Depression Over VA Tech

Yesterday a parent's worst nightmare broke out at Virginia Tech. A student gone berserk came in packing guns, killed two people at 7:15 AM and then burst into a classroom and shot up the place two hours later, killing another thirty. I'm thankful that the gunman was killed, but what a tragedy for everyone concerned, even his own parents who now have to live with his death plus the horror of his crimes.

Nowhere is safe, and maybe the first shootings couldn't have been reasonably prevented. When you have 25,000 students on a campus on any given day you can't possibly search everyone or make everyone go through metal detectors. You can't stop and search every car that comes onto the campus. It's physically impossible. And this young man had a valid student ID, apparently, so he would have been let onto the campus in any case.

But why didn't the university go into an immediate lockdown right after the first shootings? Yes, they sent some Resident Advisors around to knock on doors and warn students to stay in their rooms. That didn't help the commuters who came in for 9 o'clock classes and never came home. There should have been a response right away: a radio broadcast cancelling classes until the campus was fully secured, and an immediate email to the students to warn them to stay at home. Instead the lame excuse was that the university felt they would be safest in their classrooms. Well, they weren't.

I predict that the esteemed Virginia Tech is going to close its doors. First of all, the parents of the murdered students, particularly the 30 who died in the second attack, will most likely sue the administration's collective ass off, and they will win. Secondly, if I were a student there I would now know that I was not living in a safe situation and that those who run the university would not act quickly and decisively enough to save my life. I predict that most students will transfer out of there en masse. Some may not even finish up the semester. What's a few lost credits as compared with a funeral and the end of all a young person's dreams?

This is a horror and my heart goes out to all those affected directly by this tragedy. But I am also angry that better precautions aren't taken when lives are at stake. If something happens, lock the school down post haste and broadcast to the commuters to stay at home. That's the sane way to handle a situation like this one. VA Tech was the subject of a shooting attack last summer too, so what have they learned about beefing up security? Doesn't look like they learned enough.

My prayers to the families of the fallen. We don't know what we have lost as a nation. Did the gunman shoot because he was a social pariah? Had he failed an exam? I knew a young man who was class valedictorian in my high school. He committed suicide at Harvard because he failed a class. What else did we lose, was one of the murdered students the one who was going to discover a cure for cancer, or AIDS? We'll never know. We'll be left with dreams unfinished and only grief and anger.

Craziness and unexpected violence happens. But it doesn't have to happen twice in the same morning at the same place, unless someone isn't watching the store. I believe the university has much to answer for.