Safer Streets 101: violence prevention centers.

October 9, 8:04 AMLA Gun Rights ExaminerJohn Longenecker

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Do I mention the UCLA stabbing or save it for last? I’ll save it for last.

I wrote previously that you can have safer streets if you want them. All you need do is accept certain realities. It is my surmise that violence prevention dwells on all sorts of avoidance and does little to address what happens when avoidance fails.

Virginia Tech has conducted various meetings on violence prevention. Unasked, I contacted Virginia Tech’s Center for Peace and Violence Prevention and was answered by a polite e-mail and invitation to attend an October seminar. It was a nice response. I asked for a small tele-conference. In lieu of that, I can post here.

The earliest Virginia Tech interchanges assured liberty purists and gun owners attending, represented by Students For Concealed Carry On Campus, that the discussion is not anti-gun. However, it has always seemed to me and it still seems to me that pleadings to end so-called gun violence are in fact against the concept of private ownership and carrying of handguns and the concept of force in resisting violence. My greatest clue to this is colleges who refuse to hear from some of their greatest allies of students: adult gun owners who are fellow citizens, fellow adults, fellow law-abiding husbands, wives, and parents, people who understand both tragedy and how to prevent it the moment it might strike. It can escape the trap of bureaucrats consulting bureaucrats and hear from those who have made student safety work better.

The emphasis of such centers is on preventing gun violence. You will not likely ever achieve this goal by frustrating the willing involvement of the target.

One of the greatest impeachments of gun control is the case study of your average thug who is already a prohibited person – one who may not be in possession of any gun – one who manages to obtain one and carry out violence precisely as they planned it. A time and place of their own choosing. No matter how you profile them, it does nothing once they are there.

" The question is not how many can be intercepted before they arrive, but how the target can respond once they do arrive.

We’ve said hundreds of time how police have no duty to protect individuals, and how they cannot be everywhere, but in contrast, the armed student is in greater numbers than officers, and any thug contemplating a strike on campus can never be sure one minute to the next whether he (or she) will not be stopped by any number of students. Stopped but quick. Before an alert can be sent, before police can be summoned. Stopped and held for police. Or just plain stopped.

Even V-Tech recognizes self-defense in its own way In the Virginia Polytechnic Institute And State University Policy and Procedures, Section 4, defining what is Violence, and as part of its definition of violence "..does not include lawful acts of self-defense and defense of others." (Page 7 of Policy 5616.) Is there any change in this language for subsequent policies at V-Tech? Virginia Tech recognizes lawful acts of self-defense. But is this enough? For years, we have heard how an institution says that it supports self-defense, but vexes actual resistance as ‘fighting’ or opposes any serious-minded preparedness.

Violence prevention fails when it concentrates so heavily on avoiding violence, but does not elaborate what to do when the violent arrives on campus. Don’t forget that it’s not all shooters: there are many slashings, rapes, and unarmed murders as in the case of Annie Le of Yale last month. Abductions remain a problem. When one cannot avoid violence and encounters it alone, cornered and trapped, the policy seems to affirm self-defense, but this – as thousands know by now – falls far short when one is denied the means to actually defend oneself.

Lawfully.

Concealed carry permits are specifically denied (Paragraph 2.2 Prohibition of Weapons): "Students . . . are further prohibited from carrying, maintaining, or storing a firearm or weapon on any university facility, even if the owner has a valid permit, when it is not required by the individual’s job, or in accordance with the relevant University Policies for Student Life."

Banning firearms on campus for adult permitees makes as much sense as expectations of all gun control when it cannot stop already prohibited persons from obtaining weapons. Like health care reform, it has its own house to clean first in cleaning up the fraud, waste and abuse of Medicare and the Veterans Administration before new undertakings next, and no banning or prohibiting of lawful weapons can be the least effective when it cannot clean its own house and stop the Cho’s of prohibited persons first. Both are a credibility issue.

The bottom line is that gun control does not work in the least for its stated purpose, safety; it serves only to control the electorate, and America is getting very sick of paying the price for such folly in all things. Profiling and gun bans will not stop the next Seung-Hui Cho or the next. It didn’t stop the on-campus stabbing murder of Xin Yang, January 22, 2009.

Also, it was reported that the slasher was exhibiting some of the early warning signs of imminent violence "...some sort of verbal altercation...", which signs went unheeded. It’s reported to have happened very quickly. I don’t presume that all violence prevention programs are identical, but I do extol volunteerism in time of emergency. It is what citizen CPR and the Heimlich Maneuver are all about in the absence of first responders.

The sixth floor of any campus building is considered relatively remote by EMS. Response times are longer for tall buildings and are similar to long travel times on the ground and other such factors. What made the difference here was the willingness of others to intervene. For this patient, first-aid was immediate. On-scene.

Well done.

The comparison of meeting medical emergency and violence emergency is in spirit, the willingness to act, awareness of one’s legal authority to act, training, and more, and this has been what is missing from so many violence prevention programs. Somehow, they are seen as different, where lay intervention for a slashing is somehow noble as it is, but the spirit of resistance when avoidance fails is somehow unseemly. Fighting.

This needs to change. Answering physical threats needs to be on parity with meeting medical emergencies in the absence of first responders.

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