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Colleges Training Professors in Improvised Weapons

In a response to the school shootings of the past few years, hundreds of colleges have purchased a training program that teaches professors and students to take a more aggressive role when confronted with attackers, including the use of improvised weapons. The program urges you to be ready to respond to a shooter by taking advantage of the inherent strength in numbers and how to use a laptop or a backpack to defend yourself. Domenick Brouillette, who administered the course at Metropolitan Community College, said, "Survivors prepare themselves both mentally and emotionally to do what it takes. It might involve life-threatening risk. You may do something you never thought you were capable of doing." A sword would be nice but a pen will work in a pinch.

13 comments

  1. and in recent news... by BobSixtyFour · · Score: 1

    school shootings have gone down, however, would-be school shooters are now arming themselves with backpacks, laptops, and overclocked staplers as they attempt to instill fear in the student body. Pen bombs and rubber-band-powered-mechanical-pencil-bb-guns have also been sighted.

  2. Pathetic by ElectricTurtle · · Score: 2, Insightful

    People should listen to John Lott. The only effective defense against homicidal individuals with guns is a similarly armed resistance. If teachers were armed, no school shooting with be even a fraction as lethal as Columbine or Virginia Tech.

    People need to be more practical about firearms. They are a pre-industrial technology, and as such the genie will never go back into the bottle. The fact is any reasonably intelligent person can make guns and powder for themselves. They're just tubes in which to put powder and projectiles essentially, and as such all controls on them only effect the harmless and the innocent. Gun control has always and will always fail to get arms out of the hands of criminals. It's not a problem that can be legislated away.

    The sooner that teachers and other responsible adults in private life can be regularly armed, the safer and more polite the whole of society will become. Violent crime in every state that has enacted concealed carry legislation has either remained the same or decreased. Meanwhile those urban areas that remain most hostile to self-defense, such as Chicago and Washington DC, are in constant competition for the dubious title of having the most murders each year.

    And before anybody trots out the thin blue line, consider how many people have died cowering with a phone in their hands waiting for a police response. When a lethal threat is in your face, you don't have half an hour for the police to show up. When a lethal threat is already in the same building as you are, you'll live or die in a matter of minutes. Not to mention in drastic scenarios like Columbine or Virginia Tech, the police spend a lot of time simply gathering intel and organizing. They don't even move in to situations like those for excruciatingly long periods of time.

    Privately armed individuals stopped the rampage at the Appalachian Law School, but the anti-self-defense media did their best to cover that up, just in case anybody with sense was paying attention and might connect the dots.

    --
    I support the Slashcott and will not be reading or commenting from 2/10/14 to 2/17/14. Beta is steaming pile of dog shit
    1. Re:Pathetic by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Yes, because giving EVERYONE access to guns will totally prevent a suicidal would-be murderer from carrying out their plan.

    2. Re:Pathetic by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Actually, it likely will.

      Criminal, bullet, face. You do the math.

      Think about all the high-profile mass murders you've heard about in the last decade or three and compare them for the single common element. Where do they all happen?

      Schools, malls, government buildings. What do these places have in common? They're all enclosed areas with lots of people who are prohibited from carrying with them weapons with which to defend themselves. So, the motivated homicidal shooter knows he has a place where he'll have a fuckton of targets who can't run very far and, very importantly, can't fight back.

      When was the last time you heard of a mass shooting at a police station? A gun show? A hunting lodge? Guess what those things have in common? Lots of people there have quick access to guns. Duh.

    3. Re:Pathetic by TheLink · · Score: 1

      How often do these school shootings occur and how many people are killed per year?

      How often do the "usual" robbery/murder shootings occur and how many people are killed per year?

      Yes the genie is out of the bottle for the USA so you guys are going to have to live with it.

      Meanwhile things are fine in many other countries where gun control is really tight, and I doubt they want things USA-style.

      My countryfolk are far from as disciplined and conforming as the Swiss, most can't even handle a car responsibly, so a proliferation of guns and an "arms race" is not what I'd want.

