If VT and the other CC students are taking care of the situation, I hope campus security at least has the good sense to stay out of the library. It could get very dangerous with several guns drawn.
The problem with that argument is, is that no more college students would go out and get CC permits than the rest of the general population. Also, the ones who did get CC permits would be deemed just as competent as any other adult out of college, meaning no further risk from someone who conceal carries at the grocery store. All I know is that when the shots were fired, if I had had my gun I would have reached for it instead of cowering behind a bookcase.
I don’t even want to get into how I feel about people packing at the grocery store. That’s a whole nother can of worms. So I take it you were not killed and it sounds like campus security handled the situation? I’m not getting the problem with not having you and 20 of your cohorts all opening fire in the library.
I fortunately was not killed, obviously. But three of my fellow classmates were shot, 2 left in critical condition and one will never walk again. Campus Pd did respond to this situation well, but don’t trust them with life when it doesn’t occur in the very heart campus many students around.
I’m sorry, that is tragic.
VT, I think one of the questions is, if you and 2 or 3 of your classmates have their weapons drawn, how do campus police know which person to shoot, or not to shoot? I’m not taking a position on whether it is a good idea or not. I’m just wondering from a purely logistical perspective.
“VT, I think one of the questions is, if you and 2 or 3 of your classmates have their weapons drawn, how do campus police know which person to shoot, or not to shoot? I’m not taking a position on whether it is a good idea or not. I’m just wondering from a purely logistical perspective.”
Hopefully campus PD would be competent enough to not go in guns blazing. Hopefully they have be trained sufficiently to utilize proper target discrimination techniques and they realize just because someone has a gun, doesn’t mean they are an imminent threat. It’s obviously something that would need to included in CC training as well, teaching carry holders what to do when police make entry.
The same police forces who shoot a child with a toy gun within two seconds of pulling up at the otherwise empty playground, the same guys who can’t distinguish someone trying to buy a gun at Walmart from someone trying to shoot a gun at Walmart, the same guys who can’t see the difference between reaching for a gun and reaching for the wallet they just asked him to get, these are the guys you expect to walk into a situation where several people are firing and instantly know which ones are the good guys?
And they’ll be the same police you’ll call next time you’ve been robbed, hurt, or scared for your life. The job isn’t an easy one but I guess it’s easy for an armchair quarterback to pick out the few time a year it doesn’t go right, rather than point to the tens of thousands of times it does. If you really feel police officers are that incompetent, I’m sure you write your legislatures weekly demanding that funding for police training be increased dramatically. I think you owe your local PD officers a little more credit for volunteering to do one of the most difficult jobs in America. Or put your money where your mouth is and don’t call them the next time you’re in trouble and need assistance immediately because you apparently believe they’re too incompetent to help you.
I’ve never called our local police for help. We have very, very little crime. The town next to us doesn’t have a police department at all, and they get along fine. Although I’ve liked our police when I’ve met them, I’d like to disband our police force and just use the roving state police person, like other towns do. We could save a heck of a lot of money.
Some police are incompetent, but imagine a competent police officer walking into a situation where several people are shooting at each other. How on earth are they going to tell the good guys from the bad guys, in the split second they have to make the right response?
Consolation, I’m happy you live in such a low crime area and I hope it remains that way. To call your area an exception however, would be a vast understatement.
Cardinal Fang, of course some police are incompetent, just as there’s incompetent people in every other profession. The way for the competent officer to make the correct decision is through training. Train, train, train, train, and then train some more. As I mentioned before, target discrimination is everything in these types of scenarios. Police don’t, or I guess I should say shouldn’t, go into these situations shooting everything they see. If someone has a weapon and isn’t pointing it at you, while they are potentially a threat, they aren’t an immediate threat and therefore don’t need to be eliminated. If police make entry into a building and CC holders aren’t immediately holstering or placing their weapons on the ground, that’s a failure in their training.
But I’m not delusional and I understand no one ever bats a thousand. That is a legitimate risk that I, and fellow CC holders, would have to weigh and consider.
It seems like everyone assumes allowing trained people to carry firearms automatically turns every situation in the the OK Corral. This is simply not the case. I can’t think of many cases off the top of my head that involved a school shooter that stood their ground and shot it out with anyone. In almost every example I can think of, as soon as the shooter was confronted, they immediately retreated and took their own life.
