Faculty at one Michigan university will soon be armed with hockey pucks in case of an active shooter situation.
"The first thing that came to my mind was a hockey puck. I was a hockey coach for my kids growing up. I remember getting hit in the head with a hockey puck once and it hurt," Oakland University Police Chief Mark Gordon told Fox9.
"It's part of the bigger picture which is the plan and the strategy and the confidence that you get when you have an individual plan for the classroom," Gordon said.
A hockey puck was a "spur-of-the-moment idea that seemed to have some merit to it, and it kind of caught on," Gordon told the Detroit Free Press.
The faculty union followed up on the idea, buying 2,500 hockey pucks: 800 for union members and 1,700 for students, the Free Press reported.
The school conducts active-shooter training sessions multiple times a year, teaching the “run, hide, fight” method, which emphasizes first fleeing an active-shooter situation, hiding if fleeing isn't an option — and fighting if hiding isn’t either.
Fighting, with a hockey puck or other means, should be "an absolute last strategy," Gordon told the Free Press.
"It’s just the idea of having something, a reminder that you’re not powerless and you’re not helpless in the classroom," Tom Discenna, a professor of communications and president of the faculty union, told the news outlet.
Student body vice-president Brittany Kleinschmidt told the Free Press that the pucks are generating a lot of buzz on campus.
"It gets people talking," she said.
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