Dolphin’s Dock

Well done!

I’m such a newbie, I’d never even heard of tagging for a meme before. You wacky kids today!!!

Hey Dolphin — you’ve been tagged!

First, like many people in this country, I know Martial Arts. I’ve had years of training in Tae Kwon Do and I consider myself pretty good at it. I’ve also spent time learning Fencing (Saber) and Kendo, although I would hardly call myself anything but a spirited amateur in either. I’ve had combat firearms training and unarmed training from the Marines (benefit of being a USMC taxi driver, they want you to know how to fight if you are stuck on a beach with them). So on the whole, I’m mildly badass.

Except for one thing.

When I was 20 (I’m in my mid 30s now), a car crossed the center line of the highway I was riding my motorcycle on and hit me. End result, well, let’s just say I was pretty broken up. I mean, even in full armor, getting smacked at 100+ mph is gonna leave a mark or two. I recovered pretty well, and I even still practice TKD, but I have limitations. I have one arm and one leg that don’t really work all that well, and if it is a bad day, well then they hardly work at all, which means I don’t really have the option of engaging in unarmed combat. Now I’m not looking for sympathy, if I do, I know where it is in the dictionary, but I want Dolphin to remember, despite my training, and my determination, if I engage in unarmed combat, the only way I’d hope to win is if my opponent is in their 80’s and in poor health. Not everyone is as awesome as you, and should not have to be in order to provide for their own defense.

And besides, one of the things my three different Sensei’s all agreed on, is that when facing a man with a gun, it is best to have a gun of your own. Failing that, the ideal thing is to rush them while weaving and hope they either are bad shots or unnerved enough to hesitate until you can close the range and engage to disarm (and some of the disarm techniques I learned against an opponent with a gun had little to do with an actual disarm and more to do with strikes to kill or incapacitate in one hit).

Now, when I was in college, I took a job on campus managing a department, I encouraged all my student employees to get trained in First Aid, CPR, and self defense, since many of them would work until 11PM and would be in charge of the facility after I left for the day. I told them to be careful and safe going home, call a friend for a ride, or me, if they felt unsafe.

I also told them that should anyone enter their work areas that made them feel uneasy to call me, or if anyone made them feel unsafe, they were to contact the police ASAP and then call me. I made sure all of them knew that I would rather have them make a mistake and raise a false alarm, than allow themselves or other students to be hurt. I told them this because across the street from where my offices were, was a halfway house, and we’ve had trouble with them in the past.

So, if I’d had the option to arm my employees, would I have done it? Most certainly. Why?, because out the 100 or so students who worked for me, only two of them proved to be so irresponsible that I had to fire them. The rest were very responsible, very serious about their schooling, and very well behaved. Now maybe my assistant and I were just real good at hiring people, but I choose to think that by the time a student is old enough to legally be able to carry, they are responsible enough to be able to do so (or have already proven to the courts that they aren’t), and they know themselves well enough to know if they have the strength of character to do so. In short, without any evidence to the contrary, I would give the students the benefit of the doubt.

Second, as to my post at TheLineIsHere, you seem to have missed the point. I was not posting to argue for Campus Carry, but rather, I was encouraging people to prepare to care for themselves and their loved ones should the shit hit the fan. Ask yourself, if you were driving down the highway and a horrible accident happened right in front of you, or happened to you would you know how to help those you could help? Would you know what to do, or, more importantly, would you know what NOT to do? If you got hit by a bad storm, a hurricane, a tornado, a fire, an earthquake, a home invader, or a flash flood, do you have a plan? Do you have the training to implement that plan? Does the rest of your family know the plan and have your practiced it?

If your plan is, as was the case for thousands of people in NOLA, to call 911 and wait for rescue, you are in a world of trouble. As I have been told countless times by the Policemen, the Firemen, and the Paramedics teaching my CERT class, if the shit hits the fan, call 911, but never assume they are going to get there in time to help. Maybe they are busy at an industrial explosion, or busy with a bank robbery, or a 50 car pileup on the freeway. Maybe traffic is real bad. Doesn’t matter, the fact is, they might not get there, and to be honest, they have no legal obligation to save you! Police are obligated to protect the community by investigating crime in an effort to catch a perpetrator, protecting you is merely a side effect of that duty. Same with Firemen, if they arrive at your house and it is busy burning, they will have to decide if they can effectively fight it, and if they can’t, they are gonna let it burn and just make sure it doesn’t spread. Involved in a 50 car pileup? EMS will arrive, triage you, and if you are too far gone, they are gonna let you go.

Community emergency services are obligated to do the most good for the most people protecting your possessions, your home, your ass, is incidental to that mission.

So my point was, in an emergency, call the professionals, but don’t count on them.

Good post, Dolphin.

I have no problem leaving *some* things to the professionals, especially where people’s lives are involved and a mistake could be deadly. (Here’s an example I posted last week.) I don’t want my accounting or geography professor to be an expert in who is a threat and who’s not, who requires deadly force and who doesn’t. I want them to know about accounting and geography.

