Dear Editor:
I’m writing in response to the empty holster protest held on campus on Oct. 22. While I know those who would like to see gun laws broadened to include a carry-on-campus aspect, I might warn against such a change on practical grounds.
My basis for this is 13 years as an infantryman in the USMC and U.S. Army. There, I was put in the position on an occasion or two of having to hunt armed people in places crawling with noncombatants. Let me just say it is not as simplistic as the Marksmanship Club proposes.
First of all, in the scenario they are concerned with (the crazed gunman on a shooting spree) they would only be complicating any response to a shooter at large. Imagine if you will a lone gunman loose on campus. Now add 20-plus members of the Marksmanship Club whipping out their pistols.
Now the police responding to the report of a shooting have to pick the gunman from a background of 20-plus vigilantes prowling the vicinity of the shooting. I’ll confess, in my training we were taught to shoot them all. But the police wouldn’t do this. Instead they would attempt to disarm each individual gun-holder. This would waste precious time as they could not afford to leave any armed people behind them as they try to gain entry to buildings the ‘gunman’ may be hiding in. Minutes mean lives.
So yes, 20-plus armed civilians would only waste police time trying to stop the real gunman as they tried to sort one from the other.
And there is the threat of friendly fire. Would every gun-wielding person on campus wear a white armband to identify each other from the shooter? Only if they were organized and trained to do this.
In the military, we often have to do just that … And we’re all wearing the same uniform. This is because in darkened hallways or buildings you enter from a brighter outside your vision will not have had time to adjust so identifying a person having a gun versus one not having a gun; a person you know from one you don’t becomes extremely tricky.
Furthermore, a ‘carry on campus’ law wouldn’t just apply to members of a club who know one another. People they never met before in their lives will have guns, too.
Finally, there is the practicality of taking on a gunman with only eight hours of instruction. In the military, we drill for months as a group to do that and even then I’ve seen well-trained professionals freeze as the first bullets began to fly. That’s because a real shooting is very confusing. An arrow doesn’t point out where the ‘pop pop pop’ comes from.
Once you’ve identified the building, going in against an individual expecting intervention means he’ll have the advantage. If you haven’t trained as a team to do this in a very deliberate manner, you’re only going to be sending more casualties into the building.
I know members of the Marksmanship Club mean well. But the idea of them taking on a crazed gunman with the scant training and experience available to them actually troubles me more than the idea of the crazed gunman alone. I can’t help but think such a policy would only increase, not decrease, the number of people killed in a campus shooting.
-Kenneth McDonald

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