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http://www.collegiatetimes.com/stories/14228/single

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Tech reflects on peace, violence
by Philipp Kotlaba, university news editor
Monday, September 21, 2009; 10:38 PM
As the university community reflects on the murders of two fellow students last month, some may review their perceptions of Virginia Tech's learning environment, and how to make it safer.

The double homicide of Heidi Childs and David Metzler occurred in the Caldwell Fields area of Montgomery County, about 15 miles from Tech. Even though the crime occurred off-campus, on-campus safety is frequently questioned as a result.

As with tragedies of the past, the Center for Peace Studies and Violence Prevention has been intimately involved in promoting campus safety and preventative measures to avoid such crimes.

The center was established in the aftermath of the April 16, 2007 shootings. Former horticulture professor Jerzy Nowak, whose wife Jocelyne Couture-Nowak was among the victims in Norris Hall, was installed as its director.

"I still want to believe that these were random cases. I would not link it to the university climate," Nowak said.

John Welch and Melissa Lyden lead the center's student-led spin-off, the Students for Non-Violence Club.

"There's really been a black cloud over this town," Welch said. "All eyes are still on Virginia Tech, so anytime something bad is going to happen, it's going to be all over the place."

The Tech Police Department is all too aware of such perceptions, but officers are quick to voice approval for its security situation.

"To me, VT looks well positioned and prepared to deal with a wide range of issues related to community safety and well-being, whether it's issues of violence, suicide prevention, early intervention with people experiencing emotional difficulties," said Gene Deisinger, deputy chief of police at Tech.

Deisinger, came to Tech from Iowa State University in August, said there is intense pressure on the university to create a safe environment.

"It appears to me that there is a very high level of scrutiny by the media and maybe some members of the public that I don't think reflects all of what VT has been doing over the years," Deisinger said.

For the center, however, the ultimate goal is shifting beyond simply reacting to violence to building a capacity to prevent such crimes from occurring in the first place.

"My personal mission is to foster creation of a safe school environment, and I believe strongly that this is an obligation of any society," Nowak said. "People cannot learn when they are stressed and afraid, and that comes from kindergarten to the doctoral studies."

A student support network is a vital component. "It is very difficult to find the right person to pay attention and to hear you," Nowak said.

The center will hold several workshops this semester in an effort to engage students in this way.

"Violence prevention is not only preventing people from being exposed to violence, it's definitely focusing more on people who need help," Nowak said.

Nowak mentioned student orientations, especially those for international students, as vital for integrating the student community more tightly. He pointed to the January murder of 22 yearold graduate student Xin Yang as the inspiration for international student programs.

"(After) the homicide that occurred in the Graduate Life Center before," Nowak said, "we shifted our priorities and interests to the creation of this student support network, an environment of students taking a significant role in the development of campus safety and security."

Living in Canada for 18 years, Nowak conducted orientations for foreign students and noted how different societal backgrounds heavily influenced how students coped with and became comfortable in their new environment, or potentially became at-risk.

He found that, for example, Chinese students opened up in more individualized sessions.

"They are very much more used in this culture to one-to-one communication. They don't respond well to the large group orientations," Nowak said.

Nowak recalled coordinating efforts as a student activist, and said student involvement is the only way to build support systems.

"With students' participation, it has to be a student-driven, and in the community like that with almost 30,000 students, I think students have to have a key role in developing a safe school environment," Nowak said. "The average student doesn't know where to go, and not only the average student but the faculty or even the department heads. Because the center has been created quite recently ... people just don't know."

Yet despite "full cooperation" from the university administration, a problem persists: The movement is not yet driven by students.

"I think that it needs improvement, that's how I will phrase it," Nowak said. "I think these things are still quite fragmented."

In one of many initiatives, Nowak hopes to establish an official minor in peace studies, consisting of three interdisciplinary courses. The university has hired Lakshmi Jayaram, a professor of sociology at Johns Hopkins University, to coordinate the effort.

Postgraduate certificates in transformative leadership, organizing a consortium of universities to address violence prevention and other projects are all coming together as part of the center's vision.

If both the reactive and preventative capacities are needed for a safe school environment, how developed are both at Tech, and how do they compare?

"It has to be both. I would say that the capacity to respond in my opinion is here. The question is, will the response be quick enough?" Nowak said.

The community's perception of those capacities is a much harder concept to grasp.

"How the community feels safe or doesn't feel safe is very difficult to measure," said Geoffrey Allen, Tech police officer and crime prevention specialist. "We still have, for example, females who go out to exercise at two o'clock in the morning. And you still see the same foot traffic at the same times, doing the same thing. So it doesn't seem like there's as much of an impact from that level. We're not seeing a flood into our self-defense classes as compared to last year."

Allen has done over 150 presentations in residence halls, trained receptionists on how to identify suspicious mail and respond to potential terrorist attacks, and organized regular outreach events such as August's "Beer Olympics."

"Part of this is soliciting feedback from the community about their perceptions, because their perception is their reality," said Wendell Flinchum, chief of police at Tech. "So if they think an area's not safe, to them it is (unsafe), even though our statistics will prove it's not."

Because many off-campus crimes affect the university, Tech police regularly keep in touch with the Blacksburg Police Department, or, in this case, the Montgomery County Sheriff's Office.

"We have a very good relationship with them. The supervisors work very closely from each department. We're notified of instances that happen in the town," Flinchum said.

Discussions on campus safety often raise the enduring issue of guns as means of self-defense, inspiring strong words from all sides.

Nowak pointed out Virginia's lax gun controls relative to other states. Additionally, policemen in Canada or Britain do not generally carry firearms.

"I think it's a myth ... you cannot create a safe school environment if you carry a gun," Nowak said. "Look at the crime statistics."

He pictures a society that educates students on a different form of safety.

"I think as a society we have to reflect and say, where should the resources go?" Nowak said. "Incarceration, or rethink this entire process of providing safety to the society, and try working as early as kindergarten, and transforming the type society away from violence and gun culture."

Not everyone agrees with that assessment. The university has equally passionate proponents of gun rights within Tech and elsewhere.

"Let's be honest: What we really need to control are things like murder. If you try to control where I can carry my gun or where I can't, it doesn't change who I am," said Ken Stanton, vice president of leadership at Students for Concealed Carry on Campus at Virginia Tech. "I am still the same person whether I'm on a campus or off campus. So regulating the gun or where I can possess it really doesn't do anything."

"You have to be 21 to get a permit, so we're talking about seniors and up. Secondly, only about three percent of Virginians (over 21) have permits anyway," Stanton said. "It's not like we would expect all of a sudden thousands of people (would carry on campus). We're looking at maybe a two or three hundred at most, but currently, those few hundred people are actively denied their rights."

"If someone is able to pass the background check, goes through the training," Stanton said, "that's the best we can do to ensure someone's going to be responsible."

Ultimately, despite divergent views in the university on how to achieve the goal, all aim for safety.

"We want to serve as an organization that can show you that you can stop things before you need to call 9-1-1, that you can end the situation earlier and on the flip side that if you need help to make sure that you do call for help," Lyden, of Students for Non-Violence, said.

Deisinger said his former department at Iowa State admired Tech's responses to prior instances of violence.

"As a fellow campus law enforcement professional, I was struck by the thoroughness of the response during the two crises that the institution has had over the past couple of years," Deisinger said. "We raised questions in my previous department about whether we were as prepared as what VT appeared to have been."

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From the Canadian Firearms Centre:
If I Am A Police Officer, And Qualify For The Exemption, What Exactly Does That Mean?
These exemptions mean that as a police officer you do not need to be the holder of a firearms licence to be in possession of the firearms you use to perform your daily duties as a part of your employment. It also means that you do not need to be the holder of a licence to acquire firearms and ammunition as a part of your employment.

What If I Have Firearms Other Than The Ones I Use At Work?
If you have personal firearms, you will still need a valid licence to possess your firearms, acquire new firearms, and acquire ammunition for those firearms. You would require Authorizations to Transport to move your personal restricted and prohibited firearms just like any other citizen. The safe storage, transportation and handling regulations would also apply to you.


