I appreciate Orin's response to my post. If university police officers were indeed always or generally available within "even seconds," we'd have less need for others to be armed. But I don't share his perception of campuses being "crawling with officers from campus police departments"; it doubtless varies from campus to campus, but I almost never see UCLA police officers right around the law school. Perhaps they can come within "even seconds," or at least "minutes," but I rarely see them physically at the law school, whereas there are almost sure to be other university employees much closer.
This does raise the question, though, of what happened at Virginia Tech. Can anyone speak to how long it took for the police to be called, how long it took for them to arrive, and how quickly did they go in after the shooter when they arrived? (I should note that Virginia Tech is a large campus, much larger than UCLA, which I believe is in turn somewhat larger than George Washington University, where Orin teaches.)
Related Posts (on one page):
- My Favorite Comment, from the Armed Professors Thread:
- Armed Police Officers at Universities:
- Armed Professors and Mass Killings:
The vast majority of people shot with handguns do not die.
Most of the people who were shot at VT did die.
The most common cause of death from gunshots is blood loss.
Indeed. Though if senators were armed, witnesses might hesitate before lying to them.
Post of the day.
Yeah, but if the witnesses were armed (CCW's - afterall, if schools shouoldn't be gun-free zones, why should the Capitol building be?), would the Senators be willing to challenge them in the first place?
1.)Allowing arms to professors would highlight, in public, the differences between the tenure track elites and everyone else in academia, when many tenured professors would like to obscure that difference, in public.
2.)For an armed professor to shoot and kill *any* violent intruder in their classroom would fuzz the distinction that many want to highlight, between the "peaceful" polity of the campus, and the violence the military uses to defend society in general. By contrast, a deranged student shooter is easily "defined out" of the academic community, just because he brought violence into it.
Many in academia believe their moral competence rests on a lack of violence in academic life. The anti-military atmosphere of so many campuses draws immense "moral weight" from the lack of violence needed in an academic setting. This gives great emotional support to the beliefs of many, that somehow the campus is a "better place", whose elites and structures would be copied with profit in the wider society.
While many other reasons for not arming professors will be adduced, I fear that these internal political reasons, inside academia, will drive the debate, on one side, at least. They would agree to a massive increase in police before they will ever agree to seeing professors, much less students, armed. Yes, this is in spite of the exemplum of Utah.
Regards,
Tom Billings
I can't help but believe that if he had a firearm accessable in his office he could have made an even bigger difference in the final outcome. I don't know if he had any training in handgun usage or any interest, and not knowing his position on firearms ownership I certainly don't want to take his name in vain or use it in disrespect. Armed or not he moved toward the danger and paid the ultimate price for doing so, a brave and noble act.
If there are others in the university community of sober judgment and demonstrated responsibility (of the kind that it takes to obtain a CHL permit) who would do the same it seems that allowing these people, at their own expense, to be armed if the situation arises is a good thing. As was pointed out in previous posts, this occurs at little to no net cost to the university.
I agree with CB, given the methodical nature of this crime it seems likely the first event was intended to be a distraction.
Did you read Hesse's "The Glass Bead Game?" Remember how it ended?
Texas is different:
Please notify us immediately when your mind-reading evil-detector is ready for production.
The rest of us live in the real world.
I spent 12 years in the military. I served in the Navy for 6 years and in the Army. My training and inclinations don't relegate me well to the role of cowering in a classroom hoping a shooter will pass by. I would be improvising a club out of a desk or a book back, organizing a team of people next to the door to ambush the shooter if he entered. To try and take him down with a mass of people. We might fail, some might get wounded or killed in the process, but we wouldn't be slaughtered like sheep.
I weep for the victims of this madman and I am in awe of the stories of people who sacrificed themselves trying to take positive steps. But there a couple hundred people in the building, if they had worked together, unarmed or armed with improvised weapons, they could have taken him down with sheer numbers.
Colleges foster an environment of non-violence. They believe it gives them moral superiority over the common masses. Maybe they can deign to have unarmed self-defense classes taught and encouraged on their campuses.
Pah, far from being moral, this is a morally bankrupt philosophy. The academic Eloi can only have their "non-violent better place" if others - specifically, police and campus security (i.e. less well-educated lower-class Morlocks) - are willing to do violence to defend it.
Sort of like being a defendant in a court of law, when an armed police officer(s) is testifying for the prosecution.
Are law enforcement officers disarmed when entering a courthouse? Or are they more equal before the law than average citizens?
Here at USC, the campus security officers are armed, and there are a significant number of them on campus at any given time. Based simply on the fact that I see 10+ officers every single day, I suspect that they could be anywhere on campus within a minute or two. USC says their campus response time is three minutes or less.
I was previously a student at UCLA. At UCLA, there appear to be significantly fewer officers on duty at any given time. Also, they do not patrol on campus as often (or at least, not as visibly). Finally, UCLA is a larger campus.
