Safer Streets 2010: Guns on campus and the CPR Corollary.

Guns on campus is in the Newspapers again. One of the arguments against armed students I address here [The New Wild West]. A few answered, including yours truly as the paper was good enough to publish my response.

Part of the editorial said, “Unlike police officers, permit holders are not required to go through weeks and weeks of training to respond to high-intensity situations. If someone pulls a gun in a classroom, would professors have the ability to respond in the best way? Or would professors become automatic targets?”

Think of the medical emergency in comparison to the criminal emergency. The Paramedics undergo training that is eight hours a day, five days a week for months until they get to clinical rotations with doctors, and then after two months of hospital rotation on a general medicine floor, their OB-GYN, some Pyche, Phlebotomy, and a ton of Emergency, two more months of field internship under the supervision of two experienced paramedics.

But what good does the training do when the emergency continues to evolve before they are summoned, much less arrived? For all the training Police and Paramedics complete, what good does it do when they are not yet there? The practice of discouraging intervention is counter-intuitive, to say the least. The lay presumption about armed self-defense does what assumptions do worst, and that is to fill in the blanks themselves with guesswork instead of consulting private gun owners.

This is because the question is not one of law or law enforcement, but one of survival in the most critical moments of the emergency.