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.

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.

Murders happen all the time, and we don't shut down schools and offices unless there is an expectation that the perpetrator is likely to hurt someone else, or if it is obvious that the crime is extraordinarly (such as multiple killings). In retrospect, lives could have been saved if they had shut down the school. But it was not possible to know that at the time.

That said, I wonder that there were armed police officers all over the campus, and they had numerous bomb threats over the last few weeks, and still nobody was able to stop this person from killing so many people. I've read a few things suggesting that terrorists might try to attack colleges or high schools. I assumed that the articles were paranoid ramblings, but that school officials would make plans so that they could quickly respond to emergencies, just in case. It doesn't sound as if the officials in Virginia had any such plans. A simple lockdown in response to a general alarm when the first bullets were heard in the classrooms could have saved a lot of lives. It may have been reasonable to not shut down the campus after one murder, but it takes time to kill over 30 people, and I can't see how that could have happened without any alarms going off.

After losing 33 men and women this morning, I hope that some small sliver of awareness will come out of this tragedy. It is my sincerest hope that this terrible event and the attendant wall-to-wall media coverage will at least give some Americans pause the next time they see a bland and depressingly common headline buried in the coverage of their local newspaper stating 33 or 53 or 67 or 71 or 102 IRAQIS KILLED IN SECTARIAN BLOODSHED.

The fact that we lost 33 people today should not obscure the fact that in Iraq, this would be a commonplace, almost weekly occurrence. To be sure, these college students do not live in a combat zone -- neither they, nor we can readily be expected to blithley accept this kind of violence -- but much of the sectarian violence in Baghdad is in fact eerily similar to this event, marauding gunment kidnapping, brutalizing and executing civilians.

I hope that this tragedy and our national response to it will at least give those on the right some sense of empathy as to why the Iraqi people are not overjoyed with the "gift" we have given them. Imagine if an event such as this were repeated again and again, day in and day out, here, in America, for four straight years.

I went to Virginia Tech for undergraduate and graduate school, so I'm pretty familiar with the layout of the school (in fact, I lived in the dorm where the first shooting took place). As others have pointed out, isolated shootings in general are not unusual, and even if the university had acted and shut down classes, where would the students have gone? Back to their dorms, where someone just got shot? The campus is huge, spread out over a large area with over 20,000 students. Even if university officials thought there was possible danger of another attack, what would they have done with all those people?

This is a sad day for Virginia Tech. A close friend works in Norris Hall a floor above the classrooms--finally by mid-afternoon we learned she was "carried out" but is OK. The shooter had chained the doors shut--can you imagine the terror? She said some in their building had to step over victims. Her husband waited several agonizing hours before he could talk to her.

I lived in Blacksburg for fifteen years, received my Masters' from Tech and taught in the College of Arts and Sciences for six years. My mom still lives in Blacksburg and heard the sirens that are usually used for weather emergencies. Virginia Tech IS Blacksburg--it's a huge campus in a very small town. The campus and local police are far more competent and professional than you might expect for the setting. The area is well-patrolled, with emergency call boxes in many, many locations. I always felt safe leaving campus any time, day or night.

This could happen anywhere--the workplace, a shopping mall, a crowded street. It doesn't help to jump to conclusions about what "should've happened," what the University "should've done." Every campus will re-evaluate their emergency plans, as well they should but let's withold criticism until we get the whole story.