No colleagues ranting about how all of the students and faculty should carry guns to protect themselves?
My plan is just to wait for a Good Guy With A Gun.
"Don't freeze in place" is one of those things that's very good, very important, and very useless advice. People do that a lot in dangerous unexpected situations, and as often as not it's the worst choice. But knowing you shouldn't isn't especially useful since it's not really something people do after coming to the reasoned decision to stand there motionless like an idiot. I can't help but think that the easiest thing to do in a shooter situation would just be to hit the fire alarm and hope that the people closest to the shooter don't all get shot as everyone else trudges resentfully out of the building.
There was a failed mass shooting when I was in college. It happened a couple of hours before I went into that building. The students in the room did indeed throw chair at him, but I think only after it became clear he had jammed his gun.
Maybe if it wasn't a class of actuaries, they would have thrown chairs sooner.
Samantha Bee had something about this on her show. They have classes like that for 4-year olds. I'm not sure if that's before or after they learn immigration law.
My uncle actually stopped a school shooting in the mid 80s when he was teaching middle school. He was walking down the hall and noticed through the window on the door that a kid with a shotgun had the teacher and all the students lined up against the wall. My uncle quickly opened the door and pulled the gun out of his hand.
He was in the paper. His name is Stan, but because of a typo, the story in the paper was about what a hero Satan was.
I did wonder if I should consider carrying pepper spray.
Since it's likely to be indoors you'll want to go with a gel rather than a spray. Spray works, but indoors it's going to work on everyone else as well. Trust me, no fun at all. I'd say the big one to chuck in your desk at school and the small one for a purse.
https://www.sabrered.com/pepper-spray/home-defense-pepper-gel
https://www.sabrered.com/pepper-spray/tactical-pepper-gel-flip-top-belt-holster
I have no reference point for either, but I'd probably take getting pepper sprayed as an alternative to getting shot.
10: You'll also want to run away after spraying the guy with the gun, which is kind of difficult if you can't see.
It's probably come up here before, but the timing of the effective date of the campus carry law, on the fiftieth anniversary of the Whitman massacre, still boggles the mind.
Pepper spray is pretty obviously less of a threat than a gun, though, and if there's one thing America has taught me it's that, for reasons of safety, you should always be the more threatening one in any situation. So instead of that I recommend a hand grenade or two sitting on your desk or in your bag or whatever.
Also if you sort of absentmindedly play with it while lecturing your students will probably pay much closer attention and be less likely to stare off into space or try to secretly read their emails or something.
Speaking of 4-year-olds packing heat, why does everyone assume that the gun nut who got shot by her kid was the victim of an accidental shooting.
We got that training at my job, from a trio of local police officers. It was similar: Run, Hide, or Fight. You are supposed to try briefly to drag along anyone who is hiding or frozen when you are running, but not spend too much time doing it. Hiding is best in lockable rooms; I checked after the training and my door locks and the glass panel next to it is frosted. Yay for me. You also are supposed to push stuff against the door if you can.
The best part is "don't open the door for anyone." So some wiseass asks "including the police?" and they say "open it for the police," so he says "I can't see them, how do I know it's them?", etc.
(No, Moby doesn't work at my company.)
Fight is mostly about throwing things and using stuff as a shield, maybe because this isn't Texas and guns are banned from my workplace. I could pummel someone with a cheap plastic keyboard though, or spray them with white board cleaner.
I went to elementary school in a pretty rough neighborhood, and we had active shooter drills every year. (Well, "stranger in the building" drills). We had to hide in the cupboards while the teacher locked the doors and turned off all the lights. IIRC a student shot a secretary with a BB gun when my brother was in kindergarten, causing very minor injuries. I think the fear was more about gang retaliation or maybe drug sales fallout than mass murders, since black urban schools seem less prone to the lone male shooter phenomenon.
With running, you need to remember that you don't have to outrun a bullet. You just have to run fast enough that your coworkers are easier targets. Plus, if you get past them, they'll be mostly between you and the bullets.
