Campus police renew call to carry arms (Good Read Alert)

Campus police at several Boston-area colleges are renewing calls to be allowed to carry arms in the aftermath of the mass shootings at Virginia Tech.

Brandeis University, which has rejected calls to arm its police in the past, has agreed to reconsider the idea. Framingham State officials are talking about it, and students at Suffolk University are circulating a petition calling for an armed force.

The majority of campus police departments in the nation's four year colleges, including Virginia Tech's, are already armed, but officials at some small colleges for years have staunchly opposed the idea even as their police have requested arms. The big schools in Massachusetts, including Boston University, Northeastern, MIT, Tufts, and all five campuses of the University of Massachusetts, have armed police. Most colleges in the State College system also have armed police forces.

Although Seung-Hui Cho killed himself before police could reach him, his killing of 32 students and professors raised a disturbing question for those who live or work on a campus with unarmed police: What if someone on their campus went on a shooting spree? What could campus police do?

The answer, according to law enforcement protocol, is nothing -- except to call for backup from city police. The batons and mace that unarmed police typically carry would be useful in the face of a gunman.

Brandeis, during the summer, plans to set up a committee to study the need for arms, though it previously has denied repeated requests for at least two decades from its police force for permission to carry guns.

"The prevailing opinion has always been that this is fundamentally a safe campus," said Brandeis spokesman Dennis Nealon. "What Brandeis is wondering now is, is it a different world, maybe? . . . This is post-9/11 and post-Virginia Tech."

"The prevailing opinion has always been that this is fundamentally a safe campus," said Brandeis spokesman Dennis Nealon.

What a bunch of weasel words. "The prevailing opinion" is as specific as "they".

A more realistic assessment is that a massacre on campus is as about as likely as a meteor hit. Statistically, you have nothing to worry about, until the statistics go bad for you personally. After all, there were several million college students who were not murdered that day.

You can't do much to deter a meteor. A nutjob with a gun is a different matter. We now know from practical experience that psychiatric findings, perjured BATFE 4473 forms, and "no guns on campus" signs don't work, we can focus on things that do.

Armed, and trained, campus cops, and allowing of licensed CCW on campus, would be a "good start", to use a liberal phrase.

Feds Ordered VA Police To Stand Down

Local authorities were told to take no action to pursue killer

Paul Joseph Watson Prison Planet Friday, April 20, 2007

Police and EMT workers at Virginia Tech tell us that campus police were given a federal order to stand down and not pursue killer Cho Seung-Hui as Monday's bloodshed unfolded.

Though wishing to remain anonymous for obvious reasons, we have received calls from police and EMT's who tell us that a stand down order was in place, and this is also confirmed by eyewitness Matt Kazee, who is a Blacksburg local.

Kazee talked to local EMT's and police who told him the same thing, that the order was to wait until federal back up arrived before any action was taken. This explains the complete non-response of the police in the two hour gap between Cho's first two murders and the wider rampage that would follow later that morning.

The policy of federal control over the University was put in place following a previous shooting in August 2006 in which a police officer and a hospital security guard were killed.

In addition, a former long-term University police officer, George French, told the Alex Jones Show that it is routine to seal off a campus on which a suspected gunman is loose.

“Setting up a series of roadblocks, controlling access to very large pieces of property, is very much routine on any university campus in Canada and in the United States,” said French.

“After a double homicide, when you’re looking for a dangerous fellow with a firearm, I find it unfathomable that a series of roadblocks weren’t set up…to prevent the felon from escaping.”

French could find no logical conclusion other than deliberate inaction on the part of officials. “We have another coordinated, allowed event…the parallels are so common in each case; you can write the script in advance.”

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