The Fall of Civilization is on Schedule: Campus Police Aren't Allowed to Have Guns
Source – The Board of Trustees at Massachusetts College of Art and Design, or MassArt, voted Tuesday night for the school’s campus police officers to stay unarmed.
During a contentious and packed public meeting, the trustees voted 8-2 to continue its policy of campus police officers remaining unarmed, ending a yearslong saga that had frustrated many students, faculty and officers.
“It is not only unnecessary, but unwise to change our current policy,” MassArt president David Nelson said before the board vote. “To be clear, our currently policy is that officers remain unarmed … and that remains my position today.” …
MassArt police Sgt. Matt Hurley told the trustees that officer turnover is “a well-known and expensive problem that this department faces” as a result of the school’s unarmed policy.
“The MassArt community has been done a disservice as it has presented a false sense of security,” Hurley said. “Parents have an expectation that when they send their child off to school at MassArt, that since there is a police department there, they have nothing to worry about. This is just wrong.”
Hurley said that every campus police officer is fitted with a custom Kevlar vest, something MassArt “acknowledges that our officers face danger and may end up being shot at while in the performance of our duties. However, here we stand today to try and rationalize why we would need to be equipped with a firearm.”
Congratulations to president David Nelson and all the trustees at MassArt for making the campus safe from professionally trained sworn officers of the law. This should bring an end to the pandemic of campus police officers going around committing the wholesale slaughter of students that’s been sweeping the nation’s colleges. Now all those parents paying an average of $22,000 a year can sleep better knowing their children won’t be gunned down by these badge-wearing psychopaths just to satisfy their bloodlust.
All sarcasm aside, I need to know exactly what the thinking is here, other than a simplistic, “guns are bad” Hogarth Hughes worldview from the grown children who have been running academia for as long as I can remember. And reading Sgt. Hurley’s excellent point about being allowed Kevlar vests in order to stop bullets but not the means to fire back, just shines a spotlight on what happens any time you have a clash between people who solve real problems in this life and the ones who have the luxury to sit around on comfy chairs and theorize about everything. One side wants the means to protect innocent people from psycho ex-boyfriends, rapists, thieves and random mass killers. The other side wants a “Use Your Words” policy, like patrolling a city college campus is the same as telling kids to stop loitering outside the Hot Topic or they’ll be banned from the mall.
(Keep in mind too, that I’m not a gun owner. In fact, when I worked in the court system I made it a point to never want us to be armed with anything more than a metal detector at the door. Because most of the people in the court system are morons who’s only qualification was knowing a politician. If they so much as armed us with tasers I was going to quit because most of my coworkers would’ve been using them to heat up Hot Pockets. No thanks.)
It’s impossible to read this and not immediately think of Sean Collier, the MIT officer who was shot in cold blood by the Tsarnaev brothers while in his cruiser on routine patrol. He’s dead because two terrorists got the drop on him. The MassArt board would’ve had him unarmed and completely at the mercy of these monsters. Relying on nothing but the good will of the kind of people who lay pressure cooker bombs loaded with nails behind the legs of babies. I guess under the theory that the real problem is good guys with guns. And if we take them away and think happy thoughts, the world will follow suit and we’ll be in a violence-free utopia where everyone is as nice as the trustees of an art college.
Yeah, good luck with that. And while you’re living in your fantasy world, I’ll just keep being glad my kid is off at his school were not only are the cops armed, so is he.