The Board of Trustees at Massachusetts College of Art and Design held a meeting earlier this month and voted 8-2 to keep its police force unarmed, reported Campus Reform. It’s apparently the only four-year college with this arrangement.
It doesn’t seem like the MassArt officers could be much more in favor of getting guns. Sergeant Matt Hurley talked about a “false sense of security,” saying “parents have an expectation that when they send their child off to school at MassArt, that since there is a police department there, they have nothing to worry about. This is just wrong.” Another officer said “it’s our students’ and staff’s lives you are gambling with.”
And it’s not just lives. The sergeant suggested that the no firearms policy has resulted in a high officer turnover rate for the department. Now both MassArt’s president and spokeswoman said that the decision was made with the intent of keeping the school a “safe and inclusive environment.” But safe and inclusive for whom? Students? Or maniacs who want to maim and murder them?
Beyond those platitudes, the only real rationale I saw came from this one unnamed professor, who opposed arming police because she’s “a very sensitive person and there are many other sensitive people on campus and I wanted to speak for me and for them.”
OK but if you’re sensitive, surely you’d rather get startled by a gunshot every now and then from an officer than actually get — you know — shot by a criminal who’s on the run from police who can’t gun him down.
