I wish some of the second guessers would tell us exactly what they would have done.
1) They had an incident in a dormitory, where two people were shot.
2) We are being told that the campus should have been "locked down", at that time. There were some 9,000 students living in dormitories ON CAMPUS at that time. So some suggest that the University should have locked them in their dorms when they'd already had one shooting in a residential facility.
3. The second shooting incident happened in a building of classrooms, but how were they to know yesterday at 8:00 where the second horror would occur, even if they could have foreseen it??
4. I can only conclude that what is being suggested is that a campus of some 30,000 should have been completely exacuated. To where? How long does it take to do that?
Instead of the blame game, I'd like to see practical ideas about what people are truly suggesting.
Hindsight is 20-20
Just read this article in our local paper about preparedness at Florida universities. Basically they said it’s a hard thing to secure a large campus. They practice scenarios (as I’m sure the VaTech officials did)...but ever situation is different. Securing a large campus is virtually impossible. They even mentioned the problem of possibly locking the perp in with the students if you didn’t have enough information.
The last paragraph has an interesting idea though. We use it for our neighborhood association when there is an emergency or crime in the area. The alert would be sent to go out to student’s cell phones. Granted not every student has a cell phone, but most do and could pass on the “word” to those who don’t.
Seems like this method would be more efficient than email. My kid’s in college, I think he only checks his email once a day.
Here’s the article link:
http://www.sptimes.com/2007/04/17/Worldandnation/Sprawling_universitie.shtml
Exactly.
In a large area like a campus or town, I would advocate a siren (like the old civil defense alarms). They use them for tornado warnings and people know that means get inside, take cover, stay there til the all-clear.
Why wouldn't such a warning work here? Administrators knew there was an armed man on the loose...and he'd just murdered 2 people. Students and the community should at least have been informed of THAT information.
It wouldn't have stopped the 2nd rampage. But some of those students may have stayed home.
I also imagine there were already complaints from students about missing so much class from the previous week when they kept locking things down and evacuating because of all the bomb threats.
It’s like the snow days. If you cancel and it doesn’t snow, people scream. If you don’t cancel and then driving is treacherous, people scream. And even if you get it right, people 2nd-guess if there is an accident, like if a bus has a normal accident on a day it snowed but not that bad, people say that if you cancelled school for the snow the accident wouldn’t happen. And if a kid off of school on a rainy day that looked like ice at first is hit by a car in the street, people say the kid should have been at school.
What is interesting is to look at the comments made on the internet between the 7:15AM shooting and the announcement of the 2nd shooting. The most interesting is that when we first got reports of a professor who told their kids to jump out the window, some on this thread reacted quite negatively to that, as it the professor was to blame for the kids getting hurt in the fall. Then we learned about the shooting, and he was a hero.
I suggest that perfect "hindsight" shouldn't always be an excuse for not using "foresight". VT is not Iraq. The dorm murders can't be compared to a war zone. When a murder occurs on a school campus, everyone on campus should be alerted...by emergency sirens if that is the quickest way to reach everyone.
I question the explanations that the murders in the dorm were believed to be an isolated instance.
Believed to be? And who is the source of that belief?