Mayor Dwight Jones has taken the commendable step of reducing the executive-protection detail that travels with him as he goes about his daily business. Yet as yesterday's news story by Will Jones and Reed Williams pointed out, the level of police protection he enjoys remains greater than that of the mayors in cities much larger than Richmond.
Perhaps that makes sense. Perhaps Richmond is inherently more dangerous. Perhaps the mayor's office routinely receives death threats that law enforcement keeps quiet about. Or perhaps the protection detail is a colossal waste.
It might be impossible to say.
The size of a community likely has little to do with the degree of derangement afflicting any one individual in that community. Two years ago Seung-Hui Cho went on a murderous rampage at Virginia Tech, a school of 30,000. Five years before, Peter Odighizuwa likewise went on a shooting rampage at the Appalachian School of Law -- a school whose student body is about 1 percent the size of Tech's. Roughly a year ago an individual shot up a meeting at city hall in Kirkwood, Mo., killing the mayor, two police officers, three other individuals, and himself. Kirkwood has a population about one-tenth the size of Tech's.
Disaster prevention involves taking great pains to guard against events that are unlikely to begin with, so their non-occurrence does not really prove much. Neither does their occurrence. A mentally unbalanced individual probably would not be dissuaded from his plans by the presence of a couple of cops. Their presence may be more useful in stopping an attack once it has begun than in deterring it before it starts.
Sometimes, as in Kirkwood, it can't do even that.
. . .
The debate over the mayor's protection detail raises another angle. The constant presence of armed lawmen suggests certain individuals need to have deadly force available faster than the police can respond to a 911 call. And precisely that need lies at the heart of discussions about concealed-carry laws. "When seconds count," say advocates of the right to bear arms, "the cops are just minutes away." They also note that Odighizuwa might have killed more people in Grundy seven years ago were it not for two students and lawmen, Michael Gross and Tracy Bridges, who retrieved pistols from their cars, drew on Odighizuwa, and made him drop his weapon.
Several years ago Virginia's General Assembly debated a bill that would have let individuals with concealed-weapons permits keep their firearms on them when they went into bars and restaurants. The debate pitted the need for self-defense against the fear of drunken shootouts. Fear won.
Among those voting against the proposal was then-Del. Dwight Jones -- who now enjoys protection in the form of precisely the rapid, deadly response to threats that he once voted against. Perhaps there's a lesson in there somewhere.
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