Schools
Are Not Gun Free Anymore!
From
one extreme to another. First our
governments won’t allow anyone to be armed in our schools to protect our kids
so we have crazies flocking to gun free schools
and theaters shooting and killing at will…now’, we have campus police looking
like special Opp’s
By de
Andréa
September
10, 2014
In 1968, students at
Columbia University staged a mass uprising, joining other college campuses in
protesting not just the war in Vietnam, but their school’s collaboration with the
Institute
for Defense Analysis, a Defense Department
affiliate that researches weapons technologies. Today, weapons produced by that
institute are used by the US military throughout the world—and by campus police
forces across the country. The war has come home. Part of Obama’s expanding Gestapo SS?
Yes in the picture… is a
grenade launcher that has been issued to the campus police where your daughter
goes to school - by the Obama Regime.
Are your children safe now? Who
is going to protect them from the heavily armed campus police? I guess they’re not going to use pepper spray
anymore!
This is all thanks to the
Pentagon’s 1033 program, which allows the Defense Department to unload its
excess military equipment onto local police forces, and it has ‘quietly’
overflowed onto college campuses. According to documents obtained by the
website Muckrock,
more than 100 campus police forces have received military
materials from the Pentagon. Schools
that participate in the program range from liberal arts to community colleges
to the entire University of Texas system. Emory, Rice, Purdue, and the
University of California, Berkeley, are just a few on the list.
In 1990, Congress
enacted the National Defense Authorization Act, including the magnanimous
section 1208, which since 1996 has been known as program 1033 to share
government surplus such as typing paper auto parts and radio equipment. I don’t
think Congress had modern combat equipment in mind. Over the last 17 years,
this trickle-down gift economy has distributed
more than $4.3 billion worth of equipment, according to program
administrators. And in the last 6 years in
conjunction with his Department of Homeland Security, Gestapo SS for short, Obama
has shared advanced military equipment to arm local police and now campus
police.
You might want to warn
your child about the mine fields around the perimeter of their school.
As Ferguson police
rolled up to peaceful protesters in military-grade tanks, firing tear gas and
rubber bullets, President Obama ordered a review of the program, which reached
new highs in regifting under his tenure.
It’s clear why a review
of the program is in order, because it isn’t clear at all what sort of
equipment these colleges are supposed to be receiving. David Perry, the
president of the International Association of Campus Law Enforcement
Administrators, told Politico that
1033 mostly funnels “small items” to college police forces for daily use. These
could be anything from office supplies or uniforms or car parts, but it’s
probably not all that tame. Campus Safety magazine recommends that universities take part in the 1033 program to
cover a range of needs from storage units to grenade launchers. That is, after
all, what Obama used the program to achieve isn’t it?
But program 1033 doesn’t
even come close to explaining all the ways in which campus and local police
have been militarized over the past six years. Colleges can also apply for
Homeland Security grants, the same ones made available to every municipal
police department in the country. In 2012, UC Berkeley tried to use the
program to purchase an
eight-ton armored truck. After a backlash, university officials ultimately
decided the truck was “not the best choice for a university setting.” The
following year, Ohio State University acquired a mine-resistant ambush protected
(MRAP) vehicle. So far, it has yet to run over a
mine.
Several campus police
forces have also been vigorously trained in paramilitary
tactics since 2008. In a country where SWAT
teams raid private residencies more than 100 times a day, mostly in
neighborhoods where minorities
live, reported by the ACLU the decision to train
campus officers in this overindulged art of war is a vote in favor of military
policing tactics on the part of institutions of
higher education, even before the training is ever put to use.
In the 1960s, campuses
went into lockdown because students were occupying buildings; now, they often
go into lockdown because campus police are
itching to stretch their military muscles. Horrible crimes have been committed with guns
at colleges, but using the Virginia Tech massacre and other shootings to justify
turning universities into police states is disingenuous considering that
campuses are still so-called GUN FREE ZONES - and these tactics clearly aren’t making them any safer.
But amped up fears have made it easy for the Pentagon and local law enforcement
to align with campus police while being met with little pushback.
Just last month, campus
police at Cal State San Marcos put the university on lockdown based on
intelligence that a man was walking around campus with a gun. The suspect, they
later learned, was armed only with an umbrella. In December 2013, American
University in Washington, DC shut down its academic operations to search for a
reported gunman who turned out to be an off-duty police officer. On Wednesday,
Denison University and all other schools in the district of Granville, Ohio,
were locked down after
police received a phony threat of an impending shooting.
Concurrent with increasing lockdown drills and stockpiling of weapons is the stifling of
student dissent. In 2009, during the G-20 Summit, student protestors at the
University of Pittsburgh were demonstrating peacefully on their campus when
cops demanded they disperse, then quickly proceeded to arrest several of them.
Police sprayed
pepper gas at passersby and onto the balconies
of residences where students were watching the scene below.
There was also the infamous
mass pepper spraying of Occupy demonstrators at UC Davis in 2011. Police used
CS gas, pepper pellets, and beanbag rounds on UC student protesters throughout
2012. When students and workers at UC Riverside publicly demanded the scaling
back of university privatization in a number of sectors, they were met
with batons and
paintball pellets. Now they may be facing
grenade launchers and M16’s
The list of infringements
upon student dissent, student space, and student bodies, is too long to
enumerate here. Yet, importantly, it is also impossible to quantify, because
incidents are never added up and detailed funding records never corralled into
a comprehensible database. In the absence of serious oversight and accounting,
narratives are stitched together, stories swapped, and a picture of violent
state surveillance and control emerges. The picture squares with what we see in
cities, towns, and communities across America.
Every police arrest is a Special Opp’s Mission.
And it squares with much
of what’s taken place in response to the defensive killing of Michael Brown by Ferguson police
officer Darren Wilson in important ways, including the swiftness and brutality
with which police met peaceful protestors in Ferguson. The protest didn’t become violent until the
protesters were attacked with a seemingly combat operation. Most of the protesters in Ferguson and those
marching in solidarity across the country are young, and young people are more
likely to support curtailing
police power than their aged peers.
A few weeks ago,
activist and journalist Mariame Kaba asked on Twitter: “How can we build a movement to
divest from police? Is there a way for us to do this? Can we go after local
police budgets?”
Young people in
solidarity with the people of Ferguson and the families who have lost sons and
daughters at the hands of militant police are poised to illuminate these
connections between education, state surveillance, and state violence in a
uniquely powerful Way
Thanks
for listening – de Andréa
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agree please pass this article on to everyone on your email list. It may be the only chance for them to hear
the truth.
Copyright © 2014 by Bottom Line Publishing - Permission to
reprint in whole or in part is gladly granted, provided full credit is given.
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