Actually hindsight is not quite 20/20
April 19, 2007
The problem with hindsight is separating what you know now from what you knew then. The Virginia Tech police were responding to a fatal domestic violence event.
Most murders, thank God, do not devolve into random killing sprees. Perhaps they do in the movies. But rarely in real life.
Some folks think the VT police should have immediately notified students and professors that a “killer was on the loose” and let them judge the risks or take the measures they thought were appropriate. What would they have said? Maybe something like this:
Two people have been shot in West AJ. The murderer’s whereabouts and motives are unknown. We have no description. We cannot identify the victims at this time.
What do you do with that information? I guarantee you there are killers loose right this very instant. How many unsolved murders are there in your state? Are you staying home today and away from the windows? There’s a killer loose, take precautions. I don’t know what precautions to take, but take them anyway. Buy some duct tape.
And as I already discussed, others think there should have been an immediate lockdown. They want the maximal response to an unknown threat “just in case.” After all, the campus did it when escaped convict William Morva was on the loose.
Kurt J. Krause, vice president for business affairs at Virginia Tech, said the cordon of heavily armed officers was designed to keep Morva from escaping, and he said he ordered students and others to stay inside to keep them away from Morva.
“There were just too many rumors, too many people walking around,” he said of the decision to cancel classes and essentially quarantine students.
Of course, at that time Morva had killed a security guard, ambushed and killed a deputy. They knew he would probably want to take a hostage, and I’m sure police were expecting a gun battle when they encountered him. Best, in that case, to have the students out of the way. Morva was clearly a danger and a threat to everyone on campus. Immediately after Cho’s first shootings no one would have expected the AJ killer to be a threat to anyone other than the people he’d already killed.
A security state — one where we choose to overreact to all incidents just in case — is one that robs us of civil liberties, opportunities, and freedom. It is one that asks us to live in fear all the time. Anyone you don’t know could be a mad killer. Anyone you know could turn into one overnight. Every mugging could be the next Cho. Contrary to popular belief, there is such a thing as too safe.
I am sure when the final report comes out it will say what the Virginia Tech police have been saying all along. No one could have done a better response job. They made the best decisions they could make with the information they had available.
The same cannot be said for the gun background checks or mental evaluations. But that’s another post.
Posted in Diary
content rss
April 19th, 2007 at 8:10 am
How about gun laws permitting almost anyone to buy a gun?
April 19th, 2007 at 8:38 am
Well, that’s an obviously bad idea, Lior. I don’t think you even need hindsight for that.
April 19th, 2007 at 9:12 am
The 2nd Amendment is some kind of bullshit in this day and age. When it came out about this kids mental state, I was dumbfounded. I am waiting for the NRA to come out and say it was this kids god given right to own a gun.
I know we can’t have our cake and eat it too, but sometimes I feel the Constitution needs to be rewritten.
April 19th, 2007 at 3:41 pm
I agree with the earlier poster who said we need to wait for the full investigation to be completed before we do too much second-guessing here. My feeling is that the police probably did the best they could at the time, but perhaps we can learn some lessons for the future, particularly about communication.
I also agree that the idea of a campus lockdown is unrealistic. But I do wonder why (based on articles and television reports) the classroom doors apparently could not be locked. I guess in Mayberry, R.F.D. no one worries that computers and projectors will be stolen out of the classrooms? It seems like a simple thing that could have helped.
April 20th, 2007 at 9:51 am
How about some kind of color-coded murderer threat level system? Something that gives people just enough information to be really scared but not enough to actually do anything about it.
April 20th, 2007 at 9:58 am
Ooo. I think we have a winner!
Chrissy, in my experience with Norris (and, in fact most of the classrooms), which is admittedly eleven years out of date, all the rooms are left open even if not in use. Sometimes students make use of them for impromptu meeting areas. Locks are probably not on most of the doors out of convenience’s sake.
April 22nd, 2007 at 5:55 pm
I think that if we want to believe that the second amendment is inflexible, unlike the constitution itself, then we should allow only muskets to be sold at gun shops.