By now most of you know about the shooting at Ohio State University early yesterday morning. At around 3:30am, Nathaniel Brown, who was reportedly serving a suspension for a poor job performance review, entered the university’s maintenance building and began shooting. Building supervisor Larry Wallington was killed and operations shift leader Henry Butler wounded. Brown killed himself before police could arrest him.
Gun control advocates will point to this as an example of why guns have no place in schools or the workplace. The problem with this logic is that it was already illegal for Brown to bring a gun into the maintenance building. Not only is it a violation of workplace policy but it is also banned by Ohio law since it is a building on school property. None of that deterred Brown from carrying out his murderous plan of revenge. The gun ban did, however, ensure that nobody was able to fight back.
Gun bans in the workplace do nothing to reduce violence. High-risk security expert Timothy Dimoff, President of SACS Consulting and Investigative Services, Inc., explains why.
If a person wants to bring a gun to work to shoot someone, it won't matter whether the company has a "no weapons on premises" policy or not...so it's NOT really a deterrent. When the CCW movement first started everyone was afraid of wild west type shootouts, but over the years we've found that to not be true. Letting employees with CCW permits bring guns to work, as long as they are left in the vehicle, will not result in workplace violence. Workplace shootings result from disgruntled employees or former employees, embittered spouses and for people looking for their "15 minutes of fame and policies mean nothing to these people.
I'd take that advice further and say requiring lawfully armed citizens to leave their defensive arms in their vehicles does not go far enough towards stopping workplace violence. While better than banning them in the parking lot as well, it still renders the first victims defenseless. There are many examples of shooting rampages being stopped by regular citizens who go out to their car to get their gun, but many more of shootings being halted because the good guys are already armed and don't have to retrieve their firearm first. Think of it this way, would you want police to have to go back to their cruiser to get their guns if an active shooter was on the loose?
We will never know if things would have turned out differently if Wallington or Butler had been armed. We do know, however, exactly how things turned out with the current gun ban in place.
Comments
The employee knew that both supervisors would be unarmed because they were in a gun free zone. Would he have shot these people if he was unsure about them being armed? Maybe, maybe not. The only thing known for sure is that these two supervisors were denied their Right of self-defense. That is a fact. How many more people have to be injured or killed before people wakeup? We must always remember that nice people get injured or killed in nice places everyday. Be safe and stay armed.
However not all the killers have been accounted for. How about his accomplices? You know, those people who aided him in his murderous rampage. Uh huh, those people, the ones who set the law and the policy that Brown was allowed to kill anyone on campus he wanted to because they had been rendered as helpless as babes in a crib. Where are the criminal charges for these accomplices to murder? Where are the lawsuits for failure to provide adequate collateral fo the rights they took away from the people they helped to kill?
And this article circles back to a premise I have about CCW that seems to be constantly overlooked.... concealment.
I can appreciate that in some environments "open carry" isn't far off of "brandishing" either of which would make some (non-gun) folks uneasy. But if our CCW laws was a bit more specific about concealment, then we might be able to make a bit more headway against the criminal protection zones. Our current CCW process assures the permit holder is a citizen in good standing, meets training requirements and is accepting responsibility. Keeping it out of sight, yet ready, is what CCW is about, right?
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