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The infrequent – but no less devastating – school shootings in recent years has intensified the fierce emotions within the debate of whether PCC police should be armed or not. The responsible next step is to re-evaluate the policy.

Trying to decide the matter pragmatically has been lost to knee-jerk reactions, impassioned editorials, comments, and comments on comments.

The question of necessity remains unanswered, perhaps because no one is sure how to measure it.

Do we look at statistics? PCC does not have the violent history that some campuses do. According to Lt. Brad Young, an LAPD veteran who supports arming the police department, theft is the biggest problem at PCC. Violent crimes, when they do occur, seem few and far between.

But the decision to bring lethal force onto a college campus has to be explored beyond the statistics. Statistics only become statistics after an incident, and they would not have revealed anything useful about the student who murdered 32 people at Virginia Tech in April 2007.

Those in favor of arming the police point to Virginia Tech as an example of why the police need guns. What they usually do not mention is that the campus police on that day were armed; yet the massacre only ended when the student committed suicide.

Could the tragedy at Virginia Tech have ended any differently if that student had encountered an armed and trained officer? Probably. Though, that kind of speculation has only prolonged our own emotional debate about the issue.

It’s dangerous to make decisions based on the hypothetical, yet for a place like PCC – up to this point and hopefully well beyond – hypothetical is all we have. Would introducing guns to a peaceful campus somehow make it less peaceful?

There’s little question that it could. But this peaceful campus could take its turn for violence whether our police department had guns or not. But how can we ask them to protect us, and themselves, without giving them the best available tools?

Necessity remains the most important but unexplored issue in this matter. The extreme emotional response that this debate evokes has to be put aside so that an intelligent and pragmatic discussion that we need can take place.

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