« The BitchGirls blog is back and running... | Main | British knife crime skyrockets »
University policy: if a gunman offers you his gun, refuse it
Discussion at the Volokh Conspiracy. This is pretty insane, even for academia.
The faculty manual at Virginia Tech covers situations where a gunman offers to hand his gun to a faculty member.
It instructs the faculty member to reject it: "Never attempt to disarm or accept a weapon from the person in question. Weapon retrieval should only be done by a police officer."
Check the comments. I turns out this is apparently a boilerplate provision at a lot of universities.
6 Comments | Leave a comment
These people are academics, not to be confused with smart.
I used to be an administrator at a state college where the campus police were not allowed to carry guns. Though firearms were prohibited without explicit written permission on all campuses in the state, everybody else at this college was allowed to carry to work, secure their guns at the campus police station and pick them up when they left work. Common sense and higher education would seem to be complete strangers.
"No thanks on the gun; I'd rather take a bullet..."
Thats probably the smartest thing for most school administrators (though maybe not for teaches as most of them actually work for a living), as a gun is probably more dangerous in the hands of school administrator than a crazed gunman.
Well it's for damn certain that policy in the hands of school administrators is more deadly than a crazed gunman. Without the administrators the gunmen would have a much harder time of it.
Strangely sad; especially as it seems to be driven by liability.
Aside from the question of what would cause a gun-wielding criminal to give up his weapon, how hard is it to train a staff-person to take the weapon and set it down? How hard is it to train them to not touch the trigger, ever?
How hard is it to grant exceptions for those who have passed the training for a CCW, or had weapons-training in the military or police?