertaining stupidity in the article but here’s my favorite part:

John Pierce of Bristol, Va., a spokesman for a pro-gun Internet group called OpenCarry.org, said the university’s drill was poorly planned and dangerous. He said people in the class could have been killed or injured trying to escape or could have harmed the role player.

He called for the state to make it legal for individuals to carry firearms for self-defense. He said North Carolina is one of 16 states that make it a crime for people to carry firearms on campuses.

I’m not categorically opposed to carry laws for certain situations and with with certain restrictions.  But we shouldn’t have any illusions about how much good they might do.

Bonus question: if one of the students had been packing, and he had heroically shot the ‘gunman’ (who was a campus police officer but they didn’t know that), would he have been given a medal?  Or charged with a crime?

Notes and links:

Posted by George on 03/02/08 at 06:13 AM
Geeky • Security • (2) Comments • Link
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