Locking down the school

Virginia Tech students are adults

By Arthur Weinreb

Wednesday, April 18, 2007

Seemingly within minutes of Cho Seung-Hui killing himself and bringing the worst mass murder in U.S. history to an end, Virginia Tech president Charles Steger and Police Chief Wendell Flinchum came under a barrage of criticism for not locking down the campus after the first double murder two hours before the main shooting spree began.

In the wake of Monday's slaughter, references were immediately made to other school shootings, most notably Columbine almost eight years ago and to a lesser extent, the killings at the Amish School in Lancaster Pennsylvania last fall.

But Virginia Tech is not a "school" in the sense that Columbine is or the Amish School was. Virginia Tech is not a building. The campus is spread over 2,600 acres and consists of over 100 buildings. It includes an airport. When the 7,000 or so employees and 2 to 3,000 visitors are added to the student population of 26,000, Virginia Tech is more like a small city than it is a school in the sense that elementary and high schools are.

More importantly, the students at Virginia Tech are not children; they are adults albeit young adults with promising futures. They are of the same generation as are the majority of the men and women serving in the United States Armed Forces in Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere. What the critics of Steger and Flinchum are saying is that a small city of adults should have been warned about the initial shooting and locked down.

When police responded to the initial 911 call shortly after 7 a.m. on Monday, they discovered the bodies of a woman and a man. The shooter had left. The officers obtained information, good or bad, that indicated that the shooter had had a relationship with the woman and the man was either a romantic rival or had simply intervened in what was a domestic dispute. Unfortunately, domestic crimes of this type (if indeed it was a domestic) occur all too often. While many people like to pretend that these types of incidents occur mainly in inner city slums, they occur everywhere; in housing complexes, office buildings, palatial estates and yes, even on university campuses.

Students being students, there were plenty of them still in the residence building during the early morning hour when the first shootings occurred. The shooter could have quite easily begun a rampage there and then; but he didn't, he left the scene as most killers do. To predict from the first incident that the shooter would later come back and cause the carnage that Cho caused is quite a leap. To criticize both the university administration and the police for not anticipating the further events of that morning borders on the absurd. But it is an easy criticism to make using 20/20 hindsight.

Suppose that a man and a woman were shot to death in an apartment building in a small city with the population that approximates the population of Virginia Tech. Would residents of that city want or even expect the police to lock down the entire city until the shooter is found? Of course not. In all probability, the residents of an adjoining building would not be informed or warned to stay inside on the theory that the shooter might come back. And it would be this way even if surrounding buildings were filled with toddlers and babies. Like this scenario, although anything is possible no one expects the shooter to return to the scene of a double homicide where at least one of the victims was singled out and then begin to shoot others on a random basis.

Even supposing that a university has a higher duty of care towards its residents than cities have towards their inhabitants, it is still too much to expect the police to have acted any differently given what information they had early Monday morning.

Instead of blaming Chief Flinchum for not locking down the 100 plus buildings on campus, consideration of how Cho Seung-Hui was allowed to remain on campus after exhibiting signs of extremely bizarre behaviour would be more beneficial in preventing further such tragic incidents.

Arthur Weinreb is an author, columnist and Associate Editor of Canada Free Press. His work has appeared on Newsmax.com, Men's News Daily, Drudge Report, Foxnews.com, Glenn Beck and The Rant. Arthur can be reached at: aweinreb@rogers.com

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