Virginia Polytechnic University has a policy manual instructing employees how to deal with a violent or angry individual. Among those instructions are that if the violent/angry person has a gun, and offers to hand over the gun to the employee, the employee should not accept the gun. Instead, the employee should call security. Does anyone have a copy/cite of this policy? If so, please post the appropriate information in the Comments section. (Or if you prefer to remain completely anonymous, just send to me via the e-mail link from www.davekopel.org.) Please note that I am not looking for the Virginia Tech policy which bans all professors and students from possessing firearms on campus. Thank you.
As usual, the VC's excellent readership comes through. See the 7th comment, below, for a link to the VT policy.
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The shooter, by locking the doors against folks entering, knew he faced absolutely no threat from his so-to-be victims.
Those who signed and publicized this "no guns" idiocy actually painted a target on the book bag of every student at VaTech and, for what, just to make them feel superior.
There has to be some attack lawyer out there who'll find justice for the parents of these innocent dead students and bring the progressive idiots who run the university back to reality.
Obligatory disclosure: I have no affiliation with that site.
What a wonderful idea. That way if the violent/angry person gets upset all over again while waiting for security to arrive, he still has the firearm available. How much more sensible than giving all employees one hour of training in the safe handling and unloading of firearms.
The only justification I can think of for this policy is to avoid a potentially deadly scuffle if the v/a person changes his mind after surrendering the firearm and tries to prevent it being unloaded, or to reload it with spare ammunition.
That's from the Environmental, Health and Safety Services--Workplace Violence page at VTech
admin.sfcc.edu/~safety/DisastM/Disaster_Man.pdf
--PtM
I don't know about the rest of the world, but numb nuts written policies wouldn't mean much to me if I had the choice of accepting the surrender of a gun by an obviously unbalanced person or telling him to just put it back in his pocket.
We've seen "suicide by cop", so is "murder by cop" too far fetched? (The scenario that I'm thinking of is basically "the police arrive and the crazy person yells `he's got a gun and going to shoot me'".)
Giving away a plot spoiler for an old chestnut -- Charles Bronson's The Mechanic (1972) involved a "murder by cop" scenario, a pistol, and crazy glue.
Spot on my friend, which is exactly why I give these sort of policies the toilet paper treatment they deserve.
If the arriving police tend to shoot the person with the gun, not having it will protect you from them.
Which is why once you determined that the threat is down, and there are no more threats, you holster the weapon and wait for police to arrive. That's the SOP. If in such a similar situation Andy, my first concern is protecting myself from the guy shooting at me. After that, I'll worry about the police.
Clear the weapon. The ideal situation when the police are responding to a "man with a gun" call is for them to find it on a desk with the magazine out and the slide locked back. You do know how to do that. don't you? Everyone should.
My surprisingly informative and thought-provoking concealed carry teacher suggested placing the weapon within arms reach and then putting your hands on your head. He reasoned that you're not particularly likely to get shot by a cop that way, and you never know if there might be other bad guys around.
No f-ing way would I unload and lock the slide back. Of course, I generally pack a revolver.
As best as I can recall, The Mechanic ends with Jan Michael Vincent killing Bronson and then getting into a car Bronson has rigged to explode.
F/X definitely ends with the cops-gun-crazy glue thing.
Googling glue "bryan brown" (the star of F/X) finds a half-dozen links to that movie, but Googling glue "charles bronson" finds only... this conversation.
If I ever had an empty gun glued to my hands and was confronted by the police, I'd throw myself on the ground and roll over on my back, dog-fashion. The cops know how much paperwork they would have to fill out if they shoot a guy lying on the ground and would probably give me time to explain.
What do we know about shooters? They REALLY don't want to be taken alive.
If just a fraction of professors/students were carrying TASER weapons (the kind that shoot darts out, not the kind that requires the user to actually touch the target), the risk of carrying out a school shooting would include a very high chance of being taken alive due to being TASERed.
This would thus discourage crazy school shooters from attacking that campus.
---
If these left-wing idiots don't even understand that we're better off if a sane person has a gun than a crazy person, then I don't know how much traction my TASER idea would have.
Although I agree that a Taser is better than nothing, the civilian version of the Taser has a 15 ft. maximum range. I'm not positive, but I think they are single-shot devices, too. I would not be keen on confronting a gunman with one.
I don't know of too many university offices that don't have at least one.
Nick
Doesn't matter. The gunman would be scared s---less of you, which is the point.