To the Editor:

It is time for Suffolk to adopt a realistic and effective policy regarding the vulnerability of the university community to armed shooters.

The existing policy, if you want to call it that, is to require students and faculty to wait patiently as a rampaging killer decides which class or which assembly to attack. None of the actions typically called for by students and faculty will do anything to improve our odds of surviving an attack. Nothing short of confiscation of firearms will work, and I, along a majority of Americans, will never see that as a realistic or acceptable solution. The only solution that will work is to equip the university police and faculty with firearms. That policy, once adopted and made known to potential attackers, would deter attacks and give groups under attack a fighting chance to survive.

I strongly urge university leadership to consider, first, arming university police and, second, asking faculty willing to do so to undergo firearms training and to carry firearms with them to their classes.

David G. Tuerck

Professor of Economics

[email protected]