When I learn of yet another disappearance and write my thoughts, I am mindful of how sensitive the issue is, and how many don't need to hear anything about blame.
But blame is essential to accountability, and seeing that there is a problem is halfway to solving it. Why not discover where the problem is and get to solving it? How about doing more of what needs to be done to avoid future abductions? Too many violence prevention programs like to go over everything but that.
Students keep disappearing on college campuses. What more can be done? Well, some more can be done.
College is a place where you take away an education and make it your own. Some famous people remind us that once you have an education, no one can take it away from you. The college experience is something you take away and keep with you as a life skill. We live in an era now where we might like to learn survival skills as well, not only a survival in the corporate world nor in the political world, but quite literally in all things in the real world.
When it comes to student safety, any institution's alumni who support their alma mater might like to think that safety trumps politics, and that, when it comes to violence prevention, students can take with them something for life that no one can take away. This would translate into, of course, violence prevention wherever you are, on campus or off campus. Part of that is in actually being able to stop it.
I have been admonishing violence prevention programs to add action and purposeful response to their knowledge base to impart to students. It would seem that awareness and avoidance are not enough, and that, when cornered, students are overcome somehow. We cannot know the facts yet in the disappearance of Morgan Harrington, but we can look at the numbers of student abductions and other campus crimes in 2009 and comprehend that the first half alone is just not working well enough.
Morgan Dana Harrington was reportedly not taken from Virginia Tech per se, but last seen October 17, 2009 at the John Paul Jones Area in Charlottesville, Virginia.
My question is this: what difference does it make where she was taken, that is, on campus or off campus? Was she, and other students, taught how to be alert, how to avoid dangerous situations, and how to fight back? Did Morgan have a sense of danger? Or was fighting back not part of the material? Where fighting is discouraged as settling disputes in anger, we see a cheating of our adult students out of their spirit of self-defense. We see the externalization of responsibility and little evidence of an awareness of how the responsibility for personal safety is you own and no one else's.
Gun ownership and the idea of lethal force is not a matter of owning a gun, it is a spirit of Independence and preferring to live with that over an exclusive reliance on others. Gun ownership is the knowledge that no one can take your place in your own safety, and acceptance of the fact that it is not anyone else's job, including police. It is the understanding and acceptance that lethal force may be necessary. Too, too many violence prevention programs refuse to educate their students in the spirit of fighting back much beyond screaming, scratching an aggressor, or using a whistle.
What would you do, for instance, in a case of multiple assailants? Well, there are such case studies on the books, and they involve the use of lethal force from liquor store robberies to kidnapings to home invasions to various other real life cases where the crime was foiled by a single armed citizen. Sometimes, the aggressors are shot; at other times, the lethal force in the hands of the target was sufficient to de-escalate the conditions without shooting. When it comes to abductions of students, the question is not without an answer, but replete with cases of success in preventing the crime. For those college students who are interested, please go to http://keepandbeararms.com/opsd/ for a repository of reports of how many de-escalate their own murder or abduction. This repository is part of a larger documentation of more than 2.5 million citizens who do not limit their violence prevention to avoidance.
After all, you do not find violence, it will find you. Predators are like that.
How many students understand that they have the legal authority to use up to lethal force if they reasonably believe they are in grave danger? How many are taught that an abduction is grave danger?
On campus or off.
How many students are taught that they can seek and obtain training which will improve their response and their judgment under pressure?
How many students are taught that it is their responsibility and no one else's?
How many adult students realize that this is a skill they can take with them for life?
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For adults, the second amendment is not about guns, it is about adult burdens and how we carry them so that government will not substitute itself. It is the core message of Safe Streets In The Nationwide Concealed Carry Of Handguns, now available online as an e-book.
Comments
study or test. Item: Finger Locks - A device that ensures the inability to bend the trigger finger to a trigger pulling radius.
Court provisional - For murderers - arsonist - pedophiles - dui's - drug users and sellers - border patrol - bank robbers - gang violence - prison violence and overcrowding - self committed rehabs
Police officers need this as an extra safety device and it can be used to narrow down suspects.
It would make it very difficult if not impossible to do the above crimes.
The offenders actually need this because many of them are unable to break their violent mindset.
It also would make it difficult to do drugs because the act of lighting a match or injecting a needle and so on requires the ability to bend two of your fingers that being index and middle fingers.
It could become so painstakingly difficult to get high that it becomes not worth the effort eventually,Then gun supporters and those against guns would get what they want.
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