The Washington Post just doesn’t get it and never will, judging by the opening grafs of its article on the deadly shooting rampage at Northern Illinois University:
If there were lessons learned after the Virginia Tech massacre, they were: Lock down and notify. Virginia Tech officials did neither until hours after the first shots sounded across the Blacksburg campus in April. Northern Illinois University did not make the same mistake Thursday.
But the university’s actions still could not stop a man armed with powerful rapid-fire weapons and the intent to kill as many people as possible, higher-education and safety experts said Friday. …
By many preliminary accounts, the university did well: Within 30 seconds of a report of shots fired at Cole Hall, the first officer was on the scene. But he was too late. Stephen P. Kazmierczak, a former graduate student at the school, armed with a 12-gauge shotgun and three pistols, had already sprayed more than 50 rounds of buckshot and bullets at panicked students before turning one of his weapons on himself. Six people, including the shooter, were killed, and 16 were wounded.
NIU President John Peters tells The Associated Press that the emergency alert system the school developed after the Virginia Tech massacre is a response plan “meant to contain the carnage rather than keep it from happening, ” and the university’s police chief, Donald Grady insists that, “[I]t’s unlikely that anyone would ever have the ability to stop an incident like this from beginning.” Unless, AP opines (this is a news story, by the way), “colleges are willing to turn themselves into armed camps.”
By “armed camps” AP means at least one trained and licensed professor or student in Cole Hall who could have dropped Kazmierczak after he got off the first couple of shots. True, no one can stop that first shot from being fired, but shooting back at a crazed gunman is more effective at containing the carnage than shooting off e-mails warning students of a crazed gunman on campus.
Taking aim at “gun free zone” campuses, radio talk show host Doug Giles point blank asks, “College Presidents: How Many Students Have To Die Before You Allow Guns On Your Campus?”: “[I]f your foe has a gun, then he has a solid and deadly advantage, and the cops can’t get there fast enough to do much about it. … your campus must have deadly force on the spot to counter deadly force. Duh.”
Here’s how NIU student Allison Warren, 20 plans to protect herself against the next campus massacre: “I’m going to be looking over my shoulder and skeptical of people coming into class late.”
Good luck with that, Allison.
Note: The Stiletto writes about politics and other stuff at The Stiletto Blog.
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Follow-up comment rss or Leave a TrackbackEXPERT GROUP DISCOVERS 5 REASONS WHY COLLEGES AND UNIVERSITIES ARE NOT SAFE
The SERAPH Research Team, consisting of education and law enforcement experts have discovered five reasons, which create unsafe college campuses.
The SERAPH Research Team provides a bi-yearly school safety report for Congress and in 2006 provided an assessment of the “The Virginia Tech Review Panel Report”.
1. Since the Columbine massacre in 1999, police departments across the United States have been training in “active shooter” response. This has been a well-established practice for use in public [K-12] schools.
However, our survey of colleges and universities security directors and police chiefs shows that few have had this training. Two reasons were given for this, the first was the cost, administrators did not want to pay for the training and second administrators barred campus security / police administrators from seeking out the training because they did not want a “militaristic campus atmosphere”.
2. College Administrators have no training in security or police operations and as a result micromanage security operations on their campuses. This is problematic because of the obvious delay it causes in response time. In addition, when a college or university has a police department micromanagement by administrators can violate state law regarding obstruction of justice.
3. A proper security audit is vitally important to campus security. However, our survey of security directors / police chiefs indicates that most college administrators will not allow these assessments to be done. Two reasons for this refusal is the fear of liability exposure and the chance that the audit would require changes in management systems.
4. Threat assessment as a science has existed in the United States since the early 1940s. Predication and prevention of violence is a critical aspect of campus security and one that in SERAPH’s experience is seriously lacking on higher education campuses. All Resident Assistants, security / police and department administrators should be trained to identify violent behavior in students, staff and visitors.
A lack of systematic monitoring of people on campus contributes to crime.
5. An emergency plan is only as good as the data in it and the ability of key personnel to use it effectively.
Training is important for the effective management of an emergency by key personnel. You cannot ask untrained people to do what trained people do.
SERAPH Research Team http://www.seraph.net/about_seraph.html
Well, the first step is to train and arm campus security. Once college admins have gotten over that psychological barrier the next step is to allow trained, licensed professors and students to pack heat because the campus security cannot get there in time to stop multiple murders. One quick-thinking, armed person in the same room as the crazed gunman will do the trick.
In a column posted today, Chuck Norris argues that a lack of religious values contributes to an increase in school shootings. The link is Here .
I got a question….What if the students have no idea what to do?? My college has no publicized plan of action, as i know of. I have no idea what i would do if a shooter entered a building and started shooting. What am i to do, run???? Duck and hide?? Shouldn’t the student body have at least a simple game plan on how to react??
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