It's in terribly bad taste, but I'll raise the question: Who wants to guess where the debate on gun control will go in light of the killings today at Virginia Tech? Will the gun nuts really argue that if the students were more armed, they could have fought back? Will we hear "guns don't kill people, people do?" Will the police be blamed for not "locking down" the entire campus after the first shooting?
5 Comments:
Debbie Schussel has already blamed the muslims.
Ken Ham has already blamed evolution.
It's like a Rorschach blot. Everybody sees what they want to in it.
April 17, 2007 7:12 AM,
Well, the police hardly bear the blame for the crime (it rests solely with the shooter, of course) but they made a gigantic misstep in not locking down the damn campus, or at the very least putting out an immediate campus-wide alert. According to the news reports they "figured the shooter had left campus, based on the information they had."
Memo to campus cops: you are not detectives, you are campus cops precisely because you could never hack it even as a small-town police detective. You can obviously see the results of your brilliant deduction now.
April 17, 2007 3:50 PM,
In cruising around the blogosphere and a couple of discussion boards, I'd say the answer to every one of those questions is "yes." I've seen arguments for more gun control, claims that all the students should have been armed to protect themselves, and lots of criticism of the police. That's in addition to those blaming Muslims, evolution, and secular humanism. The tragedy seems to be making everyone more passionate about whatever they believe, whether or not it has any relevance at all.
April 17, 2007 7:01 PM,
I've seen lot's of comments pointing towards arming the students or at least the Profs.
On the other hand, the idea that the campus police should have locked down the entire campus is probably not going to happen.
Murders happen; on campuses, in dorms, everywhere. If police departments were to shut down campuses immediately after every shooting, you would be disrupting classes somewhere enought to cause op-eds about over-reaction. The campus police were following up on initial leads; it sounds like they were trying to do things right and following procedure.
Having a 2 hour gap between the first (public) shooting and the continuation is fairly rare. Usually these things happen in one fell swoop.
But Debbie Schussel just fanning the far right fears. That is her job. With a foreign student, Korean or not, she'll have a fieldday. Ken Ham is being Ken Ham. Need one say more. Imagine what these people would do if it had been a Pakisani evolutionary biologist. *sigh*
April 18, 2007 4:04 AM,
Yes, but what would the procedure have been if they knew for certain the killer was on campus? Because, as it turns out, he was. Or returned to campus.
Frankly, whether the cops thought he was on campus or not should have been irrelevant -- it should have been treated the exact same way: the guy was at large, whereabouts unknown, armed, dangerous and capable of murder.
According to the news reports I read, an email alert was sent about 2 hours after the initial shootings, which I suppose is as fast as I might expect, but how was it treated? Urgently? As a past event? As an emergency with the killer still at large?
Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying the police would definitely have prevented the upcoming mass shooting. Ultimately it's probable that the killer would have managed to kill more people anyway. But I just do not think it was the campus cops' call to decide whether he was on campus or not; they definitely could have done more; and they should have treated it with more urgency than they did.
Statement of bias: I don't hate police, but found campus cops to be rather useless in my personal experience.
As always, I'm willing to be corrected as more information comes out.
April 18, 2007 9:06 AM,
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