Posted on 04/16/2007 7:14:16 AM PDT by LexHoskin
Gunman on Campus; Stay inside your building, away from windows; Shooting incident at West Ambler Johnston Hall
(Excerpt) Read more at vtnews.vt.edu ...
As a Freeper who was in Blacksburg noted to me earlier today, a “lockdown” would have put people in place in the various classrooms that they had entered, and if the shooter was already in one of the buildings, the result would have been the same. In fact, he may have been planning on a “lockdown” to make his job easier, and may have given up waiting and started shooting.
The first classes of the day were at 8am. It would be surprising to be able to lock down the campus for a 7:15am shooting BEFORE students had entered their classes for their 8am classes. And of course, before that time many students would have been in the various dining halls, and a lockdown at that point would have locked them in the dining halls.
And if the recent reports are accurate, the police thought they were questioning the shooter at the time of the shooting, so they had little reason to believe there was a gunman loose on campus, although they were obviously not correct.
I will wait for more complete information before I start blaming people for not taking action that in hindsight may look right. Let’s face it, those 26,000 people were going to be somewhere.
I presume that by tomorrow we will know if the same guns were used in both shootings, and the police should have enough pictures from cell phones to make an ID of the shooter.
I attended Tech in the late 70s. I sat in several classes in Norris, and I lived in East Ambler Johnston (3rd floor same room for 4 years). My future wife lived on the 7th floor of West Ambler Johnston. At the time the two sides were single-sex, and it wasn’t til my junior year that my floor even allowed “visitation”.
We had a guy on our hall arrested for having weapons in his room. We had another guy that was an expert lock-pick and taught me how to make bombs.
We had a kid killed playing D&D, down in the steam tunnels — at least that was the story.
I presume they have better lock-down procedures now that we have had a 9/11, but I do think that you can’t shut down an entire campus every time there is a domestic disturbance. I would bet that they will however the next time it happens.
In my county in Virginia, they will lock down schools within a 5-mile radius whenever there is a gunman loose. It happens a couple of times a year, usually a robbery of some sort. But it’s relatively easy to lock down primary and secondary schools, each one is usually a single building, and the children are expected to stay inside all day.
Yes, I went there. It seems legit.
Bump!
Appalls me also... unbelievable and beyond tragic.
What an interesting response.
The good news is.....I think Greta said Whoraldo will have a special coming up in a few minutes. Maybe 2 hours worth! LOL
True enough.
NBC’s national news at 6:30 had a kid on, live on camera, flatly saying the guy in the classroom building was “An asian, about 6 feet tall, maroon cap” — that has been on the web for hours now — I don’t see anyone “hiding” anything, though individual speakers may be playing up this or that angle as suits them.
I wouldn’t call this a terrorist act - this was an act of murder. From his actions, he wasn’t there to incite mayhem, scare people, further some political goal through terror - he was there to kill people. You might as well call any shooting where more than one person is killed a terrorist act if this qualifies as a terrorist act.
BTW, you don’t seem to have clue 1 about my motives etc.
And, your mind-reading skills appear to be well below average.
I think that although Al Qada would like to do coordinated attacks, a lot of the big attacks get busted before they happen.
They wouldn’t have to do a massive attack at multiple universities to put the panic in. One good attack at one elementary school could be enough.
I sure hope you're right about this, but these events really invite bad law. We don't have a majority to put the brakes on until cooler heads can prevail, and you can bet those newly elected pro-gun Democrats will be conspicuously absent from any efforts to resist knee-jerk legislation.
What is the nature of these "puppet masters"? Human or otherwise?
I’m listening to Greta now, and she said something actually smart. She noted that if Va Tech had horns which went off when there were threats, those alarms would have sounded 3 times last week for the 3 bomb threats, so this morning even if the alarm went off at 7:30, by 10 people would have been ignoring it.
I would add would they sound the alarm for 2 straight hours? How long would you continue a lockdown if you had started one at 8am? What if you didn’t find a gunman by noon, 1pm, 3pm? It’s likely they would NOT have found this gunman, so wouldn’t he have shot up the school as soon as the lockdown ended?
That is, if the plan wasn’t to get into a building during a lockdown (remember, the lockdown procedure doesn’t include putting hundred of police searching people going into every building), and then shooting up the people locked down in the building with the chains keeping the police out.
A second suspect would seem to blow the jilted-lover theory right out of the water.
Well, I suppose it might be safe to assume he wasn't North Korean.
This was most likely not jihad-motivated middle easter/islamobastard political statement at work.
More like, some kind of lone nuts or two lone nuts, ala Columbine Conspiracy.
Well, you have a pair...jilted lover gets away, suicidal assassin goes down with the ship. Would be interesting if there were any other Chinese students let in from the same province, etc. and if they are missing (a face)
Wonder of we’ll find out his real name tomorrow??
From Threat Matrix Thread:
Authorities were investigating whether the gunman who killed 32 people on the Virginia Tech campus in the deadliest shooting rampage in U.S. history was a Chinese man who arrived in the United States last year on a student visa.
The 24-year-old man arrived in San Francisco on United Airlines on Aug. 7 on a visa issued in Shanghai, the source said. Investigators have not linked him to any terrorist groups, the source said.
Police believe three bomb threats on the campus last week may have been attempts by the man to test the campus’ security response, the source said.
The exits to the buildings where the shootings occurred were chained by the shooter, the source said.
Students complained that there were no public address announcements or other warnings on campus after the first burst of gunfire. They said the first word they received from the university was an e-mail more than two hours into the rampage — around the time the gunman struck again.
Virginia Tech President Charles Steger said authorities believed the shooting at the dorm was a domestic dispute and mistakenly thought the gunman had fled the campus.
‘‘We had no reason to suspect any other incident was going to occur,’’ he said.
Would one of yall give an update. My computer has been out today.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.