Though the grieving at Virginia Tech is far from over, the attacks on Monday immediately raised some serious issues that will grow in intensity as the last of the victims are laid to rest over the coming weeks. These questions are why this happened and how it happened, and what, if anything, could have been done to mitigate the terrible course of events.
Campus police reported, two separate shooting incidents: one early in the morning at a dormitory on campus and a second one in an academic building also on campus.
My first reaction as I heard the tragic events play out was shock, naturally. As more details came in, I began to question the measures and actions taken by the Virginia Tech administration. There was a two-hour delay between the two shootings, which police determine were committed by the same shooter, Cho Seung-Hui.
My question is: Why the heck wasn’t the campus shut down when the first shooting occurred? I tried to follow the logic of the police and administration – it was difficult to follow at best. Even if the shooting in the first dorm, with two fatalities, was only a murder-suicide, shouldn’t police have found a weapon immediately? It’s kind of hard to dispose of a weapon in a suicide. That immediately should have raised concerns that the shooter had fled. Watching the live interviews on CNN and Fox News, the chief of the Virginia Tech campus police, Wendell Flinchum, said the police originally believed the shooter had fled the campus. Where the heck did they get that idea from? The shooter, Seung-Hui, could have been anywhere on the large 2,600-acre campus, and they assumed he was just, well, gone? Seems stupid to me.
The day continued as normal, until nearly two hours later, when students began receiving e-mails warning them of a shooting incident. However, classes were not effectively canceled until a second e-mail warning of an on-campus threat was sent nearly a half hour later , according to some students. That in and of itself was ridiculous.
If a student was killed during the day by apparent homicide in a dorm or school building at VCU, I would expect nothing short of a shutdown, immediately, for the safety and well-being of students and educators. In my opinion, the administration acted rashly and in the interest of maintaining a good image rather than acting on behalf of its students. Ideally, officers should have been all over campus or at major locations, providing cover for students and advising them to lock themselves inside until further notice, while turning away any commuting students from entering the campus. That seemingly would be the common-sense reaction.
Of course, aside from the actions of the university itself, this incident raises concerns about effective communications over a large campus anywhere. There wasn’t a large-scale alert system capable of informing students of the danger beyond e-mail, and most of us aren’t checking our e-mail at 9 a.m., if we are even awake. There was no way for most of these students to know the danger, and they simply were allowed to walk right into it. This is a lesson for all places of higher learning that an effective mass warning system for any incident, not simply shootings, must be available. There are campuses that are as large as Tech, and without such a system, students are cut off from any chance of removing themselves from danger.
In the coming days, as what happened is more clearly understood and the university begins to resume classes, what Tech did and could have done to prevent the massacre will be a major topic for all colleges and universities to consider. Perhaps with the lessons learned, we will never again have to grieve for a group of people with nothing but the future ahead of them.