Part II:
When we talk about violence prevention on campus or workplace, we are talking about a first and second half of the endeavor. The first half has always been anticipation, or awareness. This is the alertness in situations, danger avoidance, profiling, and the recognition of early warning signs or behaviors of individuals. It works.
The second half is a preparedness, a serious-minded preparedness. Preparedness is a meaningful plan of what to do should profiling or early warning signs or avoidance fail. e.g. what if you are cornered after walking away? This is the tough part for many violence prevention organizations and groups.
This preparedness is conspicuous by its absence in violence prevention for laymen, and thus, promotes an interesting form of dependency on officials as the only known solution.
Though dependency sounds tolerable, as some understand it, this modern political dependency is much closer to our being taken hostage. The signs are in politically manipulated conditions such that the electorate has no more choice in anything anymore, no more freedom of movement, no more being left alone to work things out our way (under our own authority, I hasten to add). This loss of freedom of movement comes from political coercion and a refusal to inform the electorate of their legal and tactical options without government lectures. While many thought that they were cooperating with their leaders, we were all actually being taken. Changing conditions crushes our independence from our servants and substitutes a greater dependency on them under force.
Such conditions include violence, food shortages, energy shortages, various climate crises, international conditions, currency proposals, health care costs, an impending transfer of interests in land and mortgages abroad, prisoner overcrowding and early release, and many more which come to mind. They all might be managed much better by individual families and the judgment of individuals, but when those choices are banned or punished, you have a dependency on the government which is unwelcome and generally inept anyway. The inept part is actually part of the dependency formula: don’t fix it, or the people will have no crisis. The electorate believes that these have the feel of artificial crises, and describe their realization as waking a sleeping giant.
Politics and self-rule are one of the few places where circumstantial evidence is permitted: i.e. if we lose our confidence and our trust of our servants, it’s all we need to unseat them and replace them in due process. If you’re going to rely on perception as reality to get elected, then we can rely on perception and understanding to change out officials and make it stick. Translation: regain our independence from them in the next election, if it won’t be too late.
How this relates to violence prevention centers – both college level and the major non-profits – is the exquisite example of how the more effective solution is once again taken off the table. You might say how one of the exits is closed, such that a reliance on the remaining limited choices is all that is allowed from now on. In the case of VPC’s, armed resistance, the most powerful way to de-escalate a violent act before it is a completed act, is verboten.
Real violence prevention is the combination of seeing our aggressors coming (profiling and noticing early warning behaviors) and meeting them when they break through avoidance measures. Only then is any real violence prevention complete.
As we know by now, armed citizens who invoke their authority to stop a crime in progress effectively de-escalate violent acts more than 2.5 million times each year. These are reported to local law enforcement, who then turns them in to the FBI to aggregate as part of its Uniform Crime Report. Where the target of a crime on campus could use a deeper understanding of his or her legal authority to act and perhaps a little encouragement and some well-founded self-confidence, these are crushed and discouraged. Many programs simply hide these from the adult student. This contributes to violence and vexes student safety.
This sets the stage for a dependency: calling the cops, if you can, doing nothing until they arrive, and waiting for them to arrive. You can see, then, how our students seem to be hostages of their trustees this way and for political purposes. You can see how violence isn’t prevented as well as it could be prevented. The very word ‘prevention’ sounds as if one is avoiding something such as heart disease or obesity, but crime isn’t a medical condition; it has a will of its own, and crime strikes at a time and place of its own choosing. When ‘prevention’ fails and avoidance is all you had been taught, what do you do next?
You can see how this contributes to greater and greater dependency on trustees and other officials, and one can see how avoidance and punishment policy can never do as well as the free citizen can do in meeting violence.
This is a cloned formula across America, this idea of taking a working safeguard or a functioning institution and crippling it to leave a remainder of a mere partial solution as a sole source exclusive. Though this is an age-old form of governance, something new has been added: this makes our bureaucrats predators now.
You might even say that a great deal of violence prevention which excludes preparedness is committing their own brand of violence: sabotage in the destruction of working safeguards and imposing a hostile indifference.
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Safer Streets NewsletterJohn Longenecker——
Bio and Archives
John Longenecker is an author of Safe Streets In The Nationwide Concealed Carry Of Handguns – Meeting Dependency And Violent Crime With American Spirit, Independence, And Citizen Authority [CONTRAST MEDIA PRESS]. Safer Streets Newsletter.
