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Sunday, Nov 8, 2009
I for one am happy that the college will toss your slacker ass out if you carry a beer but you are free to creep around with a stash of handguns. Thank God we have our priorities straight on this perilous issue.
you've obviously never been to tech. It's a walking campus. Some people may drive from off-campus apts. to school, but once there, everyone walks between classes.
For me, one of the big lessons here is that people still do not realize that domestic violence IS dangerous violence. "JUST" killing your girlfriend and her new boyfriend (or whatever authorities thought was going on in the first shooting) IS an indicator that you are an unstable, dangerous, and deranged individual. There should have been every reason to worry that such a person loose on your campus could potentially create more havoc.
Still, you really can't place so much blame on the university administration, they were probably all so shocked that they were doing doing the best they could in an awful situation.
You mean Jane Jacobs
Of course, not all of the facts are known, but why not cancel classes and block entrances and exits to the campus with two people dead in the dorm and the gunman still on the loose? I heard reports that the first victim was female, and that officers believed her murder to be a domestic dispute. Did those factors have anything to do with the police not acting to protect the campus at large? Why not shut down the campus to search for her killer? The fact that he shot two people in the dorm should have alerted them to the fact that this person was a serious threat.
If the students were armed, this would happen every week. I live at UVA, and I shudder to think of 20 year old men experiencing alcohol poisoning and testosterone poisoning at the same time as being well armed.
And why can't we have a debate in this country about what kinds of arms are protected by the Constitution? Because a person can arm himself without doing so with an assault rifle or automatic weapon. Every person who looks at this tragic situation and can only wonder what it means for his relationship with his high tech weaponry ought to be ashamed of himself.
and we know that the police had every reason to think that the first two shootings were a "domestic situation," meaning some guy caught his girlfriend with another man. The victims were a man and a woman found together in a dorm room, witnesses saw a man fleeing, do the math. Apparently the university did make an effort to inform students, but again, do the math -- most of the students are commuters, who were already on their way. What use are e-mails, or a phone message through the university system? Maybe the students' cell phone numbers are on record somewhere, but how can you arrange to call all of them in a short time?
I teach at a university about the size of Virginia Tech, and let me tell you, this is the kind of thing we worry about. Every university has its share of crazies, some who are students and some who are just hangers-on who sit in on classes, hang out at public areas like the library and student union, and make pests of themselves, but can't be thrown off campus unless they actually commit some crime. One creep keeps hanging around our art department asking for a job as a nude model and harrassing the female students. Another woman kept asking faculty to help her organize a benefit concert for AIDS victims, which sounded like a worthwhile cause until you'd talked to her for awhile and realized that her charity organization existed entirely in her own imagination. When she started physically threatening people for supposedly trying to "steal" her idea about the concert, the campus police evicted her and banned her from the campus, but on a 1200-acre, wide open area, how are they going to enforce that unless she voluntarily stays away? Luckily, in that case, she did. But there are lots more people like her where she came from. There's no easy solution to an issue like this.
That's how long it takes to evacuate a campus. In two hours you'd be lucky if everyone even knew they had to leave, not to mention the fact of mass panic and hysteria and the fact that thousands of people had nowhere to go. What if the gunman had been hanging out in a dorm and began shooting people after they returned to the dorm? Yeah, that's right, we'd be second guessing the police for not keeping everyone safe and sound in their classrooms. We want to be safe, and for some people that requires envisioning a better response that would have made people safer, but for the most part, it's a fantasy indulging the worst kind of wishful thinking, that someone could have controlled the outcome of this awful incident.
Yes to those who would temper criticism of the university's arguably slow response in warning the campus of the first murders - hindsight's 20/20 - but...
-- when will we begin to take domestic violence as seriously as any other context for violence? if anything, it should be grounds for exaggerated caution, since those emotions run so deep and so far beyond reason.
-- while officials may have been justified in delaying a campus-wide *warning,* students were entitled to the prompt, unadorned information that the first 2 murders had taken place. They could then have at least made individual assessments as to whether to venture out from their own rooms. It is this bare failure to inform that is hard to condone.
At least given what we know now. I teach at a much smaller college, and even here it would take hours to reach all the students and faculty. People move around on a campus--that is just the way it is. And the idea that, even if you reached everyone, you could just say "Please find a secure area and stay there" is ludicrous. What constitutes a "secure area?" For 25,000 students, plus faculty and staff?
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