Safer Streets 2010: When will colleges be safer, Part II

In fact, when will the nation be safer? Perhaps in November.

When gun owners and liberty purists say that you and you alone are responsible for your own safety, we are saying several things. Personal safety, your own legal authority to act, and a general protection of self-rule thereby.



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Adult students who attend violence prevention seminars are not told that police will not protect them. It is like going out on a boat ride without knowing how to swim and without life jackets for everyone. Anyone preaching and teaching about violence prevention ought to teach alternatives when the boat sinks -- I mean, preparedness for when ordinary conditions deteriorate. 

Gun owners, police and the courts have told Americans that police have no duty to protect individuals, but what does this really translate into in adult decision-making on violence prevention on campus? I have written that the student alone is responsible for his or her own personal safety, but what does that mean, exactly? 

It means that the target of violence will likely be stalked and attacked, or be a target of opportunity. It means targeted. It doesn't mean that it will happen to someone else, it means that it will happen to anyone. Not all targeting is personal for some reason. Often, it is just plain anger directed at the next opportunity. It means that the student needs to come to understand that they will be targeted when the aggressor is fairly confident that their target will be defenseless. The key to hardening the target — that's you, the adult student and the entire student body — is to disrupt that aggressor's high confidence by making him or her much more uncertain as to how defenseless you really are. Doubt. Risk. Once thugs learn that a whole community of adult students has a stronger concentration of armed students among them, we have seen an important conclusion: thugs don't seem to attack on campuses where concealed carry is affirmed and common. Thugs don't usually attack where there is a known spirit of resistance. Real resistance. 

Remember that just because police are on campus doesn't mean they are at the very scene of the crime and able to see it and stop it. A nursing office is also on campus, but not at the scene of the injury. They have to be aware of the emergency. Thugs strike when they believe the coast is clear and no cops around. Or anyone else. It's good to remember -- good to learn -- that for the first moments, there is no one else. 

Violence prevention relies a great deal on avoiding such conditions, but this forgets that violence is an intelligence which can stalk you and overcome avoidance. It can even set the conditions long enough to strike. Every case of a completed act of violence on campus is a failure of the current violence prevention program of teaching strictly avoidance. 

Remember that every adult has all legal authority to stop a crime in progress, and that the second amendment is the lethal force which backs our authority over that of our servants. Life-saving citizen CPR training accompanies the trained citizen everywhere he goes to be immediately administered when first responders still have yet to arrive. Identical to this is that the armed citizen brings with him his legal authority to bring to bear on the situation of violence when there are no officers present. And when avoidance has failed. 

As long as we are contemplating violence avoidance, we need to remember that gun control doesn't go after only guns, it goes after your sovereign authority to act. Invigorate the knowledge of that authority and you’ll be avoiding violence a lot better when thugs choose other targets. Makes sense? Gun bans steal and vex that legal authority which you would bring to bear on violent thugs. 

Small wonder, then, that public servants feel so emboldened to steal other things. 

Think November, 2010 for protecting that sovereign authority. And everything else dear to us