Letter to the Editor: Regarding Public Safety Becoming Armed

Editor's note: This individual has remained anonymous due to personal information regarding their mental health in their letter. No Letter to the Editor will be published without a name attached to the original letter. Please email all Letters to the Editor to rpteic@rit.edu. 

Honestly, I have no problem with a few well-trained Public Safety officers having access to guns, so long as the guns are stored in the vehicles until absolutely necessary, meaning the guns will not be carried at any time that they are not needed. More importantly, as a nation and as a school, we need to consider mental health above guns.

Active shooters are often people with relations to the place that they attack. Many shooters are unable to get gun permits due to mental illness. If we were to seriously begin trying to prevent gun violence on campus, let's also fix the Counseling Center. The Counseling Center is notoriously understaffed. It takes months to get an appointment and when you finally do they are overzealous to send you to group therapy, no matter how much you tell them that would make you very uncomfortable. If they don't have someone available to talk with you about your specific problems when you are available, they ask if you have any other problems.

I spoke with a woman who said, "Sorry, we don't have anyone available to talk with you about depression, would anxiety or bipolar work for you?" That's unacceptable, and I quit going after that. The only way you can actually get help from the RIT Counseling Center is if you are about to harm yourself. Then they hook you up with whomever and whatever you need, and that's understandable. They can only help those who really need it because they don't have the people or resources to deal with everything they need to. But understandable doesn't mean acceptable, and mental health issues are a serious factor in gun violence. If we are really looking to form a plan to counter shootings, we should maybe consider preventing it by improving our current infrastructure, rather than just stopping it as it's happening.