For those of you who have not seen the recent headlines, there was a tragic shooting on the Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University campus on Monday morning. There were reports of two separate incidents which were two hours apart. The first was in a heavily-occupied residence hall and the second in an engineering building across campus. The first resulted in two deaths, yet it was deemed to be an isolated incident in that particular building, so classes were not canceled and the campus was not shut down. Authorities believed that the gunman had left the campus, thus there would be no more threat to the area.
Well, what if the gunman stayed on campus somewhere and hid from law enforcement until the initial hype wore down? Though it is still speculation about what happened in those two hours—and some early reports claimed that the two incidents were not related—it is still clear that proper measures were not carried out to ensure everyone’s safety. This is not a matter of placing blame, as ultimately the gunman is responsible for his own actions. However, if the authorities or school officials had called for a lockdown, class cancellations, and ultimately a campus shutdown, then the second incident would and should not have occurred—or at least would have been contained and stopped more promptly.
This is not a situation to be making examples of or drawing comparisons to, but given the recent events on our own campus, it was worth restating support for RPI administration and local police for how they handled the circumstances. In the initial shock and confusion, some officials believed that some weapon was involved, potentially consistent with a gunshot wound. Given that the reasons for the victim’s being at RPI seemed suspicious, it was not improbable that there was a shooter targeting random people. Had there been an armed person loose on the campus, a lockdown of the immediate area and evacuation and shutdown of other buildings would have helped to ensure everyone would at least get away safely.
At Virginia Tech, however, authorities believed that the gunman had left the area, thus no lockdown was issued. While there may have been additional police forces at the time of the second shooting, there was no strategy in place to potentially catch and stop an assailant. They could not have been sure that the gunman had indeed left the area, and as no weapons had been recovered after the dorm shooting, they should have gone to all lengths to lockdown the area. This would have allowed them to search the immediate buildings and safely direct students in other buildings away from the campus. Even if this had been two separate incidents, a more strict and alert tactic would have stopped the second shooter before 30 more people were killed and dozens more injured.
While in this case there actually was a gunman, and even if the events here a few weeks ago had been of that nature, the actions of the two SWAT teams here were still too violent—they only added to the mass confusion and subsequent rumors. Perhaps, though, if local SWAT teams in Virginia had acted along those lines, the gunman’s path to the students would have been blocked. But I still maintain that their mere presence could have deterred further actions and that their violence was excessive. A happy medium must be found between Virginia Tech’s inadequate response and our disproportionate one. Maybe now RPI will work harder to instate some protocol to handle situations of this nature. On a closing note, sympathy goes out to all those affected by this tragic event, and please use campus counseling services if you need someone to talk to.
