Virginia Tech made all the wrong moves

If Virginia Tech was a company and its stock was traded on Wall Street, there would be a lot of selling going on today. You can expect about 30 wrongful death suits to be filed, based on the way the college responded to the first shootings yesterday. This quote from the SF Chronicle nails it:

"I think the university has blood on their hands because of their lack of action after the first incident," said Billy Bason, 18, who lives in the dorm. "If you had apprehended a suspect, I could understand having classes even after two of your students have perished. But when you don't have a suspect in a college environment and to put the students in a situation where they're congregated in large numbers in open buildings, that's unacceptable to me."

The university president and campus police chief said they decided not to cancel classes after the first shooting because the initial indication at the dorm, based on interviews with witnesses, was that the attack might have been a domestic dispute and that the shooter probably had fled the campus.


Might have been? Probably? Haven't there been enough school shootings to convince every school to have a lockdown policy if there is even the whiff of violence on campus? Granted there haven't been a lot of colleges massacres, and granted a large college can be the size of a small city compared to a high school campus - but what other response can there be? Two people were dead at 7:15am, no one had been arrested for the crime, and no kind of warning went out to the rest of the campus population for two hours. The lawyers must be climbing over each other to get there.

Reports this morning are that they have found a note written by the shooter. Today's news cycle should bring us the interviews with people who knew him, questions about immigration since it appears he was a resident alien, interviews with sociologists about our violent society, an examination of lax gun laws, perhaps some insightful questioning of violent video games (which the shooter will probably turn out to have been addicted to) - and unless it turns out he was a radical Muslim (not too likely for a South Korean) then by Wednesday we will likely be on to something else and trying not to worry about the next random rampage. Let's be careful out there, people...

Comments

DodgerScott said…
Now that we know a lot more about angry Korean shooter, it's hard to imagine who the police interviewed that would have told them it was "domestic dispute." The asshole didn't have a friend in the world...by his own doing. Hard to have a "domestic dispute" with someone who won't even say 'hi' back to you.
April 20, 2007 at 2:33 PM
Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

How I have neglected my blog and the sadness that results

So jeez, I am feeling a little contrite because I have neglected this blog. Feeling a little like I have let an old friend fall by the wayside while I have been spending all my time with someone new.I even got needled by one of my (few) readers today - "Wow, no blog post since April 2!"  Feeling a little frivolous and superficial because my good old reliable Blogger blog here has fallen victim to my other time sucks - namely, Facebook, and of course, what I like to call "real life." Maintaining a blog is no simple task, my friend. Just mouse up there to the top of the screen, left of center, and start clicking on "Next blog." You will soon soon discover there are lots and lots people who start a blog, make two or three posts, and discover it's kind of demanding. (You'll also discover that about two-thirds of all the random blogs you'll see in the "next blog" mode are in Spanish, which I find strangely fascinating. ) Maybe those whose ...
Read more

"Mikey Angels" flies off in both directions at once

Image
The expression we've all heard is "you can't be too rich or too thin." I suppose that gets said a lot around the tennis court at the country club, the changing room at Sak's? I suppose it draws a wry smile every time. Or is it really said in the aisles at Target by people who are at no risk of being too much of either? The expression we've never heard is "you can't be too smart," because we all know it is possible to be too smart. Kind of ironic since we spend a lot of energy trying to force kids to be smart. We pound them with homework, make them take tests, tell them the kids in Mumbai are going to take your future job. We try to get them into the best schools, the ones for the smart people, but they are always at risk of becoming "too smart for their own good." Based on what I've heard about last weekend's Presidential candidate activity, Obama is running the risk of being too smart for his own good. He and McCain did these l...
Read more

Burgers with daddy

Image
Sometimes on Sundays I am transported to a place that was called Gene and Darlene's. (OK, that sounded kind of Shirley MacLaine. I am not talking about out of body experiences here. It's a memory, ok?) Gene and Darlene's was a bar down on Shoal Creek south of Joplin. The building still stands (photo proof here, taken August 2008.) No telling how many other names the place has had since it was Gene and Darlene's, but that's the name it has in my mind. On Sundays sometimes, when I was a kid, daddy would come up with the notion that burgers from Gene and Darlene's would really hit the spot. Being always in favor of food in general, and carry-out food being really exotic to me, the idea was always a winner in my opinion. I would be eager to climb into the car with daddy and ride along. It was a short trip down to Redings Mill, around the infamous curve that topped a bluff over the creek, where all kinds of carloads of people had suffered hideous deaths in spectacula...
Read more