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.)