I'm not one to assign blame, but the Va Tech administration really messed up. The guy killed two people in the dorms and came back two hrs. later to kill the rest. They didn't raise the alarm because they thought it was an isolated incident? Then the Pres. tried to make excuses saying that the campus is big, lots of buildings, people coming and going, blah blah blah. So? It would have taken a mass e-mail to all faculty and staff and notice to the media and word would have spread in 10 minutes. No one would have come to campus and everyone would have left. If there's ever a shooting on my campus, I want the damn campus shut down until the cops are all over it.
So, it seems no one read my earlier post. I'd like to see you try to lock down the VT campus. Honestly. It's easy to point fingers when you don't know what you're talking about.
1. I read your post.
2. I know what I'm talking about. Just because someone disagrees with you doesn't mean they don't know what they're talking about. Stow the attitude. I know some people high up the facilities chain at UNLV and they, along with the professors I spoke with, agree that what I say could have easily been done.
I'm not saying that the campus could have been "locked down" (whatever that means), I'm saying that a warning to stay off campus could have easily been disseminated. If you know how quickly word-of-mouth spreads on college campuses, you'd know that everyone on campus would have known within 30 minutes of a mass e-mail to all employees and students, probably less. Additionally, word to the media would have caused breaking news reports to further spread the word. The campus would have been a ghost town and the police could have raked it.
Instead, VT thought it was an "isolated incident" and decided to keep it far too quiet. There was no reason not to try to get everyone off campus. If someone shoots up a store in the mall, they don't just shut the store down, they shut the whole mall. Not a perfect analogy, but you (hopefully) get my drift.
I worked with people high up on the chain at a VA university and I doubt they're now saying "Gosh, I would have handled that much better. They should have done A, B, and C." Everything is clear in hindsight and it's easy to say that things should have happened a different way, but there's no way to say that a tragedy would have been averted had some other action been taken.
You deal with the information you have at the time. People are asking why an e-mail about the shooting wasn't sent out earlier. What are they going to do? Send out an e-mail 2 seconds after the shooting without finding out what's going on? It's a public university and telling students not to come to campus and canceling class is a huge deal, especially when you have an on-campus population. They still have to use University resources.
I don't think Ever is wrong by likening this to the incident in a campus apartment. There are acts of violence all over college campuses daily, including deaths and murders. Yes, maybe in hindsight they might have acted more prudently with the information since they had not located the gunman, but if they believed it was an isolated incident, it wouldn't have warranted canceling class and warning thousands of students away from campus. Maybe it was kept too quiet, but the fact is that you have 9k students living on campus and 14k more commuting, and if you think you're dealing with an isolated incident, the first instinct is not to lock everyone down in their buildings and create panic.
You talk about people leaving campus-- what about the students who live on-campus? Where are they supposed to go? Would it really be safe to send everyone OFF-campus when you don't know where the gunman is, since they may have left campus already? There is no feasible way to block access in and out of Virginia Tech, and that's what I'm saying about the inability to "lock down." Yes, roads can be closed, but there aren't enough resources in a small town to block off foot access or something like that.
This is an unexpected incident and I don't think anyone can honestly say that they would have handled it better to the point of actually preventing the tragedy. We don't know what would have happened if they got the word out about the first shooting earlier, but I can guarantee that if the deranged psycho gunman never set foot on campus, it wouldn't have happened.