      As for your armed militia protecting against the government, it's more likely the most powerful armed militia is the one that sets up the next Dictatorship. You want to fix stuff get people to stick to using votes while they have them (rather than changing TV channels) and stop pretending you're "soldiers" or that it's something so good to have.

      If everyone is inclined to fight fire with fire the whole country will be ablaze.

      --
    4. Re:Pathetic by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      making stuff up?

      the pro-gun stuff is all a lie.

      http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Appalachian_School_of_Law_shooting

      http://www.law.com/jsp/article.jsp?id=1024078861416

    5. Re:Pathetic by ghstomahawks · · Score: 2, Insightful

      I agree, it'll likely prevent mass murders. Now here's my question ... would the countless single murders committed solely because a gun was at hand be worth it?

    6. Re:Pathetic by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      You're only half right, other AC.

      The biggest factor in stopping the shooting, according to both the Bridges and Benson accounts, is that students fought back: they decided that the shooter had to stop and backed up their decisions with decisive physical action. Their success came from their decisiveness and training more than their weapons.

      On the other hand, the fact that Bridges and Gross were armed did not make the situation any worse. There is no indication that if they had their firearms on their persons, that the situation would have been any worse. In short, nothing that occurred in the Appalachian School of Law shooting refutes claims of the pro-gun movement or demonstrates the efficacy of gun regulation of any kind.

      Really, the law had little impact. What did was the martial training received by the responding students. With that in mind, the smart thing to do is to train students in at least the basics of self defence--especially the importance of the self-defence mindset. With that training and mindset in place, I see no reason at all for colleges to not permit qualified students to carry weapons on their persons, just as they would be allowed elsewhere in the States. However the mindset is more important than weapons--something that both Europeans and Americans would do well to remember.

    7. Re:Pathetic by localman · · Score: 1
      It is true that if teachers were armed then rampage style killings would be brought to a close much more quickly. I also agree that guns will always be with us and we have to deal with that. However I take exception to the common claim that if more people were armed that violence would go down in all cases. The problem with this claim is that you can find instances where it is simply not true.

      Yes: in smaller communities where most people assume they will live long and well, and are not terribly angry, arming the populace is probably a fine idea.

      However there are more than enough examples of messed up areas where violence gets worse as the number of guns goes up. Witness any poverty stricken gangland areas of the US for plenty of data. If there are enough people in an environment who are angry at the environment and aren't sure they'll live long anyways, then arming the populous just makes things worse.

      In the end, guns are not themselves good or ill. They just take on the tone of the environment. I support gun rights in general, but I accept that in some places, for practical reasons, guns must be controlled.

      As to the specifics, I guess we'll hash that out when people stop taking simplified, polarized views of it.

      Cheers.

    8. Re:Pathetic by dafrazzman · · Score: 1

      This could also apply to military disputes, not just domestic ones. Think about it. Any random city isn't likely to have significant access to immediate military protection. Most people in the US would be sitting ducks if even a small militarized force decided to attack. Now, if all those people had guns (even a hand gun), we'd at least give them a tough time (Every male Swiss, on the other hand, has military training and access to guns). With advanced warning, militias could even be formed, something that is impossible if nobody in the city has guns (excepting the police force, but they make up a minority of the overall people). If a gun free city were attacked, improvised office supplies would likely be the best weapons available, unless you count the guns in the hands of gangs and homicidal maniacs, but chances are they wouldn't stick their neck out, especially since doing so would get them in trouble anyway.

      --
      My preferred name is frazz, but someone keeps taking it. If you see him, tell him I said hi.
  3. Post-Apocalyptic Weaponry by mishan · · Score: 1

    Perhaps this is what the world will use as weapons after World War III -- modified office supplies rather than sticks and stones as Einstein originally predicted.

  4. Given: Armed person enters classroom. Solve for X. by LifesABeach · · Score: 1

    This problem was basically solved by schools in china, many years ago; yup, the Shaolin, and others, figured it out. Not only could the teachers defend themselves, so could the students. Maybe if a student was taught to have confidence in themselves, turning to a gun would be trivialized, maybe. But with 360+ million people in the U.S., the bio statistics are unity that someone, somewhere will go Rambo.