Putting a school the size of Virginia Tech into “lockdown” isn’t that easy. 25,000+ students, thousands of which are commuting in from off-campus, a couple of hundred buildings, and easy wide-open access from dozens of points around Blacksburg. How do you lock that down? I went to a school that was considerably smaller (James Madison University, up the road from VT in Harrisonburg) and even so, 20 years ago when I was there, we had over 10,000 students, 100 buildings, a couple of dozen parking lots, maybe eight full-time campus cops, and absolutely no facility to lock anything down.
If he shot the two people in West AJ at 7:15, he could probably get out of the dorm and fade into the woodwork with ease. Tech’s big, and crowded. And if nobody knows who this guy is now, seven hours after the fact, there’s no way anybody knew to look for him earlier this morning when he walked into Norris Hall and started shooting.
}:-)4
You're right .. this isn't a small high school campus
But that long a silence . . . still sounds . . . at least irresponsible or something.
I wouldn’t doubt that we’ll discover some things could have been done better, BUT your point is excellent. There’s absolutely no way in you-know-what the campus could be “locked down” or even evacuated. 2,600 acres, hundreds of buildings, most students not even living in dorms, thousands and thousands of staff and faculty, and hundreds or thousands at any given moment not online or in a dorm room. Even if you tried a “lockdown,” it would take hours.
You can cancel classes for this stuff, it is done all the time. Something doesn’t add up.