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Sunday, Nov 8, 2009
Jeez, I've heard so much about what the Tech administration should or did or didn't do...you'd think they, not the gunman, killed 33 people. Newsflash: putting a campus on lockdown typically requires sending the students to their dorms. Sending students back to dorms would have seemed more dangerous than keeping them in classrooms...after all, a dorm is where the first shooting took place. The first shooting was also at a time when people were arriving on campus and were moving between places. Contacting, let alone controlling, that number of people is no small task. Finally, most people would have figured that if a gunman was going on a shooting spree he'd have done it the first time.
Let's keep the focus on understanding how and why the shooter acted and keep the second guessing to a minimum, at least until more info comes in.
alright now, it's not like we are talking about the butterfly effect here -- someone gets shot in a campus dorm and six month later there's a mansoon in India. No! There's a social fabric on campus with a much higher degree of inteconnectedness than in, say, some town of 26000 people; and a lot less entropy. That is to say that everyone congreates in a few buildings and classrooms. So, we have an unexplained shooting with the gunman or gunmen still on the loose and this is business as usual?...geez, what bad things can possibly happen here? Of course, according to el presidente Arbusto, no one anticipated the levies breaching in New Orleans either.
I watched the news coverage this afternoon/evening and was disgusted by how quickly the coverage turned to questions of blame - specifically, blaming the university for what it did or didn't do in the heat of the moment. I saw journalists and their expressions of faux-concern interviewing students who seemed angry or numb. Sometimes their voices were still shaking. Some of them expressed anger at the university, and of course the networks decided that this was the Big Story of the evening.
I'm even more disappointed that I came to Salon and found the same type of article here. I thought you all were better that this. I came here to get away from that kind of knee-jerk pile-on that is just a step away from taking advantage of the grief and anger of some traumatized students.
I'm not saying that there won't be any room for blame later. Maybe, when all is said and done, the parties involved can take a look at their procedures and policies and make some changes. But how dare any of us, at this early stage, start making grand proclamations about what went wrong? When the timeline is still so unclear - when the identity of the shooter and the victims haven't even been made public yet - it's the height of arrogance and irresponsibility to take this tack. Would it be too much to ask to actually wait a day or so until we have a more complete picture? Or would that mean missing out on a scoop of some kind? We wouldn't want that.
Thank heavens the readers seem to be more level-headed than the editors these days.
We need a better name for the crime in which a woman is brutalized by her significant other. It's sickening the way people say the police assumed that this shooting was "just a domestic dispute" or "a simple domestic dispute". A domestic dispute more aptly describes a tiff about who is going to do the dishes or who is going to read to the kids tonight; it's not a description befitting an awful and horrific social ill.
Maybe it's just me, but this term is really beginning to grate; it not only grossly minimizes a huge problem, it's a misnomer. What is "domestic" about murdering one's girlfriend in a dorm room? It's like some kind of sick code for a third rate crime ("Well I guess if it was her boyfriend/husband who killed her, then it's not something we need to be concerned with.")
Enough is enough. Let's just call it murder, okay? As in, "a gunman murdered two people on campus, and therefore we can't assume that anyone is safe until he is caught or has had time to cool down. Please find a secure area and stay there." Instead we got some line about a "domestic dispute", and now 33 people are dead.
I want to reserve judgement. It's really hard to know what a deranged shooter will do. We who are sane will go "Well, this is logical" without realizing the very fact this person did this means they were NOT logical and not sane. Crazed people won't think like us. It is very hard for us to think like them without a lot of training, and it's still not necessarily going to work. What makes crazy so scary is the fact that crazies use a line of logic sane people would never imagine or think.
Many dorms today(oops, "residence halls) no longer have land lines with easily sequenced prefixes. Student cell numbers are not necessarily available. That's probably why the RAs had to knock.
Most campuses don't have PAs. An email blast might be read or not read in time, by students and faculty alike (I've seen this with cancelling campus for snow storms, emergencies, etc). Same with news media. Of course, using the media opens you to panic and copycats.
Because of budget cuts and student/parent demands to keep tuition low, there are NOT that many polic officers on a campus today, even one that size. There may have been 15 to 20 for the 2,600 acres. First responders are supposed to "search and make contact" with the shooter by the uniform protocols established after Columbine, not focus on shutting down campus buildings. Search, contain, control is the focus. One delay could have been caused by calling in state and local police to back up an understaffed force.
How could police not see him? He didn't have to use a big rifle. A semi automatic handgun (or two) with multiple clips would have been easily concealable under a heavier jacket (a university logo down jacket, an Army surplus jacket (such jackets are popular with many students as cheap and practical), a good leather bomber jacket, etc). Here's an assortment. http://www.gundirectory.com/body.asp?gun=Pistol&pp=1&sort=-3&pop=1
Such handguns are very common and sometimes cheaper than a good road bike.
If the students were armed most still would have been killed. Unless it was on the desk in front of them, they would have to find it (in a student backpack- that won't be quick), load it, and take aim, in only a few seconds. Trained responders with the guns out often freeze for a few seconds in the face of a surprise shooter. Add freeze to find, assemble, load, and aim.
On top of it, what if they miss and hit another student in those classrooms? In many big lecture halls, you are not looking at materials to that absorb bullets. Cement, brick, etc can cause ricochets with some calibers. Simple bad aim, or panicked students who run into your line of fire, can also prevent shooting the gunman.
Probably on that campus faculty could not be first responders because of the no guns on state property rule.
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"
The survivor and author is upset about comparisons some on the right are making to genocide
Once seen as a lunatic fringe, reactionary anti-women groups are courting respectability
Salon headlines in your mailbox
