Why One University Is Handing Out Hockey Pucks to Prepare for an Active Shooter

The faculty union and student government at Oakland University have purchased thousands of hockey pucks. The reason: to fight off a school shooter when running or hiding is no longer an option.

“Ideally, it would be best if every student in every classroom has one available to them,” said Thomas Discenna, president of the faculty union at the Detroit-area college. “Our union has limited resources, so I’m not sure we have the ability to buy 20,000,” he said, referring to Oakland’s enrollment. “But we are going to start.”

The idea to stock up on hockey pucks was sparked by the university police chief’s off-the-cuff response to a question during an active-shooter training in February. Some students, and even the chief himself, aren’t necessarily convinced that the pucks would stop an active shooter. But the pucks have another mission: They’re fund-raising tools.

The purchases are part of a campaign to make sure a shooting incident never gets to the point where they need to be used, Discenna said. The hockey pucks are printed with a number people can use to donate to an online fund for locks that can be activated from inside a classroom, Discenna explained in an email. Right now, most classrooms can only be locked from the outside, with a key, he said.

At many universities, including Oakland, students, staff, and faculty members are trained by their police departments to “run, hide, and fight” in the event of a campus shooting. In a video made by the Oakland police department in May, students and faculty members acted out those three stages, with a student playing the shooter. During the video’s “fight” section, the participants stop the shooter by throwing classroom objects at him, including a chair, a water bottle, and a textbook.

The idea to use hockey pucks to distract a shooter hit Police Chief Mark Gordon like a slap shot last winter during the training session.

A faculty member had asked him what other improvised weapons he would recommend. Gordon suggested a hockey puck. He was hit by one while coaching his son’s hockey league more than a decade ago, and the injury resulted in stitches. It was the first thing that came to his mind; small enough to carry in a backpack, heavy enough for an average person to throw with enough velocity to hurt someone, he said.

“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.”

Little did he know that his improvised idea for a weapon would be used to address other safety concerns: the need for classrooms that lock from the inside, which some Oakland faculty members have been calling for since the 2007 shooting at Virginia Tech, Discenna told The Chronicle.

Discenna’s own ire at Oakland’s classroom locks was heightened when he watched the Run Hide Fight video. In the video, as the assault rifle-wielding actor walks through classroom hallways, a professor can be seen opening a door to her class, reaching around it to lock the door with a key.

“When I saw the video, I scheduled a meeting with our president and provost and said that this situation is unacceptable,” Discenna said. “We needed to have interior door locks just in case of an emergency, so that no one has to do what that person is doing in the video.”

Since then, Discenna said, the faculty union has purchased $5,000 worth of locks and $2,500 worth of hockey pucks, at about 95 cents a piece. He said in an email that the union has distributed pucks to its 800 members and is giving out 1,700 more to students.

The student government contributed too, after Discenna reached out to the group during one of its weekly meetings, said Alex Bertges, a senior.

But according to Discenna, the student leaders spent less on the pucks than the faculty has – $1,000 on pucks and $5,000 toward locks. Bertges said her group wants the focus to be on the latter. She described the idea of students arming themselves with hockey pucks as “absurd enough to get people’s attention.”

That doesn’t mean she doesn’t plan to carry one.

“I probably would carry a hockey puck,” Bertges said. “I genuinely don’t know how effective I would be with it, and I hope that I never find out. But with the prevalence of mass shootings in this country, it is helpful to feel like we have something we could do, because we are not given a lot of options from politicians, administrators, or even our police force.”

Follow Andy Tsubasa Field on Twitter at @AndyTsubasaF, or email him at andy.field@chronicle.com.