At the end of the day it seems to be guided more by policy. I have also had very unusual case that ended up in court where I challenged the bad guy with my service firearm while "off-duty" and both crown and the provincial judge had no issues. Crown specifically said the police officer designation is 24/7...

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Originally posted by sendec:
I'm not sure I see your point - he is wrong about Canadian cops being unarmed, but far more goes into the level of violence in any given community or society than whether the cops have guns or not. The aricle itself seems pretty well thought-out and points out that there aren't any simple solutions to complex problems.

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original article

Mar 5, 2009 by macleans.ca


On the annual commemoration of the “Montreal Massacre,” the Quebec broadcaster Marie-France Bazzo remarked how strange it was that, after all these years, nobody had made a work of art about what happened that day at the École Polytechnique.

I wonder, in the two decades since Dec. 6, 1989, how many novelists, playwrights, film directors have tried, and found themselves stumped at the first question: what is this story about?


To those who succeeded in imposing the official narrative, Marc Lépine embodies the murderous misogynist rage that is inherent in all men, and which all must acknowledge.

For a smaller number of us, the story has quite the opposite meaning: M Lépine was born Gamil Gharbi, the son of an Algerian Muslim wife-beater. And, as I always say, no, I’m not suggesting he’s typical of Muslim men or North African men: my point is that he’s not typical of anything, least of all, his pure laine moniker notwithstanding, what we might call (if you’ll forgive the expression) Canadian manhood. As I wrote in this space three years ago:

“The defining image of contemporary Canadian maleness is not M Lépine/Gharbi but the professors and the men in that classroom, who, ordered to leave by the lone gunman, meekly did so, and abandoned their female classmates to their fate—an act of abdication that would have been unthinkable in almost any other culture throughout human history. The ‘men’ stood outside in the corridor and, even as they heard the first shots, they did nothing. And, when it was over and Gharbi walked out of the room and past them, they still did nothing. Whatever its other defects, Canadian manhood does not suffer from an excess of testosterone.”

That’s what my film would be about. But don’t worry, the grant from Cinedole Canada seems to have got lost in the mail.

I would imagine that, when the director Denis Villeneuve and the talented vedette Karine Vanasse set out to make Polytechnique, they were intending to film the official narrative. But, in this case, art cannot imitate life. There is no hero in the official version—other than, as is invariably the case in Trudeaupia, the Canadian state riding in like a belated cavalry to hold annual memorials with flags lowered to half-staff and to demand that every octogenarian farmer register his rusting shotgun. Alas, on celluloid, that doesn’t come over quite as heroic.

So M Villeneuve and his collaborators were obliged to make artistic choices. For starters, Polytechnique is not a film “about” Marc Lépine. Aside from the early voice-over narration of his ugly, banal manifesto, we hear or see very little from his perspective. He is not (if you’ll again forgive the expression) the leading man, and, indeed, barely functions as a supporting role in his own movie: there is no attempt to explore his pathologies or their roots.

M Villeneuve then opts to shoot the movie in black and white, and to be very sparing in his dialogue. I saw the film with a capacity crowd at the Maison du Cinéma in Sherbrooke (lousy sound, by the way), and the dialogue-free stretches are so frequent that, by the time someone eventually delivered a line, I’d all but forgotten the movie was in French. In reality, it’s speaking in a kind of interior language. It’s a black-and-white film of a world of grey—the literal grey of dirty urban snow falling on drab apartment houses and the godawful bunkers of Quebec government architecture, but also a kind of moral grey. The physical landscape of the École Polytechnique is unsparingly rendered: claustrophobic windowless rooms of painted brick blocks that capture the particular grimness of a city full of modern buildings that all look out of date. We hear a couple of period pop hits, but the rest of the score is mournfully anemic violin generalities. It’s an airless world, and M Villeneuve seems determined to keep it that way, as if to let in too many superficial indicators of life—colour, music, banter—would draw attention to how un-animated his characters are. Consciously or not, the director has selected a visual style that’s most sympathetic to what some of us regard as the defining feature of this atrocity: the on-the-scene passivity.