Perhaps this is largely a money question -- maybe more universities need to spend like USC on security.
Several reports that Cho was an active shooter for over *twenty* minutes. That is an extremely significant fact.
**The breaching policy of the VT police may be the biggest problem in this entire case.**
I don't know about Professor Volokh, but I certainly would contend that :)
"Finally"? Don't you think the vastly different neighborhoods in which USC and UCLA are located have something to do with the disparity you perceived?
maybe more universities need to spend like USC on security.
How many universities have had rioters burn down a strip mall right across the street from campus? This happened at USC in 1992.
Asking universities, especially rural ones like VT, to spend USC-like levels on security is pretty absurd.
BTW, one of the professors had a very good relationship with the city and campus police, and used this to arrange for students to tour jails, do ride-alongs and otherwise see some of the aspects of law enforcement that the law-abiding usually do not. It was a useful supplement to book-learned criminal law and I'd recommend it.
UCLA is adjoins Bel Air, Westwood, and Brentwood. AKA where Ice Cube lives now in his $5 million + estate. That they have "slightly" different levels of policing shouldn't be shocking.
VT police can't really be faulted. They're in a very small town, where the University population utterly dominates, and they don't deal with much serious crime. Add to that the size of the campus, and they had no chance. Tuesday campus was absolutely full of police, thanks to the Presiodent's visit. How many extra police was that, and from how far did they have to bring them in? There's no way that any serious police presence could be justified on an ongoing basis. Nothing happens at VT, until a psychopath brings unthinkable horror. This is why the "milita" is in the US Constitution: at the time mobilisation and transport could take weeks if not months. Large, rural campuses have similar problems.
His thirty-two dead victims and 15 wounded means that he used at least 47 bullets. Given that handguns are not particularly accurate, my guess is that he used many more bullets than that.
Taking all the emotion away, it's reasonable to assume that he killed himself when he ran out of ammunition.
We are developing a culture of passivity. This is not to disparage the VT community; my son graduated from VT; it's a great school.
I looked up the FBI stats on crime on campus here and the distribution I found to be a little surprising. Perhaps there is something about the definitions I don't know. In 2005, there were 2,712 violent crimes on campus, of which 1,445 were aggravated assault, 761 robbery, 501 forcible rape and 5 murder or non-negligent homicide. I would have thought there would be more death proportional to assault and rape. Anyhow, there are 15 million or so enrolled college students. So that's about one violent crime per 5,000 students on campus. (The same year there were about 1.4 million violent crimes altogether according to this, making about 1 crime per 225 people. Unless I am missing something about the statistics, which is likely, it seems campuses are drastically safer than the rest of society.) As for mass killings, they rarely happen. Average death rate of one a year?
There are about a million or so college teachers. To have an affect on mass killings or crime generally, one would want 50,000 or 100,000 of them to decide to carry. Where would they keep them at lunch, when lecturing, when going to the bathroom? How many, absent minded, would lose them or lose track of them? How many would wind up having their guns pilfered by students or criminals generally? How many would be shot by students they were taunting or groping? Adding 50,000 guns to campuses in the hands of semi-trained and unsupervised people will have its effects. So what is the trade-off.
For mass killings, it doesn't seem worth it. It would not prevent mass killings, whose perpetrators are undeterrable. It would have reduced casualties the other day, in the face of a handgun-toting killer, to have professors firing back right away and not relying on the cops outside to finish establishing a perimeter. But armed professors couldn't do a lot about the 1966 sniper guy. Another commenter mentions that one professor did fire back, missing I guess.
Would 50,000 armed professors (and the uncertainty they create in the minds of perps as to who was armed) reduce more routine violent crime on campus? Certainly the regular perp, unlike the lone nut, prefers not to be shot. But I suspect the vast majority of victims in campus violent crime are (a) students and (b) not in or near class at the time. I am guessing that, but it seems logical. Much of the crime probably happens at night, when teachers tend to be away from the campus. An armed teacher might help, but most of the time would be no closer than the average campus cop. To deter those crimes, you'd have to let students, many drunk, half male, most about 20 years old, have guns.
I think campuses are pretty safe and the measures currently being taken are not far off what would make them safer.
I'm generally sympathetic with your assessment of our culture, but I'd urge you to take a closer look at Virginia Tech before you paint us with the same brush. We have a very active and visible corp of cadets, a large ROTC program, and a generally positive attitude toward the military. Before accusing our students and faculty of passivity, one needs to take into account the extreme suddenness of the attack. Surprise attacks work - even on trained, experience troops. Some of those who had time to assess the situation and prepare themselves mounted what seems to me to be the most effective defense possible. (I would relegate your suggestions to a fallback strategy.) That some untrained and inexperienced people failed to meet that standard when plunged suddenly into their first firefight should not surprise someone familiar with military history.
You are considering only the faculty, who are considerably outnumbered by the staff. The demographics and political affiliations of university staff, and therefore their propensity to hold concealed carry permits, are considerably different from the faculty.
