Armed police couldn’t prevent the Navy Yard shootings. An armed security guard couldn’t prevent the Columbine massacre. A swarm of armed police arrived at the Virginia Tech shooting site within 3 minutes of the first 911 call, only to find the gunman had padlocked the doors.
But that’s not stopping Bristol Community College from considering a plan to arm its campus police:
“It’s a concern in this day and age,” said Wayne Wood, BCC’s public safety director, pointing to campus tragedies across the country like the Newtown, Conn., shooting last December. “All the community colleges are addressing the issue.”
With public universities like the UMass system and Bridgewater State already on the bandwagon, Wood said the move to arm BCC police will “allow us to respond to any kind of situation on campus rather than wait for city or state police.”
If more guns stopped crime, with guns now outnumbering people in the US, we should be crime-free. But arming more people doesn’t stop mass shootings. Contrary to the National Rifle Association’s “good guy with a gun” talking points, an armed civilian with a gun hasn’t once stopped a mass shooting in the last three decades. But as David Waldman has demonstrated with his GunFail series at DailyKos, accidental shootings are far easier to document.
If we were serious about stopping mass shootings, we’d ban the assault weapons and high-capacity magazines that are a part of virtually every mass shooting. But even here in allegedly progressive Massachusetts, we’re arming everyone in sight in hopes of protecting us from all the other people we’ve armed.
I was running Wayne Lapierre’s “The only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun…” quote in my head and thinking this was going to be about liberalizing laws regarding students and faculty packing on campus. Then it turns out the outrage is about arming (gasp!) the police?! At my university the police department was a full-fledged law enforcement agency which included I’m pretty sure being armed while on duty.
So as long as they’re called police, guns will help, even if there’s no clear problem?
I’m also assuming a certain level of training that goes with being “called police”. Despite stories we hear of police overreacting on balance I still give them the benefit of the doubt and there’s always a chance something could happen.
From an earlier comment:
If you only click one of those links, make it the last one.
They seem to do alright.
All police in Northern Ireland carry firearms.
They “do alright,” sure, but they also don’t face an armed populace nearly on the scale as Americans.
In the U.S., there is nearly 1 gun for every resident. Actually 0.9 gun for every man, woman and child. In England and Wales – thanks in large part to much stricter gun control laws – there is only 0.06 gun per resident.
For the math challenged, that means Americans own, on average, 15 times more guns than those in England/Wales.
Moreover, in England/Wales virtually all firearms must be licensed, handguns are banned, no guns can be carried in public except rifles and then only to and from a shooting club and all “assault weapons” are banned.
Of course, there are criminals in England/Wales too who ignore those laws but it’s pretty clear that this level of gun control makes it far easier for police to enforce the law without being armed.
Continuing to leave out Northern Ireland (which was/is a war zone), the number of police officers shot dead in England/Wales annually can be counted on the fingers of one hand. In the U.S., it’s more like 150 a year (and that’s shootings of usually armed police officers!).
Disarming police officers in the U.S., I would argue, is hardly a realistic option and certainly not where I would start my efforts to reform the nation’s gun laws.
I made the point that in one large, industrialized country in the world — similar in many ways to ours — police officers are generally unarmed and it works. Don’t mistake that as an argument to disarm all cops. If I had an argument in there at all, it would be that perhaps more guns isn’t always — or even usually — the answer.
I guess I’d continue to argue that, while “similar in many ways”, England’s gun control policies make it quite different from the United States when it comes to discussing whether law enforcement should carry guns.
may mean you like to talk a lot, but repeating the same comment over and over again by ignoring what the person you’re commenting to actually wrote does not make for good commenting, just tediousness.
It is not wrong or unexpected for cops in the US to be armed. I didn’t argue for mass disarmament in the police force, for heaven’s sake.
And when people make a very simple statement, you shouldn’t read into it anything that’s not clearly written there.
Why shouldn’t the police carry guns? Seems pretty reasonable to me.
We had a real tragedy at U Chicago a few years ago when a student was mugged and killed. I for one am happy the UCPD is there, a fully armed and trained auxiliary force made up of former CPD officers, to help apprehend criminals and patrol the surrounding neighborhood. They also ensure that some of the inner city neighborhoods adjacent to Hyde Park are better protected. Washington Park has similar demographics to Englewood where the worst murder rate is, but because its adjacent to Hyde Park and covered within the UCPD district its rate is a lot lower.
Obviously they could be better staffed and haven’t prevented every tragedy, but the one I mentioned at the beginning of this post wouldn’t be an outlier if we didnt have such a strong police force. In this day and age I’d rather have an armed and trained campus police force. Training is key though, it’s harder to get into UCPD than CPD and other campuses should have similar standards.
The solution to gun violence isn’t to disarm cops but to disarm the nutcases and terrorists our lax laws are allowing to obtain weapons.
A Liberty University police officer shot dead an unarmed student who he says attacked him. I don’t doubt the attack story, but I don’t doubt they’d both still be alive if the officer had pepper spray instead of a gun.
pepper spray would not have let the UCPD recover my friends stolen car or intervene another time when he was getting mugged, it would not stop the Gangster Disciples who are capable of some pretty heinous acts and worse.
I agree with Bill Clinton and Deval that we need more cops, and better armed ones, not less. In no way do I subscribe to the notion that its the Wild West and we should all be armed. I certainly think gun ownership would cause my problems than it solves with U of C students. But I also think if done right and professionally, and no offense to Falwell, but I doubt the yahoo he hired is half as capable as the UCPD officers I’ve met. Its a police force made up of veterans who were cops elsewhere for at least 5-10 years, and it’s significantly more diverse in terms of race and gender than the regular CPD. So I trust the cops. It’s getting guns out of the hands of everyone else that doesn’t need them that should be the priority.
Do we have reliable stats on what percentage of criminals are armed? I suspect it might be far lower than we usually think.
On that note, how often do police officers have direct confrontations with criminals where they need to be armed? That’s probably even more rare.
We shouldn’t disarm cops, but we should start to think seriously about whether they have too many guns.