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All the Wrong Things
By Brian | April 18, 2007 | Share on Facebook
Like everyone else, I’ve been listening to and reading about the horrible events that took place at Virginia Tech yesterday.
While this was the most deadly, it was not, unfortunately, the first of it’s kind. This time around, though, the discussion of what happened and how it could have been prevented/mitigated seems to be focused on a strange mix of topics.
One discussion thread is the two-hour delay between the first shooting and the e-mail notifying students about it. There seems to be an implication here that the University’s primary role in this situation is communication, not security – as if the students would have been perfectly capable of defending themselves, had they only known sooner that there was a shooter on the loose. Personally, I’d have been happy if they had secured the campus and not informed anybody, as opposed to the other way around.
Another discussion I’ve seen floating around is about VT’s “open campus,” and whether the ability to walk freely into and out of buildings without metal detectors, ID cards, etc. is worth enduring the occasional tragedy:
It is very difficult, because we are an open society and an open campus. We have 26,000 people here. The best thing that we can do is to have people report anything that they saw that was suspicious. We obviously cannot have an armed guard in front of every classroom every day of the year. What we try to determine is are they kept out of harm’s way by staying in the dorms or staying in the academic buildings. We send out communications by e-mail, we have an emergency alert system to get the word to our students as quickly as we can.
Virginia Tech University President
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