I’m really beginning to wonder, because a few things here don’t add up.
OK, so the West AJ shooting (7:15 am) sounds like a “domestic,” for lack of a better word. Boyfriend and girlfriend get in an argument, RA tries to break it up when it gets heated, boyfriend pulls out gun, shoots them both, flees. Now, this is a college dorm we’re talking about. You’re going to tell me that NOBODY out of 895 people in West AJ are going to know who so-and-so’s boyfriend is, and at least a little bit about where he might live? Not even “yeah, she started seeing this weird guy, his name’s Alphonse or Craig or something like that.” C’mon. I lived in a co-ed dorm for three years. There’s fewer secrets in a dorm than in the Clinton White House.
So anyway, that guy gets away. If he’s the same shooter, two hours and change later, he turns up at Norris with two guns and goes on his rampage. And people are now screaming “why wasn’t campus locked down?” I’ve been to Tech (a lot of friends of mine went there, and one still works there). It’s HUGE. It’s bigger than my hometown by a factor of twenty. It’s bigger than the town of Blacksburg itself, or at least more populous. How do you “lock down” what amounts to a small city? Especially when you’ve got twenty-five thousand undergrads and thousands of staff, faculty, and grad students trying to get an education and make a living? You just don’t “lock down” an institution of that size—especially with the relatively limited police resources that the university and the town of Blacksburg have. I’m actually surprised they managed to do it once the Norris Hall shootings happened.
It’s not a high school. You can’t just throw a switch and lock all the doors. There’s thousands of students flowing on and off campus every hour, and in fact the campus adjoins downtown Blacksburg’s main drag for a couple of blocks, with wide open access. I’ll agree that they may have been slow to understand what was going on, but honestly, why wouldn’t they be? To the campus cops and the Blacksburg PD, they had a domestic dispute and murder on their hands at 8:00 am. They had no way of knowing they were about to descend into hell two hours later.
Something, though, still doesn’t add up. Occam’s Razor says that these two shootings HAVE to be the same guy, because the odds against having two gun-toting nutburgers show up on that campus on the same day are one in a zillion. But the lack of ID of the perp makes me wonder.
}:-)4
The same guy or two shooters in on the same plot.
Actually, Occam's Razor would lead me to believe that there were two shooters working in concert.
The police officer speaking at the press conference just now hinted that the incidents may have involved two different shooters.
Experience would point to a planned, multi-party, event, IMO.
knowing the 7:15 shooter is still on the loose - you start cancelling classes, you start turning away students who drive to school and send them away. its also obvious that while there may have been security guards at the location of the first shooting, what about everywhere else on the campus? you bring all these people in, let classes start, and no security is present to stop some guy from chaining doors from the inside.
they would have been better off flushing everyone out of the buildings onto the lawns, the one place you don’t want to be is inside a building, yet that’s where they guided everyone to.
Exactly! And if you do lock down...what do you do with all the people already on campus who don't live in a dorm and aren't in class. There would be hundreds, maybe thousands of students just 'milling around'.
Occam’s Razor says that these two shootings HAVE to be the same guy
Exactly! Makes you wonder why the reporters bothering the college President and the police chief can't have figured that out by now!
Understood. They can't instantly ensure that everyone gets the word and is following instructions. But the first emergency call came in at 7:15 and it was over two hours before university officials sent out a broadcast e-mail advising students of the situation. The shooter was still at large and unidentified. Obviously, university officials had no way of knowing a large-scale massacre would follow, but they did know an armed violent criminal was on the loose in the area after shooting 2 people in a dorm. If only to prevent wild rumors from taking hold, there should have been a notification much, much sooner.
I suspect the post-crisis analysis is going to find that the handful of people who were officially authorized to put out such messages were busy attending to what had already occurred, and nobody else was willing to take the initiative to get a message out without official authorization. There's something to be said for not jumping the gun on official channels unless it's absolutely clear that all hell has broken loose (which it wasn't before the second round of shootings started), but it seems to me there must have been quite a few people in a position to contact the authorized decision-makers by cell phone or Blackberry and suggest that it was time to get a brief message out, and give a draft text of it for approval -- e.g. secretaries to the President, deans, head of campus security, etc.