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 am very uncomfortable with all of this second-guessing so early. The press should be attempting only to gather facts at this stage, rather than placing blame on the police or VT officials. From what I hear there is not even confirmation that the first and second shootings were by the same person. We don’t know exactly WHAT was done as far as notice to the students is concerned.
Arguably any mass email would also have been sent to the shooter(s), who would have known that the school knew about the first shooting. I can’t see how the message could have gotten out earlier than around 8:30, when classes were under way. Assuming students would have gotten email in the middle of class, they would have hunkered down in their classrooms, not know whether the shooter was already in their building. The possibilities are nearly endless when all of the facts are not in.
We should hold our fire for now, so to speak. Seems we have learned little from the Duke Lacrosse case, and we are ready to judge the police and V.Tech while the bodies are still warm.
So the siren tells you to do what? Go back to your dorms (where the guy had already killed people?) Go to your first class and stay in your room with the doors locked (I don;’t know if the classes had locks, but if they did the guy must have been able to shoot them open).
And when do you stop the siren? 2, 4 hours? All day? Until they solve the shooting and arrest the gunman — some murders take weeks or months to solve?
People already are saying that it is very ODD for a shooter to wait over 2 hours before shooting again. So even if your initial inclination was to lock down the whole school to make sure the gunman wasn’t running from dorm to dorm, by 2 hours you probably would have eased up on the lockdown if you hadn’t had any contact with a gunman.
And in fact, they DID lock down the nearby dorms, AND alerted the other dorms. And they thought they knew who the person was, and where he was driving.
False alerts do have a cost. The school was locked down 2-3 times the previous week, and the kids were paying good money to be taught, not to be locked in their dorm rooms.
Think of this. If there had never been a 2nd shooting, and if instead the shooter had been caught hiding in a building 4 hours later, would everybody be screaming that the school should have been locked down?