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Arming students: Instapunk weighs in

Instapunk has some fun with a Clemson student's article, that maintained self-defenders on campus would just manage to miss or hit bystanders, and with great lines like "You can't fight violence with more violence" -- although it seems to me that law enforcement is paid to do just that -- and proposing a course where students "would learn to be aware of the warning signs of a potential attack..." E.g., a sucking chest wound.

Interesting that in this sort of hypothetical, the author assumes that the killer is clever, rational, inventive, and a good shot, and that any defender is foolish, clumsy, rather stupid, and has lousy aim. Hey, fellow, which one of them is a mental case, and which one passed the background check and has training?

Reminds me of a comment Prof. Kleck made, about how he got interesting in doing statistical work on self-defense. He said he was struck by a number of writings which seemed to assume that firearms were quite useful to criminals, yet useless in self-defense. It struck him that in both cases the same tool was being used for roughly the same purposes and under the same conditions -- it's just that one use was lawful and the other not. A tool that was useful for one probably would be useful for the other, too.

· Self defense