School Should Have Done More

[erpowers]

I know it does not really matter now, but Virginia Tech Administrators should have done more from the beginning. They waited two hours to send out emails telling students about the first shooting. When the Administrators found out about the first shooting they should have put out information about that event. I understand it could have been hard to notify all the students; however, they could have called the news media and put out a message to the students to stay away from school.

If I were a parent of a student at Virginia Tech I would be very angry. The Administrators could have and should have done more. Even if they thought the person had left the school they should have told the students something had happened and that it was their choice to come to the school.

[No DUplicitous DUpe]

1. Every student has a cell phone..Text Msgs are read, even in class...

There should be an text message sent to every student, like - Emergency! Shooter, Take Cover!- this could be used for Tornadoes, Fires, Bomb Threats, etc.

[NightWatcher]

2. I wondered what the police officers were doing in the 2 hour window

I think that the school should have been secured.

[johnnie]

3. Do you think they should do that in all instances

For example, if someone gets killed a mile from your home and is on the loose, should you be notified? There are 2600 acres at that campus and about 30,000 people there at any given time, that's pretty much a whole city.

What should be the safe perimeters in a case such as this? 1 mile from the murder? 2 miles? Should maybe they have notified the home owners close to the campus?

I understand what you are saying and I know many share your opinion, but I think it is unreasonable at this point to say what they "should have done". Maybe they can learn from it or study it for future cases like this, but I think that what they did was a reasonable response to what had gone down.

[Norquist Nemesis]

4. Coulda, Shoulda, Woulda

I grew up in a small university town. There were about 20K residents, and the student population was around 9,000 or 10,000. So, before the din of piling on the cops gets too loud, I really hope people stop and think. Could/Should the university have had better communications? Probably. But, if you stop and think about the campus as a small city (which it is in so many ways), it puts the tragedy into a little different perspective.

If there is an incident like the first shooting in a town of 20,000 the cops don't shut down the entire town. They investigate and work to locate the shooter, yes, but they don't hole every last person up at their immediate location. Short of putting metal detectors on every entrance on campus, at least at this point I'm just not sure what they could have done differently.

Something that's bothering me is how this guy was such a crack shot with two handguns. Even the Columbine kids didn't have such a high rate of lethality and there were two of them.

[erpowers]

5. Nowhere To Run

I think what made him so bad was that he shot people in classrooms. The students probably did not have anywhere to run. In addition, by the time he stopped shooting the firt time students probably were too shocked to try to tackle him. He also chained the doors of some of the buildings.

My thing with the small town issue is that even though this college campus is about the size of a small town it is not a small town. Just put a report on tv and tell kids something bad happened at school and the suspect is still on the loose. I have seen where news organizations have cut into shows to show a car chase. Why could they not have just cut into news shows and informed kids of the events.

I do not want to pile on the cops. I just think the school should have tried harder to get information to kids. At least let them know that something had happened.