Guns on campus is in the Newspapers again. One of the arguments against armed students I answer here [The New Wild West]. A few newspaper readers 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 Psychiatric, a lot of 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 you are witnessing 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. In fact, EMS 9-1-1 dispatchers are trained in how to coach citizens over the phone in giving First-aid and CPR. The lay presumption about armed self-defense, on the other hand, 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: when you are alone and help is only on the way.
I have for years named and articulated a concept called the CPR Corollary, the exquisite identity of values between Citizen CPR and the armed citizen who carries his own concealed handgun. Oftentimes, I am pressed with provocative questions I love to answer. One of the best is the idea of how we justify the armed citizen on college campus when police are stationed on campus. Again, an identity of values between Citizen CPR and CCW.
It works like this: do you believe in CPR?
You are in a restaurant, and suddenly your beloved begins to choke on a piece of meat. At that moment – at that one moment – do you believe in the Heimlich Maneuver? At that moment, when seconds count, and that moment when it is the first thing to do, do you believe in the abdominal thrust maneuver for choking? Do you think only of calling the Paramedics and of doing nothing like the abdominal thrust maneuver? You see where I'm going with this.
Choking is the sudden and complete obstruction of the airway. It is not partial, it is complete obstruction, and the patient cannot breathe and cannot speak. It is what we call the Café Coronary. We have an old saying that if you can say you are choking, you aren't choking. Your loved one's life is in immediate danger. Because a choking person cannot speak, First-aid and CPR around the world has devised the international or universal sign for choking: both hands palm-in over the throat.
Why a universal sign? Not only to summon Paramedics, but to summon somebody. Perhaps you.
In a restaurant or other place such as a church or workplace, her life will depend entirely on whether someone there knows CPR and the abdominal thrust maneuver. The maneuver is part of a good CPR course, and you are taught how to deliver it to adults, adolescents and infants. It is life-saving.
The Paramedics are the EMS equivalent of SWAT. They are the specialists who work above ground or behind the toilet bowl in the ladies room in a biker bar. But they cannot work when they have not yet arrived on scene. For your beloved who is choking, the clock began ticking sixty seconds ago in the time it took you to read this far.
Before your loved one suffocates to death, someone has to intervene; the Paramedics are moments away, but your loved one has only one moment left. She has already passed out and she is not breathing. Lay intervention to save the life of another is the entire purpose of Citizen CPR worldwide. The American Red Cross and the American Heart Association both emphasize lay intervention without delay. So do I.
The principles and practices of Passerby CPR and the armed citizen are identical.
College campuses need to affirm the adult student's right to be armed as an asset to the student body. Some emergencies – whether they are medical or criminal violence – simply cannot wait for first responders. A college campus may also have a First-aid station on campus as it would have a police station, but if they are not on scene, what happens to the victim?
The thugs count on that and sometimes it is they who answer this question for us. They expect it. Every single case of a completed act of violence on campus is a failure of anti-violence policy.
Remember that students are everywhere on campus. They are ubiquitous. I do not suggest that individual adults undertake SWAT cases such as a restaurant takeover or a bank robbery, but from what we have seen of campus violence reports, one armed student could have made all the difference in the world in abductions, murders, rapes and knifings.
If college campuses would affirm armed students on campus on the very same principle any rational human being would affirm Citizen CPR and the abdominal thrust maneuver, you wouldn't have nearly the kind of successful violence on campus as what colleges see at present.
And thugs would come to expect that, too.
Where many citizens believe that crimes of violence can wait, I urge them to remember that the record shows that they could not. College campuses can very likely benefit from consulting private gun owners to speak instead of consulting other bureaucrats. It's not a big legal or law enforcement question, it's a personal liberty and survival question.
It's not as if you can hold your breath.
_____________________________________________________________________
For more about how the CPR Corollary educates the electorate on the ubiquitous armed citizen, see the the author's e-book Safer Streets 2010. |
