The sad reality is that Richard Feldman could end up with blood on his hands.
Him, and all the various grandees at the University of Rochester whose arrogance and ignorance lead them to conclude that police officers don’t need guns – and that students don’t need protecting.
A year ago, the school’s public safety officials conducted a study and made a recommendation that, among other things, the university’s security force be armed – like everybody else with a uniform and a badge.
The premise was: Let cops be cops.
The recognition was: An unarmed cop is a target, and useless against the worst threats that can come onto a university campus.
In a years-long climate of mass campus shootings, the law-enforcement professionals entrusted to protect the sprawling University of Rochester properties said armed officers were necessary to prudently prepare against violence.
In a city which periodically has one of the worst crime rates in the state, and where two jihadi plots have led to federal prosecutions, the public safety recommendation was to arm the officers.
That’s what the egg heads were told a year ago.
And for the last year they have been noodling over it, having inclusive community-based dialogues, searching for consensus, and all that other bull crap they do. And at the end, they chose ignorance and prejudice instead of common sense and reason.
It was determined, according to the chief potentate and enrobed master of the Loyal Order of the Water Buffalo, that arming officers would be a disruptive force.
Translation: The tenured progressives at the River Campus hate guns and cops so much that they believe the mere presence of them will be a buzz kill, or a micro-aggression, or disrespectful of the cultural experiences of one category of disaffected students or another, or some other nonsensical assertion further proving the complete disconnect between liberal academia and the real world.
Because in the real world, cops have guns.
And in the real world, we care enough about the people we’re protecting to make sure that the protectors have at least a fighting chance of doing their jobs.
The University of Rochester is the largest financial entity in the region. With its $2.5 billion endowment, massive infusion of taxpayer dollars, and various locations throughout the region, it is the tail that wags the dog. Rochester had two daddies – one is named Wegman and the other is named University of Rochester – and nobody forgets that fact.
With its sprawl, the university ends up with a massive medical complex, home to all sorts of unsavory incursions, a downtown music campus, a riverside main campus with an extensive presence across the river in a neighborhood that is cheek by jowl with folks of very different circumstance and culture.
And, humans being humans, sometimes there is crime and danger.
Like the football player who robbed a bunch of drug dealers in his dorm. And the music student who was violently misused by a parolee who found an unlocked door.
In both those situations, the university was good at keeping information about the crimes from the public, but not so good at protecting its students from horrific violent assault.
Which some would see as an argument for change and improvement.
Instead, some officers can be armed at the MMA venue that passes for a hospital emergency department, and shift supervisors can be armed.
But the folks who because “they are learned, they think they are wise” and who are “ever learning, but never coming to the knowledge of the truth” have decided that it would be controversial to allow the university’s patrolling officers to carry guns.
It is a blow for progressive orthodoxy.
Or, it just plain blows.
Because at the vast majority of American campuses, and in every American community, cops have guns.
And it is first-rank dumbassery to constitute a police force in any other way.
Because while the University of Rochester can order its officers to disarm, it cannot similarly order the thugs and the jihadis and random nut job who decides he wants to shoot up a campus to disarm.
And so the university president has decided to gamble. He’s going to take the risk that no active shooter will ever venture onto this campus that the evening news just announced is defenseless. He’s going to hope that the criminal element of society respects the invisible line that separates the land of the ivory towers from the world of bad guys who do bad things.
If he’s lucky, nobody gets hurt.
If he’s not, the university has blood on its hands.
And somehow this institution is led by a cohort of fools who are willing take that risk with other people’s children.