School: On Preparedness

Everyone at UF received an e-mail from President Machen in the wake of the NIU murders. Speaking as someone who has protested for the end of CCW restrictions on college campuses, I felt like responding to some of the e-mail's points:

We are all stunned by the shootings yesterday at Northern Illinois University west of Chicago. Sadly, it is only the latest in a horrific string of mass murders in academic settings. While we are shocked, we also find ourselves once again asking the question, "Are we prepared?"

Let me begin by updating you on some things that have occurred here at UF since the Virginia Tech incident last April...

I'd feel a lot more "prepared" if I could legally carry my CCW on campus, but whatever. I'm also irked by the reference to VA Tech as an "incident" - I hope in the future Machen can summon up some stronger language for an event where 32 people were murdered.

In January, we conducted the first test of our emergency text messaging system for students, faculty and staff. The test, performed in conjunction with Mobile Campus, showed that our text message reached 86 percent of its intended audience of more than 40,000 people within 50 minutes.

This is pretty curious. While it's true that in some anomalous cases (like VA Tech where the intial shootings happened long before the main attack) measures like this would help alert students, a lot of these mass murders are over and done with in less than a minute.

In addition, the University of Florida Police Department in December became the first university law enforcement agency in the country to accomplish the "Triple Crown" -- accreditation by the International Association of Campus Law Enforcement Administrators (IACLEA), the Commission on Accreditation for Law Enforcement Agencies (CALEA) and the Commission for Florida Law Enforcement Accreditation (CFA). This recognition speaks to the tremendous professionalism of UFPD and the quality of its officers.

As a reminder, UFPD,trains regularly for a variety of possible emergency situations, including just such a scenario: a gunman on campus. UFPD conducts exercises in conjunction with the Gainesville Police Department and the Alachua County Sheriff's Office and has a thorough and extensive response plan.

Well, it's nice the UPD is well-accredited and all, but I have no idea how they could actually prevent a tragedy. I don't care if police officers are on the scene in a minute - you could kill a dozen people in that time. It's telling that in most of these spree killings, the psycho takes his own life before anyone in uniform can respond. More and more, I think stopping these kinds of murderers requires a decentralized solution - the carrying of firearms by ordinary people.

Of course, you can't even legally carry a firearm for defense in Illinois. Not that anyone in the MSM would ever point out that the entire state is supposed to be a "gun-free zone."