choadwarrior
Just to clarify, when I said many people at the university had done what they were supposed to do, I meant before El Creepo became an active shooter. Response to the actual emergency seems to my untrained eye to have been a Mongolian clusterfuck.
Having spent the last 20-odd years in universities, I'm not surprised. Our experience of crime on campus is mostly made up of sexual harrassment, date rape, drunk driving, theft of bicycles and unattended personal items, and hit-and-run crimes by residents of sleazy adjoining neighborhoods. There is the occasional murder-suicide, and I have even watched police respond to what they thought was a bomb. Some of this crime is serious and violent and very much on our minds day-to-day, but I'm not aware that the spree shooter is something that's planned for at any level.
Which is weird, because America's introduction to the spree shooter was on a university campus, way back in 1966 at the University of Texas, when an undiagnosed brain tumor caused a guy to go insane, and he got on top of the clock tower with a rifle and shot 46 people before the cops killed him. I spent 8 years literally in the shadow of a similar clock tower at LSU, and it was hard to look at it without thinking of the UT sniper. I mean every day.
In a case like that, I suppose someone would just call SWAT, and that would be that. Maybe the apparent confusion at VT started when police supposed that the incident they were investigating-- the double murder in the dormitory-- was over. When shooting broke out two hours later in the classroom building, the description of the shooter was at odds with the description from witnesses at the dorm. So understandably, nobody could tell what the hell was going on.
I guess what caught officials flatfooted was the continuation of the shooting spree after a short delay, and they're already being criticized for failing to issue some kind of alert immediately upon discovering the first crime. I know they don't want to cause a panic, but then again, it might be nice to tell people that a murderer appears to be on the loose in the neighborhood. Saying they didn't want to disrupt classes would appear pretty weak in retrospect.
Just thinking out loud here and not really fighting the urge to second-guess as much as choadwarrior.
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