Years ago campus police were greeted as
a welcome alternative to regular cops hassling students and creating
trouble.. But now they mostly are regular cops, hassling students,
dishing out speeding tickets like the one the Virigina Tech campus
police issued Cho. They were good at spotting a car going a few miles
over the limit, bad at protecting the campus from a smouldering
psychotic.
The Virginia Tech terrible massacre
should prompt a radical review of the utility of SWAT teams which now
infest almost every community in America. Each time there's a hostage
taking or a mass murderer on the rampage, one sees the same familiar
sight: overweight SWAT men, doubled up under the weight of their costly
artillery, lumbering along in their body armor and then hiding behind
trees or cars or walls while the killer goes about his business. SWAT
teams perform most efficiently when shooting down unarmed street people
menacing them with cellphones.
The answer is to disband SWAT teams and
kindred military units, and return to the idea of voluntary posses or
militias: a speedy assembly of citizen volunteers with their own
weapons. Such a body at Columbine or Virginia Tech might have saved many
lifes. In other words: make the Second Amendment live up to its promise.
In 2005 I listened to some earnest ACLU
type at a meeting in Garberville, an hour from where I live, deliver a
judicious speech about Taser guns--a new toy for the cops, whereb y a
person can be zapped with 50,000 volts. The ACLU guy was torn. On the
one hand, he reasoned that the Taser -- being purportedly, though not
actually non-lethal -- is better than a 12-gauge or high powered rifle.
On the other hand, there is the possibility of "improper use". His
answer: more regulation. He didn't entertain the actual course of
events, namely that Tasers have now been added to the means whereby the
police can kill or terrorize people and that regulation will be zero.
The left complain about SWAT teams, but
doesn't see that the progressives bear a lot of responsibility for their
rise. If you confer the task of social invigilation and protection to
professional janissaries--cops -- and deny the right of self and social
protection to ordinary citizens, you end up with crews of over-armed
thugs running amok under official license, terrorizing the disarmed
citizens. In the end you have the whole place run by the Army or the
federalized National Guard, as is increasingly evident now with the
overturning of the Posse Comitatus laws forbidding any role for the
military in domestic law enforcement.
The Drug Connection
What should be banned from campuses are
not weapons but prescriptions for antidepressants. Eric Harris,
co-slayer (with Dylan Klebold) of twelve students and a teacher in the
Columbine school shootings in 1999, was on Luvox, a Selective Serotonin
Reuptake Inhibitor (SSRI) of the same class as Prozac, Zoloft, and Paxil.
Initially Harris had been prescribed Zoloft, but told his doctor he was
having suicidal and homicidal fantasies. So the doc shifted him to Luvox.
16-year Jeff Weise, who killed 10
schoolmates at Red Lake High School on an Indian Reservation in 2005 was
on Prozac. The manufacturer said 4 per cent of children in one of its
tests of Luvox developed short-term mania. Other studies of the SSRI
anti-depressants have claimed they have a 15 per cent chance of
prompting suicidal or homicidal reactions.
Cho Seung-Hui was on a prescription drug
for his psychological problems. What exactly it was not yet been
disclosed, though the likelihood of it being an anti-depressant is high,
since doctors on campuses dispense prescriptions for them like confetti.
Fear Of Legal Repercussions On Unruly
Students
There was plenty of evidence that Cho
Seung-Hui was a time bomb waiting to explode. Students refused to take
classes with him. His essays so disturbed one of his teachers with their
violent ravings that she arranged a secret signal to another professor
in case she needed security during her tutorials. It seems he may well
have harassed female students and set fire to a dorm earlier this year.
Students talked about him as a possible shooter. Three weeks ago there
were anonymous threats to bomb the engineering buildings. Come the first
two slayings in the dorm and the cops don't raise the alarm or clear the
campus.
Make laxity in closely supervising and,
where necessary, committing visibly psychotic students grounds for
termination. More than one teacher felt Cho was scarily nuts. They
recommended "counseling", then didn't bother to review the conclusions
of the counselors. And now it has emerged that Cho was actually
institutionalised as a psychotic and eminent suicide risk in 2005. Yet
when he returned to campus the administrators didn't even tip off his
room-mate to be on the watch.