IU has responded by upping the number of police patrols and holding several self defense classes for students and faculty. If I'm not wrong, and that has been known to happen, these self defense classes will boil down to
- Avoid poorly lit or empty areas of campus after dark
- Travel in groups
- Walk assertively
- If attacked, yell "Stop!", kick them in the balls, run away, and call police.
Suffice it to say that I have little faith in what these classes will accomplish in the IU situation. These things are a good start, but the women who attend and work at IU deserve better. Since IU is a victim disarmament zone, I'm guessing there will be little to no discussion of the tools that a woman can use to equalize the force equation with a male attacker, namely firearms.
If IU leadership truly cares about the women on their campus, they should drop their irrational fear of effective defensive weaponry, and hold defensive training that will actually teach these ladies the tools and methods that they can use to protect themselves. But what will probably happen is that the attacks will continue until either the attacker moves on, the campus police gets extraordinarily lucky, or he makes the mistake of messing with one of the women in the IU population who have made personal defense a personal decision.
4 comments:
We need to start up a Victim Armament program. I wonder what it would take...
Concur- Arm them and give the Ladies a hunting license!
It would take a inexpensive, reliable, and easily used firearm in an inexpensive caliber that could be purchased by someone on a college budget. Then it would require firearms safety training, say a CCW class as part of the Freshman 101 series of classes. If you pass the CCW background class, you get to carry on university grounds.
And give every student, male or female, who stops a crime using these tools a tee shirt that states their role as a protector of the university and its people. Maybe something that says "We guard schools" in latin. Kids will do anything for a tee shirt. ;-)
Yeah, but I wonder what it would take to actually organize a program to push this forward. I, for one, would be overjoyed if my school would let me carry my pistol on campus, considering that the walk to school goes through a couple blocks where a person would not like to be walking at night...
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