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Saturday, Jul 4, 2009
But individual shootings are not that unusual. And colleges don't put the whole school on lockdown because of a single shooting.
The first shooting today, appears to have been a single shooting. Ergo the college, even if they knew, wouldn't have a reason to lockdown the whole facility.
A few weeks agon there was a single shooting in the dorms at UNC Greensboro. It was the typical beater drug deal gone bad is only noteworthy because it involved the son of Sidney Lowe, the NC States Wolfpack Basketball Coach. If you don't live in Greensboro or Raleigh you probably didn't hear about this shooting. Of course the victim didn't die, but that's another issue.
So At Va Tech, the simple fact of a single shooting early in the day is probably not a good enough reason to shutdown the whole university.
In either case, Universities generally have bulletproof policies to cover everything. They are automatically not liable for the behavior of their students. That's what cops are for. And just because they assume in loco parentis doesn't mean they guarantee your safety. How could they?
Let's not jump to any conclusions about this, whether the university handled it right or anything else. It took me only a moment to come up with several basic questions we don't yet know the answers to. This is a story that just broke, and we should know by now with stories like this that much of the initial reporting is wrong.
Did you ever know the administration of any college, private or public, that had the competence to boil water? In the 1960's, colleges were paralyzed by New Left demonstrations that a little applied force could have stopped. At Kent State, the campus cops were incompetent to handle the problem, and the administration called in the undisciplined National Guard - and the result was history, especially when Gary Trudeau commemorated the anniversary in his Doonesbury strip.
Like most educators, college administrators are supposed to intimidate the student body and look intelligent. But give them a genuine crisis and they fold. Just watch as this particular group of flakes announce their dynamic plan to address the problem and keep from being fired: they will convene a study group. They will protect their students with coffee and danish.
It would be stupid to say that the school could have predicted this incident. No one is expecting them to be psychic, any more than the people at Columbine High could have predicted the existence of their shooters. But after Columbine, many high schools developed procedures to handle emergencies like this. Why didn't this college? Did the dunderheads assume that their college students were more "mature," that they would "never" have a shooting incident?
Even a Wal-Mart has a flip chart on the office wall with instructions for all varieties of emergencies. It's asking too much for a university, with plant and buildings worth approximately twenty times as much as a Wal-Mart Supercenter, to take a basic step like a flip chart and emergency instruction for all personnel.
I'm amazed by this because on my campus we have plans in place for such things. Did Va Tech not have such plans, or did they not invoke them?
I also don't appreciate being called a rube for not being blase about this tragedy. Particularly since, even though there are shootings on campuses, any individual campus has them rarely if ever. I can't recall one here, on the campus of a university about the same size -- and certainly not one in which the shooter breached existing security to hunt an individual down.
Finally, how hard is it to take logical steps to ensure the safety of your students on those rare occasions when it's warranted? Apparently too hard for Va Tech.
I'm with RealName on this one. There are several reasons to understand the university's lack of a shut-down.
First, unless there was reason to believe the gunman was planning on killing more people, single shootings are indeed more common than spree/mass shootings. An email within a couple of hours is actually not a bad response time, if you believe the only purpose is to inform, not warn. The university and police probably thought the shooter was attempting to flee and therefore unlikely to be a danger, not planning a second attack. If the shooter left behind the weapon used in the first shooting, they had even more reason to believe the shooter was no longer a danger.
Second, college students are for the most part adults. Unlike a high school, junior high, or elementary school, these are people who should (theoretically, at least) be responsible for their own well being.
Third, many college students are either paying for their schooling, or their parents are. They can also have challenging schedules. If you shut down the school when you had no reason to believe students were in danger, you upset a lot of customers.
Safety first, of course, if you have any idea more people are in danger. If evidence appears that the gunman left a note threatening more people, or some other message, then the issue of why there was no lock down should be discussed seriously.
What time is it?
Lets take this slowly. I'm not ready to blame VT's administration for 30 deaths.
I have a friend with a little knowledge of the situation (so this is a confirmed rumor, but nothing official) that says it initially looked like a boyfriend/girlfriend thing that ended tragically. Awful, but not the sort of thing that usually ends in a massacre. 20/20 hindsight says the school "should" have known, but realistically, the probability was low enough that locking down the school wouldn't have seemed necessary.
The finger-pointing is going to get bad: blame the university, NRA, whatever. When it comes down to it, the gunman is responsible, and it's almost too bad he isn't alive to be shot 29 more times.
From what I've read so far, the VT officials thought, via the cops, that the early morning shooting was a domestic dispute and the shooter had left the campus.
Also, when you consider that the school has 25,000 full time students and is spread over 2,600 acres, and that people were probably starting to come into the school for work and students were probably starting to head out to classes, an campus lockdown is quite a task and not an instant feat.
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Thanks for sharing, Governor. Now please take a cue from Norm Coleman, and go away
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