Too many posters here, some of the proprietors included, think of universities as having only faculty and students. The staff are transparent to them.
Fair enough. How does it change the calculation, though?
The real problem here is the crazed killer. They're not deterrable. Multiplying the number of people who might have guns by four increases the number of people who might shoot the *ssholes by four.
A point to consider here is that focusing on deterrence as opposed to actual weapons use says a great deal about mindset.
We're not trying to change the behavior of mass murderers by eliminating "gun-free" zones where only the police and the homicidally inclined may have guns. The objective is to shoot the homicidally inclined before they can kill too many people.
Go to the Gate of Vienna website and read the account of the 1966 clock tower shooting. It appears more than one person had a rifle and was shooting back. The trained rifleman, Whitman was up there for 2 hours and managed to kill 16. Apparently recieving incoming fire prevented his kill number to go higher. So whether the professor was missing or not, it kept the shooter from killing more people.
Indeed it does. As I said, having armed good people wouldn't deter the crazed killer but would reduce casualties. The problem is that crazed mass murdering *ssholes are extremely rare. (Cho and Whitman ... Are there others? I don't know.) The other effects, good and ill, of arming professors would outweigh by a lot the lives saved during gunfights with crazed killers.
I doubt there is a causal reason but it seems that schools and colleges, gun-free as they are, are relatively safer than other places. VT would have been way better off with people armed the other day, but I don't think it can be extrapolated from that that colleges would be safer in general if people there were armed.
I'm not sure of your experiences at UCLA but as a very recent undergrad my interactions with the police led me to believe they were a very good force. On the very few occasions that I've had to call them (or had them called on one of my parties) they responded very quickly. While I didn't necessarily see too many cops wandering around campus, I did see a great many CSOs patrolling or watching over high traffic areas. CSOs essentially act as the eyes and ears of the police and do not have to call 911 to initiate a response.
"You may be right that campus police departments do not, in general, do the job that Kerr suggests they should do. I think the upshot of his point is that we do not need to implement new deterrents; we need to better use the deterrents we already have in place."
- I agree. Before throwing more guns on campus, wouldn't it make more sense to better train and equip the local police force?
One problem with arming so many professors is that guns will get stolen. At UCLA, if you left something laying around there was a good chance it'll get stolen. Unless you can guarantee that prof will always keep their guns on them (and I highly doubt you could) then some number of them will be stolen. I've seen a number of absent minded prof leave their jackets or materials behind. One time a prof even left his wallet behind...although I have no idea why he took it out of his pocket in the first place.
These are, of course, also the predictions of the people who are opposed to concealed carry laws. To bring some real-life experience into this discussion let me share my personal experience. I attended Michigan Tech in the 1960s. A very high proportion of the student body owned deer rifles (I owned one) or shotguns. My roommate had a pistol (I was too poor to be able to afford one) which he kept in our room.
To my knowledge no one was injured either accidentally or on purpose during my four years there despite the consumption of large quantities of adult beverages. I know of no guns stolen. And there were no instances of mass killing sprees despite the fact that the faculty and student body was heavily armed.
I did lose a friend as the result of a fall from a balcony at a Frat house during a drinking spree. No guns were involved.
Most people do not join the armed forces or serve as law enforcement officers. The ones who do are a self-selected group with, collectively, far, far more personal responsibility and self-discipline than those who don't. And that is BEFORE training.
The same goes for those faculty who go to the trouble of applying for concealed weapons permits.
I also suggest that those who keep mentioning the lack of responsibility of faculty they know are telling the truth about that. Responsible faculty demand more of their students.
That said, however (you know that word would show up eventually), I think you share a common misperception that has been repeated by others opposed to carry rights: that by allowing citizens to cary weapons we would be creating an environment that would be rich in "semi-trained and unsupervised" "absent minded" or even, as others have said, irresponsible armed people. The experience of myself and, I would hazard, most familiar with guns and gun culture would show otherwise.
I will concede that immediately following a repeal of cary prohibitions there very well may be rush to cary by some who should not. However, as the novelty wears off most of those folowing fashion will lapse and become less enchanted with actually doing the carrying. Those who will spend the required time, effort and money to get certified for a CC permit and have the discipline to cary regularly generally exhibit a certain level of responsibility. "Where would they keep them at lunch, when lecturing, when going to the bathroom?" you ask. They would cary it with them. That's what "cary" means. It is a commitment to exercise responsibility and control over their firearm.
One does not obtain the required training and certifications to cary lightly, and one who goes through the process generally does not take their responsibilities lightly. Is it your contention that professors are some special subset of the population that can be entrusted with the education of your child, but is not responsible enough to maintain control of their weapon? As another pointed out, your numbers and conclusions could make a convincing argument that it is not necessary for a professor to cary a weapon, but does not support the conclusion that they should be prohibited from doing so.