11: I figure someone else will do the spraying. I'll just benefit, but feel the effects of the spray. I'm no hero.
I grew up in a happier, simpler time. No one worried about school shooters. The only emergency drills we had in elementary school were for fire, and for nuclear war.*
*We went down to the basement of the school, and stood there for a few minutes because there wasn't enough room for everyone to sit down. There was enough canned food and bottled water to keep a school full of kids alive for for about a day.
The elementary school I went to for K-2 had a SLIDE that you got to go down during fire drills, if you were in a classroom on the second floor. In kindergarden I was scared of this idea but by first grade I thought fire drills were awesome.
We had earthquake drills too, which involved hiding under the desk and covering the back of our necks with our hands.
We had tornado drills. I don't think that's a think in Pittsburgh.
My elementary school had tornado drills, and apparently somebody thought the city's tornado siren needed to be on YouTube.
Interesting report on school-related fatalities in the U.S. The largest group is "school transportation related," with two thirds of those pedestrians hit by school buses. A fair number of homicides, very few of those from "active shooter" situations, and plenty of suicides. Some tornadoes.
https://www1.maine.gov/doe/security/resources/Relative_Risks_of_Death_in_US_K-12_Schools.pdf
Fire drills are either a colossal waste of time or extraordinarily effective: 0 school fire fatalities in a 14 year period.
23: Your earthquake drills sound identical to my air-raid drills in southern CA in the early 1960s.
16
Speaking of 4-year-olds packing heat, why does everyone assume that the gun nut who got shot by her kid was the victim of an accidental shooting.
Because 4-year-olds aren't capable of premeditation? I mean, I realize there's a middle ground between first-degree murder and a big oopsie, but even if the kid had been going "Waaaah, what do you mean I can't have another cookie, I hate you!" we'd still think of it pretty much the same way - criminally irresponsible parenting, funny when it's such a gun rights advocate, and that's about it. We could guess whatever we want about what was going through the kid's head, but there's no actual evidence of anything other than the official account, is there?
I'm not super big on "I'll move to Canada if Donald Trump is elected," but I do sometimes wonder if I'd leave a state that passed campus carry. Probably not, I bet, if I liked my job and my kids were doing well in school. And I guess if UT Austin wants to hire me and pay me all the money -- and give me an armed guard -- I'll listen. So that takes care of that thought experiment, thanks!
30: Eh, it's been around here and CO for quite some time. Wingers crowed and liberals gnashed their teeth but the actual effects on anything have been non existent.
This reminds me of violence in the workplace seminar I had to attend at a previous place of employment. The instructor asked if anyone had been a victim of violence in the workplace. An older man in the back raised his hand. The instructor asked if the man could give us some details. He responded in a deadpan manner "I was in the military."
32: That was an old joke on Benson, when I was a child: the avuncular, genial Governor character mentioned in passing that he had had a dangerous job when he was young. When asked what that was, he replied "Combat," and then "I was on a battleship in the Pacific and people were trying to kill me. It was very hectic."
I wonder if Benson is streaming anywhere.
I'd say the big one to chuck in your desk at school and the small one for a purse.
Well, I wouldn't want to lug anything big back and forth to class.
One good ol' Texan colleague did say something like, "Nothing's more intimidating than a woman reaching for her purse and saying 'Keep your distance!'" and I kind of enjoyed the idea that the bad guy in the darkened alley might think I had a gun.
Probably good advice when it comes to committee meetings too.
OT: Don't marry Salman Rushdie, I guess.
33. I'd never heard of Benson. I guess that is what I get for not having a TV and wasting my time on dissertations and such.
I spent years failing to write a dissertation but I still had time for Benson.
It has made me the person I am today, the one with absolutely nothing to talk to people about at cocktail parties.
Because guns are so rare in Japan, drills for dealing with intruders always assume they'll be armed with a knife or other close-range weapon. So in some places, teachers right down to kindergarten level are trained to use riot forks or net launchers to pin an assailant up against a wall or on the floor until the police arrive.