And yet, despite his artfulness, he can’t quite pull it off. He focuses his efforts on two composite students, Valérie (Karine Vanasse) and Jean-François (Sébastien Huberdeau). They’re sitting next to each other at the back of the class when the killer walks in and barks the two most important words in the movie: “Séparez-vous!” This is the hinge moment in the story, the point that determines whether the killer’s scenario will play out as intended, or whether it will be disrupted: drama turns on choices because choice reveals character. But, when the man with the gun issues his instructions, every single male in the room meekly obeys him and troops out, and we are invited to identify with Jean-François because unlike the rest, who shuffle for the exit as if for a fire drill, he alone glances back and makes momentary eye contact with Valérie. Oh, the humanity!

And then, like everyone else, he leaves the room.

“I wanted to absolve the men,” Villeneuve said. “Society condemned them. People were really tough on them. But they were 20 years old . . . It was as if an alien had landed.”

But it’s always as if an alien had landed. When another Canadian director, James Cameron, filmed Titanic, what most titillated him were the alleged betrayals of convention. It’s supposed to be “women and children first,” but he was obsessed with toffs cutting in line, cowardly men elbowing the womenfolk out of the way and scrambling for the lifeboats, etc. In fact, all the historical evidence is that the evacuation was very orderly. In reality, First Officer William Murdoch threw deck chairs down to passengers drowning in the water to give them something to cling to, and then he went down with the ship—the dull, decent thing, all very British, with no fuss. In Cameron’s movie, Murdoch takes a bribe and murders a third-class passenger. (The director subsequently apologized to the first officer’s hometown in Scotland and offered 5,000 pounds toward a memorial. Gee, thanks.) Pace Cameron, the male passengers gave their lives for the women, and would never have considered doing otherwise. “An alien landed” on the deck of a luxury liner—and men had barely an hour to kiss their wives goodbye, watch them clamber into the lifeboats and sail off without them. The social norm of “women and children first” held up under pressure.

At the École Polytechnique, there was no social norm. And in practical terms it’s easier for a Hollywood opportunist like Cameron to trash the memory of William Murdoch than for a Quebec filmmaker to impose redeeming qualities on a plot where none exist. In Polytechnique, all but one of the “men” walk out of that classroom and out of the story. Only Jean-François acts, after a fashion. He hears the shots . . . and rushes back to save the girl he’s sweet on? No, he does the responsible Canadian thing: he runs down nine miles of windowless corridor to the security man on duty and tells him all hell’s broken loose. So the security guard rushes back to tackle the nut? No, he too does the responsible Canadian thing: he calls the police. More passivity. Polytechnique’s aesthetic is strangely oppressive—not just the “male lead” who can’t lead, but a short film with huge amounts of gunfire yet no adrenalin.

Whenever I write about this issue, I get a lot of emails from guys scoffing, “Oh, right, Steyn. Like you’d be taking a bullet. You’d be pissing your little girlie panties,” etc. Well, maybe I would. But as the Toronto blogger Kathy Shaidle put it:

“When we say ‘we don’t know what we’d do under the same circumstances,’ we make cowardice the default position.”

I prefer the word passivity—a terrible, corrosive, enervating passivity. Even if I’m wetting my panties, it’s better to have the social norm of the Titanic and fail to live up to it than to have the social norm of the Polytechnique and sink with it. M Villeneuve dedicates his film not just to the 14 women who died that day but also to Sarto Blais, a young man at the Polytechnique who hanged himself eight months later. Consciously or not, the director understands what the heart of this story is: not the choice of one man, deformed and freakish, but the choice of all the others, the nice and normal ones. He shows us the men walking out twice—first, in real time, as it were; later, Rashômon-style, from the point of view of the women, in the final moments of their lives.

If M Villeneuve can’t quite face the implications of what he shows us, we at least have an answer to Mme Bazzo’s question: you can’t make art out of such a world. Whether you can even make life out of it for long will be an interesting question for Quebec, Canada and beyond in the years ahead.

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Originally posted by TexasFats:
I wish that all of the folks who favor peace and believe that citizens don't need guns would reflect on the fact that it takes only one foe to start a fight, and even those who have no weapons can still be killed by the violent. (VT proved that in spades.)