Unless Norris under went major renovation, I remember it from classes as old, very plain and the corridors relatively long narrow with not as much egress as you would find in the newer buildings. I think the shooter planned this out and knew that an old building like Norris would give him an upper hand.
When I first heard Norris Hall mentioned, I wondered if he did not open fire in the auditorium; what we fondly called “the cliffs of Norris.” It was narrow and one of the steepest auditoriums I can remember being in. With the limited aisle space and steepness, getting out quickly or hiding would have been impossible.
Look this idea of a lock down is good in theory, but VT is kind of spread out and most students do not live on campus. People are coming and going every minute. You can enter it from so many points and there are not fences and guard shacks at the entrances. The campus comes right up to the edge of town. There is a sense of openness and that’s what makes it a nice campus. Yes, you can cancel classes and send out the word on the Internet, radio and whatever but actually locking things down? It might take hours unless there was some kind of audible alert system in place. It’s easy to second guess the police now.
I think mistakes were probably made, but let’s all give the Campus Police a break and wait for the facts. They’ll own up to their mistakes, I feel confident of that.
Right now, let’s concentrate on praying for all that have been touched by this.
My point mirrors yours. Every analysis that, at this point, comes to a conclusion about whether a mistake was made starts by knowing what the outcome was, a luxury not available to the guys making the decision at the time. And, for each scenario where taking an action might have helped the current outcome, it’s possible to construct one where taking that same action would have been the wrong thing to do. For example, if they’d cancelled classes and the guy had shot up any of those thousands of nearby student apartments, killing students who would have been in class if it hadn’t been cancelled, we’d be hearing questions about that.
It’s too early to make any decisions about fault other than that of the guy with the guns. And it’s always too early to assign blame by starting with a known outcome and then reasoning backwards instead of placing yourself in the same situation authorities were in at the moment it occurred and limiting your knowledge to what they knew. One of the things they knew is that there are thousands of incidents around the country of jilted lovers shooting their significant others then running for the hills. The number of those incidents that result in the suspect going nuts and shooting up a school approaches, if not equals, zero. Until today...