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Frankie,

If the whole campus is a mental institution, I think you are overreacting in this case. It is fairly normal to see a no guns policy on the campus of a mental institution (say the Texas State School systems) such as this. One of the very realistic reasons for this is that there are known mentally ill people in the vicinity.

Yes, they do segregate the very unstable as they detect them, but that is the real trick. Mentally ill people can appear normal and responding to treatment, then flip out for some unknown reason. I saw this happen when I was a young rookie. I was assigned to Walter Reed as an MP. They have an annex base, Forest Glen, in Maryland that is all of the mental wards. One of the patients was improving and allowed visitors. He was in the dayroom with his wife when he suddenly turned and yelled at her how she did not like him and her family did not like him, so he was going to kill himself by jumping out the window. It took two MP's plus 4 ward techs to wrestle him down (his belt caught on the window frame when he dived head first through it) and strap him to a gurney. As they were wheeling him back in, he calmed down and told the doctor that they would never know when he was cured. He would just act normal until they let him out and then he would kill himself. That struck me then as a pretty profound observation of mental health and it still does.

As for the no guns in prisons, I think you are wrong. I don't know about the new prison, but there were no guns allowed inside the walls of the old USDB at Ft. Leavenworth. You checked the firearms in and out from the arms room in the barracks across the street and waited at the gates for the prisoner you needed to be brought up. The tower guards could not even bring the guns down out of the towers, but lowered them by rope outside the walls if they needed to be replaced for some reason. A flat out rule of no guns, period.

To me, the bigger question is why the guard was armed in the first place. The contract was bid and let with a no guns clause. That seems like adequate notice to me. I guess it also answers BPet's question. If they truly did make sure the company knew in advance like the article says, there will be no shortage of comapnies to bid on the contract and no shortage of employees willing to work it.