G020
January 23th 2013
Summary: Gun-Control
Thompson, Price, Mrdjoenovich and Khubchandani on their study called “Reducing Firearm-Related Violence on College Campuses-Police Chiefs’ Perceptions and Practices” show how are guns used on college campuses on the United States. They state that since the attacks of September 11th 2001, this has been a concern for many people because these places are “soft vulnerable targets of terror” and right now there is no information of how these events begin or how are the guns and the students involved (247).
The authors illustrated about how substance abuse, mental illness and “possession and ownership” of guns during the past few years had been related to more murders, suicides and accidents involving this weapons. They also mentioned the responsibility of campus police chiefs on trying to prevent violent incidents and help to maintain safety on campuses; this includes many of the duties that regular police officers do on their work around the cities and communities but what the authors thought was more important was to determine what were the actions they were planning to use to prevent this episodes and how they were perceived by the university’s society (248).
After reading this study I have learned that the risk of shooting in Universities and Colleges in the United States had increased since 2001. The campus police chiefs across the country are trying to prevent that these events occur on their watch but meanwhile the law and the constitution let that any individual purchase any firearm it would be difficult for them to prevent this to happen. Also I learned that these campus police officers on the majority of the times are not trained to deal with a real shooter at their school; this is important because they cannot do their job effectively if they cannot do what they are supposed to do (Thompson et al 250). Another thing I learned reading this study about how police chiefs’ in campus are doing their jobs of maintaining students and faculty safe is that many universities in the country do not have a plan on how to deal with this problem and the ones that have one has not offered a training to their faculty to address this issue when it occurs (Thompson et al 251).
In my opinion the