The riot hooks are amazing, like herder's crooks, and they go so well with a bunnies-and-kittens smock.
The fashion thread is the other one.
There was an attempted school machete ing in England a few years back - teacher went up against the guy barehanded. She was cut about but survived (got the George Medal, which is one step down from the George Cross/ Victoria Cross, the Medal of Honor equivalents) and so did all the kids. The contrast with the Dunblane shooting the year (16 dead) before was noticeable.
The intruder training in Japanese schools was introduced in response to a massacre in an elementary school in 2001, when a man stabbed eight children to death and seriously wounded 13 others and two teachers. He apparently wanted to kill himself, and chose to do so by committing a crime guaranteed to earn him the death sentence.
31: Not actually true, sadly. Fears of students threatening people in class haven't happened, and mostly we can ignore it as most students aren't inclined to carry. Most concealed carry permit holders aren't total jackasses (we suspect most of ours are cops or ex-military guys.)
But the law does have serious effects. Given that we're not allowed to have common sense regulations, campus police have been forced to interpret "concealed" as "unrevealed and unremarked upon." So no one can ask, for example, if the toddler preschool's teachers are carrying, because they can't answer, and of course concealed carry is permitted in the toddler room because it's not a football stadium. If a student is acting paranoid and vaguely threatening, we can't ask him to leave his gun in his car, or do anything besides ban him from campus entirely, because common sense measures are out. We can't have common sense rules in the science lab.
Only injuries are a student shooting himself in the leg a few years back.
I am more worried about open carry, which will probably die in committee if it hasn't, because people inclined to open carry are basically toddlers playing the "I'm not touching you game" with AR-15s, and those guys are mostly dickheads. If that passes, I am tempted to carry, too (I have a pretend Internet friend who can probably help me buy a gun and learn how to shoot it...) ; but my kid(s) will be pulled out of the university school. Much higher risk of dumbassery.
Even the campus day care is covered? They're just fucking with universities because they hate them. Or employer provided daycare. Or both.
Who cares if the son of a college professor gets shot? If she loved him, she'd have quit her job to take care of him instead of chucking him in day care, right?
That's going to be my favorite story this month. I feel just a little bit bad about laughing because the kid could have just as easily shot himself.
49: Ah, I hadn't even thought about the daycare thing. And open carry nuts are the fucking worst.
We've got the daycare thing, too - we had to fill out a survey requesting that our daycare be a designated campus gun-free zone. I don't know if it's been approved.
And open carry nuts are the fucking worst.
Yes. They've done more to boost gun control in two years than the entire Brady campaign did in 2 decades.
I may be more worried about passive shooters.
We need better education about how easy it is to end up in jail bc you pulled your gun out thinking you are the "good guy with a gun."
We need better publicity about people losing self-defense claims. Far too many open carry people have far too much bravado for my liking. To be fair, the vast majority of open carry and concealed carry people that I know are contentious about learning about the law. But there is still a ton of misinformation and claims of courage out there.
Yeah, the problem with open carry guys is that they're operating from a delusional mindset about self defense and tactics. Thankfully there's very few of them out here.
Let's all buy a gun this spring. Lots more fun than talking about the primaries. Glock recently came out with a .380 and I'm thinking of getting one for off duty.
A wolf is going to try and blow that thing down. But not if you shoot him in his stupid wolf face.
After it cures, it will be stronger than nearly all residential buildings in the U.S., assuming I know what I'm doing.
58: I hope you're right, and a few years from now it may well turn out that in hindsight you were right, but I don't think that's true yet.
61: If that law passes, we can go shopping. Open carrying woman professor (with tenure, importantly, by the time it would go through) would make for an epic bit of political theater.
61: I already recommended something like it but I still think you should get something like this for on duty. It's true it wouldn't be as "effective" or "not ludicrous". But it would more than make up for that in being intimidatingly large and weird.
But I suppose it could work for an off duty gun as well.
