- Top Features:
- War Room
- Glenn Greenwald
- Broadsheet
- Joan Walsh
- Camille Paglia
- Since You Asked
- Follow Salon:
Read other letters about this article
To the people trying to turn this into a feminist issue: the point is not that the police don't take domestic violence seriously. The point is that domestic violence is not random. It has a specific proximate cause and is aimed at specific people. There was no reason to think that the shooter is then going to go on a random shooting spree. If the shooter had instead shot people randomly on the dorm floor, then the police would have had reason to think that this was a shooting spree and the criticism would be justified.
VA Tech is the size of a small city. We don't shut cities down every time there is a murder. Why would university officials think of shutting down the university?
I teach at a large university. In the five years that I have been here, there have been at least two murders involving students in domestic disputes. Of course, no one thought for a second that the campus should be shut down. What, besides hindsight, would have made VA Tech administrators think that this incident was different than any similar incidents involving students that occur every few years?
