Posted on 06/06/2007 3:32:48 PM PDT by neverdem
A University of Utah task force formed to examine campus security initially will focus on policies prohibiting guns in hearing rooms and restricting concealed-weapons-permit holders in dorms.
Law professor Wayne McCormack will lead the task force, which eventually will focus on issues ranging from personal assaults to weapons-related mass violence.
"We will be considering ways to forestall emergencies, to enhance our response capabilities and to communicate with the campus," he said. "All subjects related to security are on the table for consideration, but it is important to realize that this campus already has a very effective security and response system in place."
U. President Michael Young proposed the 12-member, cross-campus task force after this year's Legislature passed a law that allowed concealed-weapons carriers to bring guns on campus, but allowed students to select non-carrier roommates in campus dorms. In exchange, the U., which had previously lost a case in the Utah Supreme Court to ban guns from campus, dropped a pending federal lawsuit.
While the task force has yet to meet, Annie Nebeker-Christensen, dean of students, wants people to know the U. "is a safe place and will continue to be a safe place."
"Other schools have been dealing with these issues for some time, and they've done an excellent job, and so can we," she said. "We want to make students aware of their rights and responsibilities."
As a result of the April shootings at Virginia Tech, the task force also will look for early warning signs of hostile student behavior and provide appropriate counseling. Members will advise the campus community how to alert security if they suspect a student has a weapon and is a threat.
McCormack said the task force also will look into emergency communication methods such as using electronic signs and text messaging.
Various campus groups are reassessing the U.'s emergency response plans to seismic, weather, chemical or technological events that could cripple campus. The task force will communicate with those groups, but will remain focused on campus violence.
"If you look at this as a beginning, middle and end, we want to have preventive measures to identify problems before they occur, have the right responses and facilities in the middle of an emergency and have the right communications and counseling systems in place at the end," he said. "Basically, we're looking at our ability to deal with violence."
smcfarland@sltrib.com
Because gun control worked so well at Virginia Tech.
Didn’t they learn anything from what happened at Viginia Tech?
Will they also be training local police to cower behind trees until massacres end?
And depriving honest, law abiding citizens of the means to protect themselves and others does this exactly how? Or do you mean it is and will continue to be a safe place for criminals to ply their trades?
Thanks to you, all additional posts to this thread are now redundant.
Never underestimate the stupidity of those for which ideas have no consequences...such as professional academics.
Well, if it ain't broke, don't fix it.
Isn't she the one that also said "evidence doesn't prove anything!"
You don't understand.
They have to heal the atmosphere of terrorism that comes from the possibility someone might have a gun...
The Virginia Tech shootings provoke cries for draconian gun control laws enlisting wisdom from bureaucrats and politicians comparable to those who applied their trenchant and mercurial incites to keeping out 10 million illegal aliens. However, an alternative would expand permitted concealed carry in public places.
A rigorous, twenty-year study by John Lott and William Landes from the University of Chicago Law School supports this alternative. Passage of shall issue laws correlates with large decreases in multiple victim shootings and reduced harm from shootings, which do occur.
Licensed citizens who understand shooting, and limits for use of deadly force can make startling interruptions resulting in abandoned or improvised plans. The assailant may not be neutralized, but now police would respond to an incident in progress, instead of arriving for body counts and paperwork.
The absence of shootings is also important. Public place shootings provide perpetrators leading roles in theatricals executing private, malevolent fantasies. Previously imagined screams and explosions suddenly penetrate their beings, embellished by intimate self-created visual stimuli of human terror, bloody mists, broken bodies, culminating in the Gotterdammerung of suicide at their chosen moment. The latent presence of armed citizens provides a deterrent disqualifying those places, leading prospective murderers to abandon their fantasies, or to seek the supportive environment of a “gun free’ zone.
Our colleges tout disturbing protocols for evacuating, witnessing, communicating, containing, coordinating, notifying, and counseling, while not revealing minimum police response times provide murderers five to ten minutes for uninterrupted violence.
Hate to break with the crowd here, but I have some practical reservations about guns in dorm rooms. For starters, college students are not always careful about who is in and out of their dorm room. There friends are in and out, and friends of their friends, and on and on. And not all those people are always sober and responsible. Unless the student had a place to lock the gun away securely, I would be concerned about who might pick it up and get stupid with it.
I would not be concerned about the student who owned the gun, but I would be most of his friends would not have experience with handling guns safely. It seems like an accident waiting to happen.
I am not totally opposed to allowing students to have guns in their room, but if I were running the school, I would mandate gun safety classes for the student gun owner, and those sharing his living area. I would also make sure that there was a safe, locked place to store the gun within the room.
My favorite
“We want to make students aware of their rights and responsibilities.”
How about the right to protect yourself...
If the next school or college shooting happens to be in the administrative offices, they will install bullet proofing for themselves and declare the rest of the buildings as safe.
Well, we definitely have to forbid cars, voting, sex and alcohol, then. Hmmm... that used to be the case. It was called “In Loco Parentis” or some-such Latin phrase. It went out the window when we passed the Constitutional amendment making 18 year olds full citizens.
Repeal that amendment, and you might find some sympathizers.
Why would you make the assumption someone is incapable of safekeeping a weapon with out oversight and rules from someone like yourself
actually, my last post was meant for you
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