Yeah You can, and in this case you must. It's a school, not a city. And a murderer is loose on campus. Lock down all buildings ASAP. That is the protocol.
How in the h-ll could they or should they have known he was going to show up in classrooms 2 hrs later and execute people. Please give it a rest.
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.