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The school was a victim of its own complacency because officials never created a fully secure environment for students, believing that by virtue of the campus location everyone was safe. It's the same way the Titanic didn't have any life rafts -- because it was so confident that it couldn't sink that it didn't have an adequate plan for people to survive.
What happened instead is that the murderer took advantage of the exact things officials thought made the place safe: the sprawling campus and security crew driving around in cars rather than patrolling the denser parts of campus on foot. It's that Jane Adams thing: there were no eyes on the street, no one to notice that this guy was wearing an ammo vest or had suspicous-looking bulges. Instead, that job --keeping eyes open, noticing -- was left to the terrified and unfortunate people he attacked and in many cases, killed. If the university had declared an immediate lockdown and manhunt for the WJ killer the way they did for the convict last year, folks might have had a fighting chance.
