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Sunday, Nov 8, 2009
I am impressed by the other letter writers who point out that it is a little premature to blame the campus for not locking down the campus. In today's gotcha media, it's easy to brand anyone connected with a tragedy legally negligent - it sells ad space. But what a waste of time! If every campus - or other organization - spent the requisite planning to prevent all freak accidents, they would never carry out their mission, whatever that may be.
Wait a minute here. Exactly how was the Virginia Tech administration and/or police supposed to determine that a single shooting in a dormitory early in the morning would lead to a massacre two hours later on the other side of campus?
The RAs told the students in AJ to stay in their rooms. This makes sense because they don't want the students to get hurt in the case the gunman is still in the building. The police converged on AJ to try and catch the gunman there, not knowing that he had since left.
As for the email, the police probably wanted time to investigate and create a crime scene before announcing the problem to the rest of the community. They didn't want people showing up at the scene of the crime until they had it secured and they didn't want the gunman to get away while there was a chance he was still near AJ. It is a horrible coincidence that the shooting was announced via email maybe 5 minutes before the gunman killed all of the students in Norris.
Hell, why not just suggest that the 9:26 AM email is the direct causal action of the gunman for killing all of the people in Norris (i.e. gunman read the email and then decided to go on a rampage directly because of it)? It makes as much sense (read: none at all).
Allie Jarett, a resident of AJ, says if they had cancelled class, 30 people would still be alive. Michelle Billman stated no one [had been] notified that something had happened at 7. We went onto a dangerous campus not knowing." Thank you, 20/20 hindsight! What if there was a single murder, the one at 7:15? That would be a tragedy in its own right, but would have it been enough to lock down the campus?
Virginia Tech had something like this happen at the beginning of the school year when William Marvo, a convicted felon, escaped and shot a sherrif's deputy. They locked down the school because an armed convict was known to be on the campus and the school wanted to protect the students. This time, all the school knew was that a girl had been murdered in her room. They could not foresee the gunman making his way over to a building full of classrooms, waiting two hours for people to arrive and sit down, and then go on a shooting spree.
Not even twelve hours since the shooting is over, and Salon is already pointing fingers and laying blame.
This is the textbook sensationalist response. It isn't constructive, it's premature and it's in bad taste. The staff of Salon should be ashamed of themselves.
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.
Is it already blame the victim time in this tragedy? I thought that was Fox News' domain - even they usually wait 24 hours.
Who's in charge over there? 10,000 Monkeys with 10,000 typewriters?
As long as our society worships the culture of the gun, and glorifies death and violence, then why is this news? As long as we refuse to even consider compelling citizens to pass a written and performance-demonstration firearm saftey class, pass a criminal/psychological background check, and register their firearms and pay a substantial yearly fee and obtain personal liability firearm insurance, subject to the insurers own risk analysis, and as long as we refuse to consider electronic trigger locks that require a key fob-like device to be carried on the firearm owners person, and refuse to consider requiring firearm owners to store their weapons in approved gun safes without ammunition loaded in the weapons, we will continue to experience mass-casulty shootings as well as the continual onslaught of onesey-twosey firearm murders and suicides. Same goes for restrictions on owning semi-automatic weapons. Yes, hypocrites, we refuse to licence and regulate firearm ownership in the same manner that we regulate motor vehicle ownership and operation. Keeping and bearing arms is not an unrestricted right, coming with no responsibilities from the bearer to society...the Scond Amendment references 'A well regulated militia...'. So, go ahead, stick your heads in the sand, make each and every Presidential candidate dance in front of the camera pertending to be the great white hunter to kow-tow to the NRA-fundamentalist/evangalist axis of evil, and buy some body armor and keep your head on a swivel every time you drive down the freeway, eat at Mickey-Ds, go to school, and visit the Post Office. Oh, and don't cry to me or anyone else if your child/spouse/mother/friend gets cut down by some psycho with a gun...just keep chanting "Freedom isn't free'.
Much of the initial coverage about Fort Hood turned out to be wrong. Is there anything wrong with that?
The accountability imposed by another country for the CIA's kidnapping and torture reveals much about our own.
Fox News' morning show plays to type, talking about whether Muslims in the Army should face "special debriefings"
219 Democrats and one Republican join in favor of the legislation, which passed by a narrow margin
The survivor and author is upset about comparisons some on the right are making to genocide
Salon headlines in your mailbox
