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and we know that the police had every reason to think that the first two shootings were a "domestic situation," meaning some guy caught his girlfriend with another man. The victims were a man and a woman found together in a dorm room, witnesses saw a man fleeing, do the math. Apparently the university did make an effort to inform students, but again, do the math -- most of the students are commuters, who were already on their way. What use are e-mails, or a phone message through the university system? Maybe the students' cell phone numbers are on record somewhere, but how can you arrange to call all of them in a short time?
I teach at a university about the size of Virginia Tech, and let me tell you, this is the kind of thing we worry about. Every university has its share of crazies, some who are students and some who are just hangers-on who sit in on classes, hang out at public areas like the library and student union, and make pests of themselves, but can't be thrown off campus unless they actually commit some crime. One creep keeps hanging around our art department asking for a job as a nude model and harrassing the female students. Another woman kept asking faculty to help her organize a benefit concert for AIDS victims, which sounded like a worthwhile cause until you'd talked to her for awhile and realized that her charity organization existed entirely in her own imagination. When she started physically threatening people for supposedly trying to "steal" her idea about the concert, the campus police evicted her and banned her from the campus, but on a 1200-acre, wide open area, how are they going to enforce that unless she voluntarily stays away? Luckily, in that case, she did. But there are lots more people like her where she came from. There's no easy solution to an issue like this.
