Open Letter To America's College Students: 'You Have the Power To Demand Self-Protection Be Standard Campus Policy'

"College students throughout America’s history have taken it as a point of pride to be changers. I believe it is part of the collegiate experience as young people gather at universities and are exposed to new ideas and concepts, that they take their combined experiences and youthful exuberance and apply those attributes to current events to implement change, either in popular culture or politics or national attitude."

A long missive, but a strong case that college students -- who forced a sea change in the Viet Nam War, the Civil Rights movement of the 1960s, the act that lowered the voting age from 21 to 18, and even today's climate change movement -- can be the change agents for campus safety and security.

So that no more Virginia Tech, or Louisiana Tech, or Northern Illinois University slaughters take place.

It is time for college students everywhere, writes Wasted Electrons, "to band together and demand the right of self-protection be the standard policy on every campus!"

"Certainly well publicized recent events prove beyond doubt that your campus administrators are not protecting you and are not capable of protecting you as individuals. In spite of their best efforts, their ineffective rules and laws and their protests that they are doing “all they can” to protect you, the mass shootings at Virginia Tech last year and more recently at Northern Illinois University must prove to you that you are not safe on your campuses. Less well publicized are the violent attacks that occur on every campus to you, our future leaders of America. Rape is widely recognized as prevalent but drastically under-reported and assaults of all types occur wherever students cross campus in the dark of night.

"My research is incomplete but it is apparent that violence does take place and no amount of parking lot flasher-warning stations or blanket email notifications can stop a single act of violence when a criminal sets their mind to doing harm. Ask among yourselves and see if I’m right. I’m certain that if you look, you can find someone close to you; on your campus; that has been a victim of a violent assault. Does your school have a violence reporting hotline or a support group for violence victims? If it does, that group exists for a reason and I encourage you to discover the reasons for their existence.

"Self-protection is a basic human right and it has been recognized as such for centuries! It is not a privilege to be handed out by administration nor can it be doled out to a privileged few through legislation. In every case that you can name, violence happens to individuals or groups when they have surrendered their right of self-protection to some other entity besides themselves. It matters not if it is a community’s trust in its police force, a campus’s trust in the administration and security group or a civilian population disarmed by decree of the government, when you surrender the right of self-protection to another agency, you voluntarily place your life at risk. It should be obvious to anyone that it is not possible for the police to be in every single place where violence can occur and that at best, police officers are provided to maintain the appearance of law and order, yet in most cases of violence they can only write reports, investigate the behaviors of the law breakers and perhaps notify next-of-kin."

An incredibly well-written essay. Kudos to the writer(s) at Wasted Electrons.