Campus police renew call to carry arms (Good Read Alert)

Campus police renew call to carry arms (Good Read Alert)

Campus police at several Boston-area colleges are renewing calls to be allowed to carry arms in the aftermath of the mass shootings at Virginia Tech.

Brandeis University, which has rejected calls to arm its police in the past, has agreed to reconsider the idea. Framingham State officials are talking about it, and students at Suffolk University are circulating a petition calling for an armed force.

The majority of campus police departments in the nation's four year colleges, including Virginia Tech's, are already armed, but officials at some small colleges for years have staunchly opposed the idea even as their police have requested arms. The big schools in Massachusetts, including Boston University, Northeastern, MIT, Tufts, and all five campuses of the University of Massachusetts, have armed police. Most colleges in the State College system also have armed police forces.

Although Seung-Hui Cho killed himself before police could reach him, his killing of 32 students and professors raised a disturbing question for those who live or work on a campus with unarmed police: What if someone on their campus went on a shooting spree? What could campus police do?

The answer, according to law enforcement protocol, is nothing -- except to call for backup from city police. The batons and mace that unarmed police typically carry would be useful in the face of a gunman.

Brandeis, during the summer, plans to set up a committee to study the need for arms, though it previously has denied repeated requests for at least two decades from its police force for permission to carry guns.

"The prevailing opinion has always been that this is fundamentally a safe campus," said Brandeis spokesman Dennis Nealon. "What Brandeis is wondering now is, is it a different world, maybe? . . . This is post-9/11 and post-Virginia Tech."