Missing the Forest for the Trees

It's been pretty quiet on the blog over the last few days -- must be that time of the semester. My excuse? A week's worth of remodeling, spring cleaning, and home renovation projects at Chez Huginkiss. This story, however, was maddening enough to entice me away from the spackle and paint cans long enough to share it here:

"Gun Seller Offering Discounts to 'Save Lives'"

The owner of a company that sold firearm merchandise to both the Virginia Tech University and Northern Illinois University shooters announced Wednesday that he will sell his guns at cost for the next two weeks in hopes that "law-abiding" citizens will buy them to prevent similar tragedies.

I certainly appreciate the sense of responsibility this man must feel to somehow make amends for supplying weapons used in both the Virgina Tech and NIU campus shootings...but I don't think this plan is the best way to go about it. More than that, though, I am absolutely baffled by the cultural persistence of the "good guys/bad guys" dichotomy. Follow the logic with me: The gun dealer plans to make firearms more readily available to "law-abiding" citizens (i.e., the "good guys") so that they will be armed and (ostensibly) more prepared to intervene in and/or prevent mass shootings committed by citizens planning to use their firearms for more nefarious purposes (i.e., the "bad guys"). Of course, the fatal flaw in this logic is that, by the "good guy/bad guy" standard, both Seung-Hui Cho (the Virgina Tech gunman) and Stephen Kazmierczak (the NIU gunman) would have been considered "law-abiding" citizens, as neither had ever been arrested. Now, admittedly, Cho had had contact with campus police after several incidents in which he harassed female students, but to my knowledge he still had no criminal record. Kazmierczak, on the other hand, by all accounts might have been considered a "model" good guy.

It seems I'm not the only one who recognizes the inherent difficulty in making distinctions between types of gun purchasers. Said the gun dealer:

I feel like I have a special responsibility to show people what guns are, what the laws are, and to allow people to protect themselves," Thompson said. "Initially, I wanted this to be an offer for college students," he said. "But there's no real way to determine whether someone is a college student ... so we opened it up to any legal American."

He further acknowledges:

"There's a small chance of these discounted guns getting into the hands of the wrong people," he said. But, he added, "as a federally licensed gun dealer, we have to rely on federal background checks."

Is it just me who feels like this is a perfect example of missing the forest for the trees? I mean, despite the gun dealer's supposedly altruistic intention to arm only the "good guys," making guns cheaper and thereby more readily accessible nonetheless serves to increase the total number of guns that are "out there," right? Including those purchased by the very "bad guys" whom this incentive is designed to thwart?

I am really struggling to find any shred of reason or rationality here. What do others think?

What would you do? Reflecting on NIU

The recent events at NIU have created an element of uneasiness among many of us. After Virginia Tech last year, I was comforted by the fact that deadly acts on college campuses were extremely rare and geographically distant, at least from me. “It could never happen to me,” I reasoned. Maybe it also helps that those of us who study criminal justice issues can (or at least should be able to) look at the problem rationally and therefore realize that the likelihood of victimization on campus is very low.

Since last week, however, I have found myself questioning how insulated I actually am from that kind of incident. (I applied to NIU when I was on the market, so I easily could have been there.) Today I read an article in the Duluth News Tribune that detailed an incident that happened at the University of Minnesota in Duluth this morning:

Assistant Professor Pedro Albuquerque was teaching his Principles of Macroeconomics class about 9:15 a.m. when he noticed a man he didn’t recognize as a student staring at him in a way that caught his attention.

A 36-year-old Duluth man who later was found to have a 6- to 8-inch wooden stick and a leather whip was removed from a University of Minnesota Duluth lecture hall after concerned students called police this morning.

So, the question is: what would you do if you saw someone acting suspicious in your classroom? I teach an intro section of 120 students, and am unsure if I would even notice someone who didn’t belong. For the first time, this semester I have a seating chart for that class, so maybe I would. Even if you did become aware of someone who wasn't supposed to be in your class or observe a student acting odd, how would you respond? Would you intervene? Would you call campus police? I often leave my cell phone in my office during class though I also know that it typically doesn’t work in our big, interior, lecture hall. Would you confront the individual?

I don’t have any answers, so I am looking for your thoughts. Have you experienced anything that concerned you in the classroom? Should professors be allowed to carry concealed weapons or tasers or be taught self-defense? Should we lock classroom doors while class is in session? Perhaps at the beginning of the semester we should establish a “secret word” or duress signal of some kind that would alert students to quietly leave and call the police. Should we have drills to practice for this unlikely scenario much like we prepare for fires or tornados?

By the way, as many of you know, I also applied for a job at UMD back in the day. Seems like I am narrowly escaping these unpleasant incidents…

Tragedy at Northern Illinois University

In a tragic scenario eerily reminiscent of the mass shooting at Virginia Tech University last April, a gunman earlier today opened fire at Northern Illinois University, leaving 18 people injured and 5 people -- including the gunman -- dead.

This is such a profound loss for a university community to sustain, and will no doubt rekindle the conversations begun after the Virginia Tech massacre about campus security measures and how (or whether) universities can protect students and faculty from such horrific acts of violence.

I will post more about this story as information becomes available. In the meantime -- as with all of you, I'm sure -- my thoughts and prayers are with the students, faculty, and staff of NIU.

UPDATE: Turns out the tragedy at NIU hits particularly close to home for those of us in criminology/criminal justice. The man responsible for the shooting deaths at NIU is Steven Kazmierczak, who had studied corrections as a sociology graduate student at NIU. (Though the Chicago Tribune reports that at the time of the shootings Kazmierczak was a graduate student at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, having presumably left NIU.) He co-authored a reaction essay in the February 2006 issue of Criminology & Public Policy entitled, "Self-injury in correctional settings: "Pathology" of prisons or of prisoners?". His author biography accompanying that article reads:

Steve Kazmierczak is beginning graduate work at Northern Illinois University. In addition to his interests in corrections, political violence, and peace and social justice, he is co-authoring a manuscript on the role of religion in the formation ofearly prisons in the United States with Jim Thomas and Josh Stone. He is also develops [sic] content for online education and is an executive board member of the NIU student chapter of the American Correctional Association.

Finally, an additional victim has died, bringing the total number of deaths to 6, including Kazmierczak.