“This is not a good idea”

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OK, clearly, the state of NEVADA has gone friggin' nuts.

In this morning’s Inside Higher Ed: Professor’s Got a Gun:

Next time, if an unhinged student chooses a campus in Las Vegas or Reno instead of Blacksburg, Va., Stavros Anthony wants Nevada’s colleges and universities to be prepared. After April’s shootings at Virginia Tech, the Las Vegas police captain and member of the Nevada Board of Regents proposed that the Nevada System of Higher Education protect itself against a similar attack, in part, by enabling faculty and staff members to become reserve police officers.

“Virginia Tech hit home with me, and I thought, ‘What can we do here in Nevada to deal with an issue if, God forbid, if ever happens here?’ The answer, to me, was have more individuals trained to shoot back and kill somebody who’s committing a mass shooting.”

On Thursday, the Nevada Board of Regents gave the go-ahead to four public colleges in the state to develop policies — which would still require board approval in September — to allow faculty and staff members to become reserve police officers authorized to carry guns. Anthony is confident that the regents will ultimately approve the plan to allow armed employees on Nevada’s two- and four-year campuses. But administrators and faculty leaders are raising a bevy of practical and philosophical objections to the idea, which they vow to fight.

“This is just not a good idea,” said Bryan Spangelo, professor of biochemistry and chair of the Faculty Senate at the University of Nevada at Las Vegas. “It seems like a knee-jerk response to a very terrible situation that will result in more guns on campus, more accidents, and more problematic situations that are unintended.”

Under Anthony’s proposal, which was considered Thursday by the Board of Regents’s Cultural Diversity and Security Committee, which Anthony leads, faculty or staff members who sought to become reserve police officers would, if approved by administrators on their campuses, go on paid professional leave to attend a 21-week police academy and go through post-academy training. The colleges and universities would pick up the cost of the training.

The result, Anthony said, would be that campuses would have more people trained to step in if and when a horrific incident like the one at Virginia Tech unfolds on a Nevada campus. “The common denominator” in such incidents is that “you have one person with a gun killing massive amounts of people until police show up, and there’s always going to be a lag time,” Anthony said. Having more people on a campus capable of stepping in effectively in such a situation would reduce that lag time, he said….

Anthony rejected complaints that his plan would make colleges less safe by injecting more guns onto campuses. “If we were just handing people guns, that would definitely be a concern, but we’re going to make them reserve police officers so they have all the training and background,” he said. “This is not going to just be some guy with a gun.”

...Citing Robert Pirsig’s concept of the university as the “church of reason,” Spangelo said he feared that having faculty members with guns tucked into desk drawers would create an “immediate cultural change” on campuses where openness is a fundamental principle.

“I’d hate to think we’d have people walking around who are armed because of one terrible incident on one campus,” said Spangelo, who said Nevada-Las Vegas faculty and staff had responded overwhelmingly negatively to a query he put out asking for feedback on Anthony’s idea. “It’s a flawed idea to consider bringing something onto the campus that is potentially dangerous as a way to prevent a tragedy that has a very, very small chance of happening to begin with.”