Instead of learning to cower from a gunman, start packing your own heat!

Colleges confront shootings with survival training

KANSAS CITY, Mo. (AP) — Hundreds of colleges across the nation have purchased a training program that teaches professors and students not to take campus threats lying down but to fight back with any "improvised weapon," from a backpack to a laptop computer.

The program — which includes a video showing a gunman opening fire in a packed classroom — urges them to be ready to respond to a shooter by taking advantage of the inherent strength in numbers....

"Look at your environment through the lens of survival," said Domenick Brouillette, who administered the course at Metropolitan Community College, which serves more than 20,000 students. "Survivors prepare themselves both mentally and emotionally to do what it takes. It might involve life-threatening risk. You may do something you never thought you were capable of doing."

Utter tripe. What people need to do is carry their own firearms, which will place them on equal footing with criminals. As the old saying goes, you don't bring a knife to a gunfight. You also don't dodge bullets by turning over a table and hiding behind it, or by flinging a bag around. A backpack could work against someone who attacks you with a knife, but unless it's solid metal, it will do nothing against a bullet.

If you rely in this absurd concept of "strength of numbers," it simply means you're putting your life in other people's hands. In a public place, those "other people" are generally folks you don't know and therefore can't trust. Oh, someone might be honest to return a ten-spot that you dropped, but I'm talking about trusting strangers with your life, that they're willing to risk their necks alongside you. And what if they're incompetent at self-defense? I wouldn't even trust classmates I saw all the time. God knows one might dislike me and wants to see me hurt or dead, perhaps deliberately not trying so hard when it's my life at stake.

Even assuming others will coordinate effectively with your own maneuvers, it's still an excellent chance that when you try to subdue the gunman with your non-lethal items, someone's going to die! Three, four or five people might start whacking the gunman, but the odds are exceptionally good that the gunman will get off shots at close range. Look, my Christian faith teaches, "Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends," but that certainly doesn't mean Christians should want to die. Nor do I want to put up my life for a bunch of idiotic sheep who expect me to be their sacrificial lamb, especially when the sheep are the same ones who elect governments that restrict my ability to defend myself and others with effective weapons.

Some of you might still remember the 2007 shooting spree at Salt Lake City's Trolley Square. What stopped the shooting was the heroism of Kenneth Hammond, who traded shots with the gunman and bought precious time until a SWAT team showed up. It wasn't that Hammond was an off-duty cop, but the fact that he was armed. Any private citizen with a decent firearm, and competence in using it, could have done the same.

What if a bunch of people at Trolley Square decided to rush the shooter? Well, there would have been a higher body count, that's what. Real life isn't the cinema, where protagonists emerge unscathed or maybe wounded but not mortally. The only way for us, in the real world, to resist in such a situation is to respond with a lethal and ranged weapon. The only "mental preparation" you need is the will to kill a human being in the legitimate defense of yourself and others. I don't know about the rest of you, but I have no problem with that.

I went to Trolley Square many a time when I lived in Utah and still can't imagine it turned into a bloodbath. The Bush Administration, for all its "War on Terror" talk, didn't want to call it an act of terrorism. When a Muslim starts shooting indiscriminately in a public place, shouting "Allahu Akbar," what else could it be?