Student Says Bulk of Virginia Tech Shootings Were Easily Preventable, I Agree
April 16, 2007
Today’s tragic murders at Virginia Tech started at about 7:30 a.m. EST when gunfire erupted inside West Ambler Johnston Hall, which is one of the school’s biggest residential buildings.
On the Virginia Tech network public discussion forum at Facebook student Ben Hair wrote:
They could have prevented most of this…shooting at 730 in WAJ, classes don’t start til 8, why couldn’t they cancel classes for the day…SOMEONE WAS SHOT AND IT TURNS OUT THEY DIED…I THINK THATS GROUNDS TO CANCEL CLASS RATHER THAN SENDING OUT AN EMAIL THAT SAYS USE CAUTION AND REPORT ANYTHING TO POLICE. They could have save almost 20 lives and 20 injuries if they just decided to cancel class right away.
Update: Here is a campus map that I got from CNN:
As you can see, West Ambler Johnston Hall is all the way across campus from Norris Hall where the bulk of the shootings took place two hours later. With two hours and a sprawling campus between the first and second incidents, I want to know just how the latter half of this tragedy wasn’t prevented.
Update 1:45 p.m. : College officials are saying that they had reason to believe that the first shooting in the residence hall was domestic in nature and that the shooter was on the run. Evidence at the scene led campus police to believe that the shooter in West Ambler Johnston was leaving campus and likely leaving the state. They say they do not yet know whether the shootings at Norris Hall were linked to the shootings at West Ambler Johnston.
I tend to agree with Hair. When I was a junior at Pomona College, a professor trashed her own car and claimed it was a hate crime. Before we knew the whole story about the fake crime, the presidents of the five colleges quickly gathered and determined that canceling all classes was the way to keep students safe and to give us an opportunity to figure out what to do in response.
If five separate colleges can shut themselves down voluntarily within hours of a reported hate crime, why can’t Virginia Tech make a judgement call that students are safest in their dormitories? Letting the students go to classes created a perfect target for the deranged gunman.
My prayers are with everyone at Virginia Tech.
Such a senseless act. My thoughts and prayers go out to everyone over at Virginia Tech. I, too, am a bit baffled as to why the school wasn’t put on lock-down (or at least why classes weren’t canceled) after the first reported shooting.
remember when there was a gunman running around pitzer? no one cancelled classes then or told everyone they had to stay inside.
That gunman hadn’t shot anyone.
below are my immediate thoughts on the massacre, and as i hear more information my opinion and analysis will probably shift with increased information.
*for the pitzer thing: i wanna say it was jr or sr year? i’m pretty sure that it was linked to an armed robbery b/c i remember that some kids were robbed in their dorms at gun point and then something about cops looking for them because they were still on campus and someone told me they had seen the guy(s) running around.
anyway, i don’t believe anyone was shot but the fact that you don’t recall that is illustrative in and of itself about how difficult it can be to inform everyone–and we’re a pretty small campus–especially so early in the morning. i don’t contest that what happened is a tragedy and really just incredulous, but it’s easy to forget amid all the passion that decisions and execution of a response had to happen quickly with little and imperfect information. if it is true that the school believed the first shooting was an isolated incident, then i don’t think it’s necessary to shut down the entire school when it is believed that the threat is gone (i don’t know what information they had to lead them to believe the perpetrator had fled), though i would make counselling available to those who needed it and kept the school updated with reports as they came in. that is procedure. as i last heard, they are still trying to determine if the incidents are linked, though it seems pretty clear that they are.
i find it disturbing when i heard on the news that people said that administrative heads should roll over this. i don’t think that someone getting fired or asked to resign is really a solution (i’m recalling your recent post about racism and scapegoats as a means to release pressure), or that any one administrator could really be held accountable for this. it’s too p.c., too easy and cheapens the value of the victims lives by glossing over any investigational process into the ugly story and getting a clean, simple, instantly gratifying tangible outcome. the only person that is truly accountable is the murderer himself. i think people expect others to have anticipated this massacre, but really who can concieve of such a thing happening?–it is the largest massacre. what happened to personal responsibility? people should be angry at the murderer instead of the school. it is the school’s responsibility to try to protect its students, and the school behaved the way it should have given its information. it is unrealistic to expect the school to anticipate and protect the students from any and every possible outcome. i am not belittling the massacre when i say that theft, rape and drug use happens every day on a more widespread basis on college campuses around the country, and schools can’t even successfully address those somewhat predictable, consistent issues–but it’s true. how can we expect for a school to anticipate something like this on such a grande scale? it’s not the school’s fault, it’s the murderer’s. if it’s true he’s the same crazed person that commited the earlier murder in the dorms, he probably would not have let anything stand in the way of finding more students to kill whether they were in class or not.
the murderer must have been a very sick person. my heart goest out to those who have lost their loved ones because of his actions, and i hope that they can have some closure on this, and maybe even be able to forgive him some day and fully heal.