And I think it’s very telling that if you ask law enforcement people, they are almost unanimously opposed to the kind of citizen intervention that the conceal carry folks propose.

Finally, I agree with you that “it’s a false dichotomy to suggest that your only choices are to carry a gun or do nothing at all.”

Oh, one more thing, I agree with you that a campus should be allowed to govern themselves and set their own policies regarding weapons on campus.

I also think that a campus should be held to account for that decision. If a campus chooses to disarm its students, it should be held open to lawsuits should a student be subjected to a violent crime while on campus. Of course, such a policy would worry me as campuses report crime shoddily enough as it is (I’ve had friends who worked for, or had experiences with, various campus police organizations, and the level of pressure to under-report crime is significant).

What I’m saying, is that you don’t have to have a gun to “do anything to help yourself.
I agree, students in that lecture hall at NIU could have thrown books, or chairs, or anything at hand, at the the shooter to take him off kilter long enough for a tackle, but instead they all hid or ran because none seem to have been taught how to properly act against such violence. Discussions of CCW on campus afterwards tended toward the idea that armed students could have done nothing and only the police would have been able to stop the shooter. I merely parroted that argument as indicative of a greater problem. Your discussions with me at AuntB’s was not the only place I sourced from.

As for the students (and this is really the crux of this post), I think we offer them a great disservice by teaching them a specific solution to a specific problem in lieu of the critical thinking skills necessary to discover and evaluate solutions to any problem they encounter.

Seeing as we are discussing firearms as a solution to a problem on a campus, your statement here implies that somehow those who are advocating campus carry are advocating a single solution, rather than a final piece in an entire mindset of self-protection through situational awareness, avoidance, preparedness, and self-reflection. No strawman is being built here. If you feel, as I do, that students should learn how to protect themselves as I described above, how to critically evaluate a situation and work to extricate themselves from it before violence is needed, then we agree to a point. I hold that if we are to give them the tools to protect themselves, we give them ALL of the tools they desire within the scope of the law. If a campus chooses to ban weapons, then that campus should be held liable for it’s failure to protect it’s students from violence. If a campus permits weapons, then that campus puts the onus of protection on the student, and the student must choose how they would provide for their own defense.

Now, most states only issue CCW to persons over 21 with no criminal background. That means after a student leaves High School, a campus has 3 years to help students learn to protect themselves. Most campuses pay a good amount of lip service to the ideal, but fail to really deliver. It was one of the things I did like about my campus, it offered numerous martial arts as elective classes, and hosted even more free clubs for students to continue practicing with, along with regular seminars, and a couple of programs to provide students a safe way to get home. It was not perfect, but it was at least an effort.

As for College Admins, I’ve followed campus politics for most of my adult life, and most admins are more worried about their own asses and reputations than they are the students.

Thank you very much sir, sorry about the mess, I’ll try to be neater next time.

Actually, most campuses prohibit weapons carry of any kind. For example, at times, when carrying a firearm is not a good idea (like when I got to a bar), I carry an ASP (Collabsible Baton) along with my walking stick. Many campuses would prohibit this, along with devices like Tasers and Pepper/CS Spray. If a campus denies students the right to devices that act as force equalizers then that campus should potentially be liable for students who are victims of violence while on campus property.

See, it is not a question of guns or nothing, it is a question of percieved versus actual safety. A campus is, by denying adults the right to carry legally (guns or otherwise), making a statement that the campus is accepting responsibility for the students safety while on campus, therefore the campus should be liable for failing to provide that protection.

Offer the students access to any and all means of self defense while on campus, and the campus relieves itself not only of the responsibility of protecting students, but also relieves the responsibility of an accident with a weapon, as a person who carries concealed legally accepts all responsibility for that weapon. So, say I carry my sidearm at the mall, and somehow I get trampled by a herd of children, which causes (somehow) my weapon to discharge and injure someone. Legally, the mall has no liability since it was only following the law by allowing me, a legal permit holder, to carry. Now, a mall may prohibit CCW, but it does so not out of fear of losing a lawsuit, but rather out of fear of having to bear the cost of defending against one.

So it my scenario, the school that allows CCW is not held liable for any violence on campus. As it stands right now, most campuses prohibit students the means to protect themselves (except certain half measures), yet bear no legal responsibility for failing to protect them.

The right of a person to provide for their own self defense trumps any right others might think they have to “feel safe”. And remember, I don’t think the solution to every conflict or situation is a sidearm, but I do feel that adult students have the right to make that choice for themselves (and bear the consequences of that choice themselves), and an open campus should either allow these adults their rights, or risk paying for the privilege of limiting them.

Regarding admins, might be the difference between small private versus large public campuses, I could believe a small private campus would have a leadership that really cares and is invested in the quality of the campus for the long term.

Quite right, we shall have to agree to disagree.

Thanks for a stimulating conversation, been a pleasure!