Globe headline: “Northeastern to equip officers with semiautomatic rifles”
I went there in the 1960s but am ashamed of the school now. Sadly, NU President Joseph Aoun seem to be rejecting FDR (“The only thing we have to fear is…fear itself.”) and swallowing Trump’s Kool-Aid.
Fear sells in Ted Cruz’s Texas, where it’s legal to bring guns to class, but Boston — indeed all of Massachusetts — is better than that. We don’t buy fear here … as Republican Charlie Baker has seemingly learned (See “Thanks Gov. Baker” post). Mr. Aoun, are you listening?
Please share widely!
We are turning even campus police into uniformed military special-forces teams, and our campuses into combat zones.
The WGBH piece describing this travesty notes that MIT campus police have carried semi-automatic assault rifles since 2012 (emphasis mine):
Boston police have a different view of all this:
I don’t know about Texas. I do know that what I see unfolding in Boston is more and more hysteria, panic and unrestrained fear.
We are terrified of anyone not like us, and we are apparently terrified of the NRA. We watch our children being massacred on our campus, and our answer is to flood our campus with military combat teams rather than turn off the gun manufacturers and confiscate the tens of millions of guns.
These are dark times for the city I love, and I fear the darkest hour has not yet come.
Despite the ramp up in fear and militarization, the real world just doesn’t support either.
Our cities are generally much safer now than a decade or more in the past. For police, despite the ludicrous arguments that they are constantly under attack, it is safer to be a police officer now than at any time in the last 100 years.
…carry a simple handgun in a belt. Surely campus police need not be better armed than that.
By defending no fly lists, racial profiling of Muslims, and opposing due process all in the name of window dressing gun control that won’t stop mass shootings.
He didn’t quadruple the terror lists. He gave speeches DEFENDING moderate Muslims in the wake of 9/11 when nobody much wanted to hear it. And so on.
Your Progressive Leader lied to you from the get-go about Gitmo and a lot of other things. You fell for it, and kept your protest muted until the second term and mid-terms were safely gone by.
Tell me what the difference is between Crawford and Chicago, exactly. That is why I downrated your reflexive and self-pitying remark.
I don’t know where Ted Cruz hails from, but there are any number of Texas cities and tows that can substituted for “Crawford” with no change in meaning at all.
I have expressed my feeling of being betrayed by my party and my president multiple times. My contempt for our most recent gubernatorial nominee is due in no small part to her enthusiastic embrace of the Patriot Act, expansion of police militarization, expansion of government surveillance, and similar rubbish in the aftermath of 9/11.
I invite you, now, to please offer the names of GOP leaders, nationally or in Massachusetts, who spoke out against such abuses. A large part of the betrayal I feel about Mr. Obama is that he campaigned against just such abuses. He did promise to close GITMO (and did not).
Now, just for the record, what was YOUR party’s stance while Mr. Obama was attempting to carry out his promise to close GITMO? Which GOP leaders stepped forward in a bi-partisan show of support for ending US war crimes and human rights abuses?
There is plenty of blame to smear around about our disgusting descent into these shameful and contemptible practices. President George W. Bush most certainly DID lead the way. He most certainly DID destroy the most stable non-secular Middle Eastern government that had until the 2003 been a bulwark of western resistance to the spread of Muslim extremism (fomented by the Iranians) that produced ISIS. He did so based on lies, disinformation, and false pretenses. He betrayed the trust that some in his own administration, such as Colin Powell, placed in him.
Mr. Bush may have given some nice speeches in the aftermath of 9/11. The actions of his administration betrayed everything he said in those speeches.
There is simply no way to avoid the role that George W. Bush played in creating this terrible situation that we have today.
Our good ally Saudi Arabia fomented the Sunni extremism that ISIL traffics in. Iran is propping up the secular Baathist Assad because, as an Alawite, he is a fellow Shiite and a bulwark against Sunni extremism. Granted, much of the rest of the argument is compelling, and I would agree the secular Saddam was a check on the regional ambitions of many of the powers in the area, not the least of which was Saudi Arabia and Iran which both filled the power vacuum with their proxies. George W. Bush definitely made the least far less stable than his predecessors or successor, though 7 years in, Obama has made plenty of mistakes trying to clean it up just fine on his own.
For some reason, I can never keep “secular” and “non-secular” straight. 🙁
I think you need to maintain a coherent thought. It sounds like talk radio string together similar yet unrelated items together to try to make a point that is not proven by their remarks. You have been doing this in multiple posts.
I’m having a hard time understanding why you are referring to him, perhaps because you are being incoherent.
@ Peter: I am not sure what your downrating was about, I basically have been agreeing with you throughout this debate and used the Crawford, TX exaggeration satirically to match the hyperbolic ‘texas values’ of the thread title. That said, it would’ve been nice if your side stood up for civil liberties and against secretive lists back when it merely threatened the 1st, 4th and 5th amendment, rather than just getting angry when it threatened the 2nd.
between NPD and the Husky 5-0, which I think has more to do with it than anything else. Doesn’t seem like it make sense to heavily arm urban campuses. If anyone, the BPD should be the ones responding, not the security guards with guns.