In Conclusion, Quack-Quack!

In Australia, we have very strict gun control, the gun-grabbers insist that we are all safer for it. They point to the shootings in the US as proof, but they conveniently forget to mention that those shootings usually occur in stupid gun-free zones. Now, if we were so much safer, why do we suddenly need all these programs to address these 'disenfranchised' students, why do we suddenly yearn for social justice in our universities? I thought it was the evil, terrible, mean, nasty gun that caused all the killings and now that we'd taken them away from the law-abiding nasties, we'd all be safe and could just hop and skip along singing kumbaya!

SMH - But the Monash incident, in which the perpetrator was later diagnosed with a paranoid delusional disorder, sounded an alarm bell to universities. Suddenly they were forced to confront difficult questions about their duty of care to students and the reality that allowing just one student to slip through the cracks could result in harrowing consequences. Universities across Australia ramped up their counselling programs and encouraged teaching staff to identify and refer loner students to support services. They reviewed their safety and response procedures again last year after the Virginia Tech shooting in the US.

When I first read this article, I thought, they have a plan, these folks are taking pre-emptive action, 320 highly trained... perhaps top-notch ninjas or something, at the first sign of some 'disenfranchised' student pulling a nasty gun out, they'd have him on his ass and completely disabled using their secret 'touch of death' finger jabs. If not that, then these folks would be armed and ready to deploy and neutralize the baddie, post-haste. Shock/horror folks, those were the old days, it's a new sophisticated world we live in now, yes they are highly trained. They are organized, they have their careful plans and fancy drills, just that they all involve some form of running away!

Much of the strategy is focused on prevention and involves early identification of disenfranchised or vulnerable students, but it is almost impossible to protect campuses from gunmen walking off the streets. "To stop people coming in is very, very difficult," said Steve Wallace, security manager at the University of Technology, Sydney, where 33,000 students are enrolled. "You can't. There's just so many access points and nobody wants to live in a jail." UTS trained 320 supervisors to be wardens in charge of evacuating students in case of an emergency and has developed a system to contact them quickly via SMS messages and can make broadcasts around the campuses. Some universities can contact all students via text message.

So, what they're saying, once you cut through all the BS about counseling, hold-hands and all that, is that they cannot protect you, that there is always the possibility of some 'disenfranchised' student suffering social injustice walking into your bastion of higher learning, inquiry and free thought and start busting caps. It's amazing how they, who consider themselves to be intellectually superior and of greater brainpower than us, refuse to acknowledge this very plain reality. So in summary, you're just sitting ducks, strolling ducks, studying ducks, so Quack-Quack!