Student Activists Claim College is Giving Guns to Campus Police to Keep Minorities Down
Isn’t it more plausible that campus police are being armed to prevent campus shootings?
Christian Britschgi of the College Fix reports.
Oregon college gives guns to campus police to keep minorities down, anti-gun activists claim
‘Disarm PSU’ angry about being compared to Republicans
The shooting deaths of nine people at a gun-free Oregon college last week have done nothing to slow the march of an anti-gun movement a few hours up the I-5 corridor.
Progressive student activists who crashed the freshmen convocation at Portland State University last month, before the Umpqua Community College shooting, have doubled down in their opposition to a new PSU policy that arms some of its campus police.
In an announcement Friday, the school said four officers are currently armed and 12 will be at the end of the three-year implementation period.
“Portland Police will respond to campus emergencies, but the bureau has only one officer assigned to PSU’s part of town and the response time can be as long as 20 minutes,” the announcement said. “The goal of the campus police force is to respond to emergencies – an active shooter, for example — in less than a minute.”
The PSU Student Union is encouraging students to show up en masse to the office hours of President Wim Wiewel next week, as well as to a weekly “Coffee with the Chief” meeting with PSU’s campus public safety chief.
The activists brought the Sept. 21 freshmen convocation to a standstill in order to register their opposition to the deputization of campus security, which started in June – a year and a half after a university task force recommended it.
Alyssa Pagan, the primary organizer of the protest, performed a self-described “mic check” in the middle of Wievel’s address to incoming students as her fellow activists held banners that read “#DisarmPSU” and “Welcome to Police State University.”
Oregon college gives guns to campus police to keep minorities down, anti-gun activists claim (The College Fix)
Comments
The PSU protesters are rather sad — this is protest for the sake of protest and nothing more. The one group of people on campus LEAST likely to draw their weapons are the campus police. They’re also the least likely to oppress anyone. Campus police officers are chosen precisely because their nature pushes them to a college campus rather than city streets. They’re trained differently than city police officers in key ways. And the people they are around every day are different. It is humorous to think that campus police oppress people.
At most other urban college/university campuses, some percentage of the the campus police are armed. They certainly are at my campus. Just in case. It’s the job of a police force to be prepared for the worst that might happen (and then pray that it doesn’t).
What this protest says, in the end, is that life is pretty good at PSU and that there is little else about which to complain. The protesters have to do something to prove their revolutionary bonafides, and unfortunately for them life is too sweet at PSU.