Campus Safety

A minor misunderstanding has erupted over at Ambulance Driver regarding Campus Safety, after AD mentioned he would have the opportunity to attend a seminar led by the Virginia Tech "Public Safety" honcho in the next few days.

Rather than extending a comment string (which seems borderline rude to me, once I've decided I have something to say at any length), I have my very own blog over here that I can rant on without being unduly intrusive.

As regards a comment "over there" from a parent of a VT student...

Madam -

Many of us view the events at Virginia Tech and similar tragedies as having a minimum of two guilty parties. The first guilty party is painfully obvious - the mass killer(s) themselves(self), the monster(s) with their finger upon the trigger/button/chemical vat committing the immediate foul deed(s).

However, many of us see a subtle accomplice to the more obvious monster, a "stealth" monster lurking in the wings creating monster-friendly environments for the more obvious evil, laying a groundwork cloaked in good intentions for the killing beast to attempt its slaughter uninterrupted and unthreatened.

We look at Campus Administrations (for this is not limited to simply universities or colleges) that in the name of safety declares their demesnes as "weapons free" often with a zero tolerance rider (wear a t-shirt depicting a weapon, get penalized), and to the extent their declarations succeed, they create a large concentration of potential victims without any reasonable means of self defense in a world where the mad and the predatory demonstrably and historically seldom give much credence to such declarations.

Upon such observation, we are deeply unamused at best. For many of us, given the possibly erroneous assumption that such Campus Administrations are not composed solely of ignorant idiots, it angers us immensely that students and staff are not merely placed needlessly at risk through stripping them of the rights they hold in off-campus spaces - but that they are then lied to and told this is somehow *good for them* and *makes them safer* justifies a quiet white hot fury worthy of being banked as embers until the next election or legislative session.

Speaking only for myself, I find a certain comfort in a rather bitter humor sprinkled heavily with sarcasm as I engage in the quite likely eternal wait for logic and common sense to re-emerge in academia. I am not, however, holding my breath.