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I’m really beginning to wonder, because a few things here don’t add up.

OK, so the West AJ shooting (7:15 am) sounds like a “domestic,” for lack of a better word. Boyfriend and girlfriend get in an argument, RA tries to break it up when it gets heated, boyfriend pulls out gun, shoots them both, flees. Now, this is a college dorm we’re talking about. You’re going to tell me that NOBODY out of 895 people in West AJ are going to know who so-and-so’s boyfriend is, and at least a little bit about where he might live? Not even “yeah, she started seeing this weird guy, his name’s Alphonse or Craig or something like that.” C’mon. I lived in a co-ed dorm for three years. There’s fewer secrets in a dorm than in the Clinton White House.

So anyway, that guy gets away. If he’s the same shooter, two hours and change later, he turns up at Norris with two guns and goes on his rampage. And people are now screaming “why wasn’t campus locked down?” I’ve been to Tech (a lot of friends of mine went there, and one still works there). It’s HUGE. It’s bigger than my hometown by a factor of twenty. It’s bigger than the town of Blacksburg itself, or at least more populous. How do you “lock down” what amounts to a small city? Especially when you’ve got twenty-five thousand undergrads and thousands of staff, faculty, and grad students trying to get an education and make a living? You just don’t “lock down” an institution of that size—especially with the relatively limited police resources that the university and the town of Blacksburg have. I’m actually surprised they managed to do it once the Norris Hall shootings happened.

It’s not a high school. You can’t just throw a switch and lock all the doors. There’s thousands of students flowing on and off campus every hour, and in fact the campus adjoins downtown Blacksburg’s main drag for a couple of blocks, with wide open access. I’ll agree that they may have been slow to understand what was going on, but honestly, why wouldn’t they be? To the campus cops and the Blacksburg PD, they had a domestic dispute and murder on their hands at 8:00 am. They had no way of knowing they were about to descend into hell two hours later.

Something, though, still doesn’t add up. Occam’s Razor says that these two shootings HAVE to be the same guy, because the odds against having two gun-toting nutburgers show up on that campus on the same day are one in a zillion. But the lack of ID of the perp makes me wonder.

}:-)4