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OK.
So now let us get to the meat.
How would this have found a student with a student ID, who at that moment was in his own dorm getting ready for act two.
Even out of his dorm, he has an ID that says he belongs.
Would you strip search every single person on the street?
Do you realize how easy it is to hide a 9MM and a .22?
I have three 9mm’s. One will fit in the palm of your hand. It will still kill you.
I have also a Smith and although it does not fit in the palm, it is easy to hide in your belt, in the small of your back, under your arm, whatever.
Also remember that Monday was cold as hell and everyone was wearing arctic gear to stay warm. I have a sawed off .12 Ga that I could hide under those clothes.
So what are the cops going to do?
If you have 2,000 cops, putting some of them out on the street is PC. If you only have 70 something, it is dumb.
Especially when the cops see the guy walking by, pistols hidden under a big goose-down jacket, with his student ID pinned to the jacket front and do nothing because after all, he does have an ID He belongs..
26,000 thousand goosedown jackets. Which one do you look under?
Well, there is that gorgeous blond gal over there. I might check that out. What makes this discussion important, and I believe it is the only reason that we should not shrug it off as being wasted time, is that people are, on the TV and here as well, criticizing cops and administrators who are suffering real pain. The 20/20 armchair "they should haves" are having a theoretical game of what if and in the process making the pain worse, with the potential of destroying the lives of good people who are busting their butts to do a good job. Knock it off. It is very unattractive.
Whether the cops would have found something had they spent more effort looking is a question we will never properly know the answer to.
I agree with you that the likelihood is low, and that is not what I fault the authorities for.
What I fault them for is not notifying all of those whom they should reasonably have suspected might be in harm’s way that they might be in harm’s way.
THAT, at a bare minimum, is their responsibility. And they patently failed at it.
That it failed this one time is perhaps excuseable. Now that the failure is exposed, thought had best be put in by every administrator at every public facility about how NOT to screw up like that next time.