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Strategy November 28, 2018

University Gives Out Branded Hockey Pucks To Battle Active Shooter

There’s a promo products connection, as the pucks feature a logo and a code that can be used to make online donations toward paying for interior locks for classroom doors.

By  Christopher Ruvo

Faced with an active shooter and absolutely can’t get away or hide? Fight back with your branded hockey puck.

That’s the word from a university in suburban Detroit that’s on track to give new meaning to the term “slapshot” with an initiative that involves providing faculty and students with logoed hockey pucks to chuck at firearm-wielding assailants.

Some were a little incredulous at the idea of pucks being used as a last line of defense to deter an active gunman.

Still, the university is for real. Weapons aren’t an option because they’re banned on campus. And, as university training sessions on an active shooter situation have shown at least some staffers, a plethora of well-thrown pucks – or other hard objects – can potentially serve as a life-saving last line of defense if there is no escape or place to conceal one’s self.

“My first reaction was: You are talking about facing an assault weapon and asking us to fight back with hockey pucks? It sounded silly,” Garry J. Gilbert, director of Oakland University’s journalism program, told The Detroit News. “Then I went through the training session, and it all made sense. None of us want to face an armed assailant. Students will look to us for leadership in a situation like that.”

The story has a connection to the promotional products industry. Inspired by a training session led by Oakland University Police Chief Mark Gordon, a youth hockey coach who remarked that pucks are non-weapons that can nonetheless do damage, the executive committee of Oakland University’s faculty union decided to begin buying and distributing pucks. The hard black discs feature the union’s logo – and a number that donors can put into the school’s online giving service, which will funnel donated funds toward installing interior locks on the university’s classroom doors.

According to The Detroit News, the union has invested $2,500 in the first batch of pucks, which cost 94 cents each. The union has been giving the self-defense swag out for free since Nov. 9. Some 800 faculty members have received pucks. Another 1,700 are destined for students. The university’s student congress is reportedly ordering an additional 1,000.

“As far as the hockey pucks are concerned, I expect eventually we’ll run out of money to give them to people,” Tom Discenna, president of the American Association of University Professors, told The Detroit News. “Maybe students will buy their own. It’s just the idea of having something, a reminder that you are not powerless and you are not helpless in the classroom.”

Training sessions related to active shooters will continue at Oakland University. The safety focus comes in the wake of school shootings around the U.S, particularly the infamous mass shooting at Virginia Tech in 2007 that claimed the lives of 33 people, including the gunman, who committed suicide.