Safety is a clear priority on every campus. How to achieve the safest possible environment for students, faculty and staff is open for debate, especially when it comes to having guns on campus.
Arming the public safety officers at Augustana College is not a good idea. Our campus does not have a long history of violence.
Our campus has already taken several steps in the right direction for promoting a safer campus environment. The emergency phones in poor cell service areas are one safety resource.
Public safety patrols the campus regularly, making themselves a visible presence everywhere on campus that people could be up to shenanigans. Mass drills of different kinds have been held multiple times on campus in just the past year.
Those are all steps in the right direction. Arming public safety would be a definite step in the wrong direction.
Jim Fisher, former FBI agent and criminal law professor, reported to the Washington Times in 2012 that armed police officers were responsible for 607 shooting-related deaths, part of a larger total of approximately 1,100 shootings in the year 2011 alone.
These numbers should be a wake-up call to the kind of violence that can and does come from the very people we are supposed to be trusting to protect us when they have a gun in their hand.
The Public Safety officers at Augustana College are all upstanding people, and strict training and regulations would surely be put in place before any of them are armed. But if we allow Public Safety to be armed now, what happens in the future after the current officers retire? Police academy training does not ensure that a future officer won’t be trigger-happy.
A Public Safety officer wouldn’t even have to be intending to shoot and seriously injure or kill someone for a terrible accident to occur. Even with proper training and safety protocols, guns are dangerous weapons with one purpose only – to kill.
We don’t need guns on Augustana’s campus. Public safety and the administration does a good job of keeping us safe.
The Observer Editorial Board was unable to reach a consensus on the topic of Augustana College arming our public safety officers. This article is one of three perspectives the editorial board is presenting on this issue. Find the other two articles here and here, and weigh in on the debate in the comments.