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Colleges Training Professors in Improvised Weapons 13

In a response to the school shootings of the past few years, hundreds of colleges have purchased a training program that teaches professors and students to take a more aggressive role when confronted with attackers, including the use of improvised weapons. The program urges you to be ready to respond to a shooter by taking advantage of the inherent strength in numbers and how to use a laptop or a backpack to defend yourself. Domenick Brouillette, who administered the course at Metropolitan Community College, said, "Survivors prepare themselves both mentally and emotionally to do what it takes. It might involve life-threatening risk. You may do something you never thought you were capable of doing." A sword would be nice but a pen will work in a pinch.

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Colleges Training Professors in Improvised Weapons

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  • school shootings have gone down, however, would-be school shooters are now arming themselves with backpacks, laptops, and overclocked staplers as they attempt to instill fear in the student body. Pen bombs and rubber-band-powered-mechanical-pencil-bb-guns have also been sighted.
  • Pathetic (Score:3, Insightful)

    by ElectricTurtle ( 1171201 ) on Wednesday August 27, 2008 @05:31PM (#24770801)
    People should listen to John Lott. The only effective defense against homicidal individuals with guns is a similarly armed resistance. If teachers were armed, no school shooting with be even a fraction as lethal as Columbine or Virginia Tech.

    People need to be more practical about firearms. They are a pre-industrial technology, and as such the genie will never go back into the bottle. The fact is any reasonably intelligent person can make guns and powder for themselves. They're just tubes in which to put powder and projectiles essentially, and as such all controls on them only effect the harmless and the innocent. Gun control has always and will always fail to get arms out of the hands of criminals. It's not a problem that can be legislated away.

    The sooner that teachers and other responsible adults in private life can be regularly armed, the safer and more polite the whole of society will become. Violent crime in every state that has enacted concealed carry legislation has either remained the same or decreased. Meanwhile those urban areas that remain most hostile to self-defense, such as Chicago and Washington DC, are in constant competition for the dubious title of having the most murders each year.

    And before anybody trots out the thin blue line, consider how many people have died cowering with a phone in their hands waiting for a police response. When a lethal threat is in your face, you don't have half an hour for the police to show up. When a lethal threat is already in the same building as you are, you'll live or die in a matter of minutes. Not to mention in drastic scenarios like Columbine or Virginia Tech, the police spend a lot of time simply gathering intel and organizing. They don't even move in to situations like those for excruciatingly long periods of time.

    Privately armed individuals stopped the rampage at the Appalachian Law School, but the anti-self-defense media did their best to cover that up, just in case anybody with sense was paying attention and might connect the dots.
    • by TheLink ( 130905 )
      How often do these school shootings occur and how many people are killed per year?

      How often do the "usual" robbery/murder shootings occur and how many people are killed per year?

      Yes the genie is out of the bottle for the USA so you guys are going to have to live with it.

      Meanwhile things are fine in many other countries where gun control is really tight, and I doubt they want things USA-style.

      My countryfolk are far from as disciplined and conforming as the Swiss, most can't even handle a car responsibly, so
    • It is true that if teachers were armed then rampage style killings would be brought to a close much more quickly. I also agree that guns will always be with us and we have to deal with that. However I take exception to the common claim that if more people were armed that violence would go down in all cases. The problem with this claim is that you can find instances where it is simply not true.

      Yes: in smaller communities where most people assume they will live long and well, and are not terribly angry,

    • This could also apply to military disputes, not just domestic ones. Think about it. Any random city isn't likely to have significant access to immediate military protection. Most people in the US would be sitting ducks if even a small militarized force decided to attack. Now, if all those people had guns (even a hand gun), we'd at least give them a tough time (Every male Swiss, on the other hand, has military training and access to guns). With advanced warning, militias could even be formed, something that

  • Perhaps this is what the world will use as weapons after World War III -- modified office supplies rather than sticks and stones as Einstein originally predicted.

  • This problem was basically solved by schools in china, many years ago; yup, the Shaolin, and others, figured it out. Not only could the teachers defend themselves, so could the students. Maybe if a student was taught to have confidence in themselves, turning to a gun would be trivialized, maybe. But with 360+ million people in the U.S., the bio statistics are unity that someone, somewhere will go Rambo.

Solutions are obvious if one only has the optical power to observe them over the horizon. -- K.A. Arsdall

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