Yesterday a college in North Carolina, Elizabeth City State University, ran a test wherein a university police officer entered a classroom and threatened to kill the Assistant Professor and the students in the room. The explanation the college offered was that the event was announced using email and text messages; the people in the room just didn’t get the information. Needless to say, the folks who thought they attacked were scared, especially the Assistant Professor, who had the gun (fake or not, he didn’t know) held to his back.
The response to this, on the part of the internet that I frequent, fell largely into two lines of reasoning about why we react so badly to something like this:
- The people in the room are wimps because they did not respond to the attacker.
- If one of the people in the room had a gun, the police officer would be dead.
It’s odd to me that these events (either staged or real) degenerate into a second amendment debate. We’re missing the point. Getting killed by a gunman in a college classroom (or a school, or a church, etc.) is an incredibly unlikely way to die. We are much more likely to be killed in a car crash or by some uninteresting chronic disease. Like being hit by lightening an attack on a college is a random event that cannot reliably be predicted. The difference, however, is that the attack has an actor - we think that only if we had done something we could have stopped the attack.
But we couldn’t have prevented the attack. These things occur so infrequently and so unpredictably that a few are bound to get through our defenses every year, no matter what we do. That’s not to say we shouldn’t have school counselors report a homicidal case but staging fake attacks will not do anything to make us more prepared or able to prevent attacks. Staging fake attacks will only spread fear and perpetuate the illusion that these attacks are commonplace. Staging fake attacks serves to terrorize ourselves.
This demonstration was a form of security theater. It makes some people feel safer but really does nothing at all. We need to focus our efforts on those places where we can make an appreciable difference if we want to save people’s lives: make cars safer, cure boring chronic diseases, convince people to live their lives without fearing that some masked bad guy is lurking around the corner.
1 Thomas // Feb 28, 2008 at 09:08 AM
Good thoughts. When I read the beginning of this I immediately thought to myself that the cop was lucky no one in the classroom had a gun, mainly because of this article: http://www.cnn.com/2008/US/02/20/cnnu.guns/
I respect a person’s right to bear arms and generally think it should be regulated by the states (or maybe even counties/cities in some cases) instead of the federal government, because I can’t think of any gun law that would be appropriate for both crowded Manhattanites and deer-hunting Alabamians. At the same time, as you say, there is no good reason for this kind of theatrics as preperation for a possible attack.
It seems to be useful for univiersity police forces to run disaster tests for their forces to respond to such events, but it shouldn’t come at the cost of a student or professor having a heart attack. I remember reading that the police force at NIU was able to respond to the scene within 3 minutes or something and had emergency texts and emails out to the students within 15-20 minutes. That’s obviously a great improvement since last year’s VT shooting, and they credit it to disaster prep, but I don’t think the students need to be used as pawns in those drills.
2 Thomas // Feb 28, 2008 at 09:15 AM
*I need to clarify that my stance on gun control.
What I wrote above only holds true for rifles and shot guns. Hand guns should be either banned outright or heavily, heavily regulated, as they serve no purpose other than killing another human being. Granted, it won’t solve all the crimes (as the guns used by the University shooters show), but it is a start in the right direction.
Rifles and shotguns are for the sports of hunting and target shooting. Hand guns are created for the purpose of killing people.
3 Mike W // Feb 28, 2008 at 04:00 PM
Not to be a degenerate and focus on the 2nd Amendment issues, but I thought it would be pertinent to point people to AHSA. It’s a pro-gun group… with reason. They represent hunters but understand that cop-killing bullets have no place in society. They will fight to make sure no one will touch their hunting rifles, but will also stand for protection of our nation’s natural resources.
4 Trish // Mar 03, 2008 at 04:08 PM
“Hand guns are created for the purpose of killing people.”
I disagree. I am definitely in favor of gun control, waiting periods, licenses, state regulations, all that -but I don’t think that you can say hand guns are only tools for people to kill each other. It may be a small point, but I think you need to make the exception for people who are marskmen, who do target shooting with handguns as a recreational sport at a facility, and things of that nature. (I also don’t think you can ban handguns outright - but that’s an argument for another day.)
And I completely agree with both Jason and Thomas (shockingly enought) - this type of exercise is not helpful at all. I don’t really think you can predict human behavior in a crisis situation like that one, so to try is more harmful than helpful.
5 Mike W // Mar 03, 2008 at 05:00 PM
Trish a.k.a. “From my cold, dead hands!!”
:)