Safer Streets 101: When does campus violence prevention kick in?

October 23, 10:25 AMLA Gun Rights ExaminerJohn Longenecker

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Virginia Tech, the week of October 15, 2009, and another student goes missing, Morgan Dana Harrington. Would this be considered violence? Do you believe this would be considered a completed violent act?

I have written a brief series on campus violence prevention centers, and suggested how to make it all work better. What qualifies me to remark to them?

Experience. Call it work experience. Call it Socratic.

How do you make violence prevention better?

By actually preventing the violence. There are two halves to the concept of violence prevention. College campuses extol the first half, and ignore the second half. Click here to refer to remarks in my series, Safer Streets 101, Violence Prevention Centers, Parts I thru IV.

Violence prevention is not entirely advance warning; it is made complete and workable by resistance and resolve. It is completed by an attitude, a spirit within the adult student long before need. It is the robust development of a fundamental human instinct and recognition of a fundamental human right.

It is preparedness. Clearly, it has been a survival skill which is discouraged by trustees. A policy may state that it respects self-defense or defense of another, but this is hardly possible when adult students are not educated in the choices available to them as adults and when they are punished for resisting violence (fighting on campus).

Campuses with such a front half of violence prevention need to accept that it isn't working for you. Women are still being battered, still being killed, and still being abducted. Until proven otherwise, it might be a very good idea to believe that Morgan Harrington was taken.

And for any future takings, rapes or batteries, or beatings and robberies, the second half of truly preventing violence needs to be offered students.

They are adults now. They possess the legal authority to act, and it is wrong to frustrate their instinct to resist danger. The reason that the first half of violence prevention, avoiding danger, doesn't work is that you do not find violence, it finds you. When it does, as it did with Xin Yang at Virginia Tech, January 22, 2009, or with a 20-year old student at UCLA last month, we hope you begin to see how violence prevention which relies entirely on avoidance doesn't quite do the job.

Adults who share the worry for these students understand that this formula of discouraging resistance is being cloned in major cities of high crime and in other areas, such as media Bloggers and Fox News. The goal is to quash resistance.

Resistance, itself, is being punished.

I don't care what your race is, your age, your financial status, or your political attitude; every single completed act of aggression on a student is an offense against society and our way of life for all of us, and the right to resist hostility, whether it be violent or political, must be intact and respected. Every single completed act of violence is a failure of the current paradigm.

Every injured or missing student gives testimony that violence prevention isn't preventing much of anything except safety.

One of the things that enforces the stubbornness is the deep pockets of trustees in lieu of change. Virginia Tech made an $11 Million settlement in April, 2008 for a ‘watered down' alert system, and likely dodged the bullet of actually considering armed students on campus. Not a bad renewal of that lease, huh? Now, there is a $100,000 reward for information leading to the safe return of Morgan Harrington.

Still, it is after-the-fact, whatever the facts are or turn out to be. It is too late to prevent anything.

What liberty purists and experienced gun owners are trying to tell the next generation is that violence isn't fought by rewards or by chasing it so; violence is fought by facing it, an adult concept, and stopping those who wish to face violence and resist it cannot be purchased allegedly on their behalf against their own better judgment.

It isn't working.

How many women actually stop their own abduction every year? How do they manage it? What is their secret?

For V-Tech, $11 Million and another $100,000 reward is pocket change they can easily afford in stalling the concept of guns on campus – a little too easily afford. But we don't need pocket change to substitute for practical safety; for real safety on campus, we need real change.

We wish Morgan and her family the very best.

Be sure to register for my Safer Streets Newsletter.
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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 try. It is the core message of Safe Streets In The Nationwide Concealed Carry Of Handguns, now available online as an e-book.