Don’t get me wrong: a hard hockey puck traveling at 90 mph is a dangerous projectile.
Just ask Tampa Lightening fan, Sabrina Pattie
Of course you need a skilled athlete on an ice rink with a regulation hockey stick in order to get off that kind of slapshot. But even stipulating to that, the new Oakland University backup plan for thwarting active shooters on campus by arming faculty and students with defensive hockey pucks seems less than optimal. University officials say the pucks are intended as a “last resort” response and would be “better than nothing.” I don’t know about you, but I’m beginning to lose what little confidence I had in the plan. Especially after reading that its genesis was an off-the-cuff comment by the university police chief during an active-shooter training session last February.
But let’s examine the scheme: to reiterate, a hard rubber hockey puck is designed to be hit with a hockey stick on a frictionless ice surface by a trained athlete.
Hurling it by arm through the air won’t achieve anywhere near the same velocity especially if thrown by people whose last softball pitch was somewhere between 25 years ago and never – as is the case with music professors and choomers.
And unless you’re a physics professor, it might be a little hard to even calculate where your pitch will land, possibly leaving the shooter completely unscathed.
But as with all socialist undertakings, the efficacy is in the numbers: your aim needn’t be perfect as long as you are amongst many equally unarmed comrades:
“It isn’t designed to be a one-shooter-and-one-hockey-puck duel here,” he said. “The ideal situation is that you would have a classroom full of 30 or 40 people, all of whom have hockey pucks, all of whom throw them as hard as they can at intruders when they come through the door.” - Chronical of Higher Education
But hey, stick a few hockey pucks in your backpack while it’s still legal to do so. The Democratic Socialists will eventually demand they be registered as lethal weapons. Until then continue your delusion that you can stop an active shooter with scary looking black hockey pucks. In reality they will not protect you any better than the stupid bean bag bullets we gave Border Agents like Brian Terry to protect himself against Mexican criminals armed with high powered automatic weapons sold by Obama’s Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives.