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Monday, April 16, 2007 12:00 AM

University officials waited two hours to warn campus, students say

With at least 33 dead and 29 wounded, some ask why the campus wasn't shut down after an early-morning killing.

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  • Tuesday, April 17, 2007 11:54 AM

    This is real life

    Not a movie where all of the police officers are ex-special ops, or navy seals, or Army Rangers, or ex-FBI profilers who were unfairly fired from their jobs and now work campus security. Who would have looked at the earlier shooting and seen it as the obvious prelude to a mass murder by a psychopath. (See that blood splatter. He's going to kill students in a classroom! )

    It's not a television show where one of the students was carrying a gun and not only had experience shooting at a target range, but real life experience, and could calmly shoot another person from a safe distance in the head.

    It's not fiction, where evacuating 20-thousand students, without making them a target, in 2-hours, with a minimal security force, golf carts and probably a handful of cruisers, is easy.

    In real life, people make mistakes. In real life, people can't plan for every forseeable event. Blaiming the school and the cops, who were maybe a little limited in their thinking and thought the situation was completely different than what it acutally was, for being human and not having the omnipotence of a Hollywood screenwriter is just unfair.

    Even before the shooter's body is cold, everyone is pointing the finger at everyone else. It's the worst thing about this country. We should instead try to figure out how to make sure this doesn't happen again. But having said that, we won't win all of the time. Most likely, we'll fail. Because we don't control the world. Sorry to break it to all of you who think the school is to blaim for a crazed gunman, but bad shit happens. People die. They get murdered. It's been going on forever. Welcome to real life.

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