“Some police are incompetent, but imagine a competent police officer walking into a situation where several people are shooting at each other. How on earth are they going to tell the good guys from the bad guys, in the split second they have to make the right response?”
For that matter, why do we think that the average 18-21 year old college student would be any better than even the most incompetent police at utilizing “proper target discrimination techniques” in a crisis situation?
I think @dstark started this thread with his tongue in his cheek. But also looking for some answers.
Maybe this is stating the obvious but of course guns won’t help with sexual assault on campus since most of the sexual assault involve alcohol and drugs and who can shoot straight then?
Any weapon can be taken from you and used against you, especially in the context of drugs and alcohol or any other “distracting” factor.
So I say NO to carrying on campus, except in Wisconsin. Since Scott Walker pulled his latest stunt, the students in Wisconsin might want to provide their own, cough, “reporting device”.
http://jezebel.com/scott-walker-wants-colleges-to-stop-reporting-sexual-as-1688375293
Just to be clear, alcohol/drugs and firearms never mix. The minimum age for a carry permit is typically 21, so for the most part your “average 18-21 year old college student” won’t be carrying. Also, as people have alluded too, I don’t think allowing women to CC on campus will suddenly stop or reduce sexual assault.
Unfortunately, looking at the recent situations where police officers burst onto the scene and killed someone who wasn’t pointing a weapon and wasn’t posing a danger to the police or others, police who were then not disciplined; indeed, whose actions were defended and applauded as “good kills,” I cannot be as sanguine as you are.
But if a bad guy is shooting it out with a CC shooter, one of them does need to be eliminated, immediately. How does the cop know which one to shoot?
Greenwitch, your link blows me away…
I don’t have the time to carry this on so this will probably be my last post on the subject.
CF, there’s over 900,000 police officers serving in the US. 126 of those officers were killed last year alone. We don’t pay police enough to be able to hire 900,000 infallible officers. Mistakes will happen, as you’ve continually pointed out. Should some of the officers in your examples have been punished? Absolutely. Some should be serving life. Others shouldn’t. You may think I’m optimistic, I think I’m just realistic. You can focus only on the handful of high profile times the decision has been wrong, or you could also consider all of the times the decision has been right, and lives have been saved. I truly hope you’ve never been placed in a situation where you have to make that split second decision to take someones life, before they possibly take yours. Just remember that police officers face that decision daily.
LasMa, again, these situations aren’t the OK Corral or some action movie where everyone has unlimited ammo and can dodge bullets during a 5 minute shootout. Just because two people are shooting it out doesn’t mean the cop starts shooting everyone they see. As soon as one of them turns the gun towards an officer, the situation has changed, and they should act accordingly. A CC holder should be properly trained on how to handle themselves and their weapon when police arrive on scene.
I was only 19 when I deployed the first time overseas and I was expected to make these exact types of calls, as were every other 18, 19, and 20+ year old infantryman. If we shot everyone in Iraq or Afghanistan that had a gun, their populations would be zero. I’m not saying they are easy calls to make or that every decision is always the best one, but that’s the nature of the beast. If we could wave a magic wand and poof there would be no more school shooters or violent crime, that would be incredible. Unfortunately that’s not the world we live in, and it never will be. God forbid anything ever happened at my school, I don’t want my only option to be cowering in a corner behind a desk hoping the shooter picks the next door over.
As they say…“when seconds count, the police are only minutes away.”
Yes, let’s give a bunch of drunk students with poor judgement lethal weapons so that already regrettable scenarios result in a death than can never be fixed…
I’m already terrified of the idea that authorities are making life altering legal decisions based on he-said/she-said evidence, but at least the accused party is alive to defend themselves. If we add guns to the assumption that the accuser is always right, what stops some girl from murdering some guy she doesn’t like then claiming it was self defense against rape? We’re already dealing with a situation with limited evidence, do we really want to cut the evidence in half, make the verdict pointless, and effectively let anyone act as their own plaintiff, judge, jury, and executioner? (Not even going to go into all of the sex/gender/racial biases that apply to this as well.)