What if they did lock down the campus, sent everyone to a dorm, and then he struck there, where there was a mass amount of people hanging out in common areas? You just can never know, so it is always best to not use hindsight to criticize.
Or, they send of an air raid siren and kids RUN INTO the building where the killings are happening?
It is a tragedy. No one could have prevented it except for the kid who pulled the trigger.
But, since he robbed the people of vengeance by dying, we will have to focus the blame elsewhere I guess.
The witness that Treis quoted also said that he was dressed “like a Boy Scout”, wearing a short-sleeved tan shirt and a cammy vest. But other reports had the shooter in a black leather jacket and maroon cap.
Maybe that’s why people thought for awhile that there were two shooters.
I signed off this thread last night. I could not take it any more. I slept late to postpone the inevitable. It is worse than I might have imagined. Certainly a good day to hug your kids.
I see there are three threads about this shooting. This is the longest, so I choose this one to post in.
I am sorry this happened, but I am honestly not surprised or shocked. The only thing that surprises me is that this sort of thing is NOT more common than it is, considering the availability of guns. I’m neither liberal nor conservative, more middle of the road, but I’ve always been firmly in the abolish-gun-ownership camp myself. Once people finally have enough of this sort of thing, then it will happen. If people are willing to put up with this sort of thing, then they’ll continue to vote against stricter gun laws, not to mention complete abolition. It’s really up to the voters; if sentiment were strong enough, the gun lobby would be overcome.
And I hear that there is a lot of criticism beginning about the police NOT shutting down the campus when the original episode occurred, in that dormitory. Well, I understand that school has 26,000 students. I’ve attended two universities of silimilar size; in fact, one of them boasted the largest university campus in the US, at the time anyway. With tens of thousands of students and staff arriving for class and work, I could just see the reaction if police had tried that. People moan and wail that the police overreact whenever they DO do that sort of thing. If for some reason shutting down the campus HAD prevented the further tragedy, then no one would have known a further tragedy had been prevented, and the police would be accused of overreacting and being stupid. I sympathize with the police’s decision not to shut down the entire campus; they acted on the best information available to them at the time.
I’m also hearing questions in the news about how the shooter could have made his way from that dorm to the Engineering building and started shooting again two hours later. Well, how could he have been stopped? Guns can be hidden inside bags. I doubt he was wandering around with a gun in each hand and a couple of bandoliers crisscrossed around his chest during those two hours. Maybe that consideration alone WOULD have justified shutting down the entire campus after all, I dunno. 20/20 hindsight is an amazing thing, but still, I think I’ll wait and hear all of the details once the dust has setled before I start condemning the police.
I spent the evening with some friends from my church praying together and talking about the day’s incident and just generally being there for each other. It seems that only one person I knew directly is still unaccounted for. She was a casual acquaintance through my church small group (about 20 to 30 people) and I’ve never gotten to know her very well. One of the girls who was there tonight is the missing girl’s best friend and is pretty hard hit. I can’t imagine what she and all the other friends and loved ones are going through as they wait to hear if their loved ones are dead.
It seems that I also lost a number of friends of friends. The RA who was shot was a friend of a guy in the small group I co-lead. One of my friends (the one I mentioned earlier who heard shots and saw people jumping from windows) lost a sorority sister. A girl I know casually from one of my classes spent most of the day waiting for news and only just learned that she had lost a friend.
I really still can’t take it in. I can accept 33 dead. It’s when I add the missing work and make it 33 people dead that I start to lose it. That’s 33 lives. 33 families with holes in their lives. 33 best friends waiting for news. 33 people who woke up this morning worrying about the mundane minutia of their days, homework, studying, where they were going to eat lunch. It’s here that I tear up and break down and just can’t keep thinking about it anymore.
God bless all of the families and loved ones of those who were lost and of the injured.
Thanks for keeping us informed, Lord Il Palazzo. This event is being widely reported here in the UK. My thoughts are with you and everyone else at the university, and their families and friends. Take care.
No. In fact, when I heard about this, after the initial shock had worn off I thought to myself “Thank God it wasn’t a Muslim or an Arab” (the word is that the guy was, for lack of a better word, Oriental). My God, can you imagine the reaction had that been the case? The bigots would have been on that so hard you would have seen the fires from coast to coast.
The gun debate is being discussed in the Pit thread, not here.
The man was initially described as “Asian,” which to most people means East Asian. (I don’t think Oriental was used anywhere in the reports, at least not from what I’ve seen.)
How do you propose we do that? Do you honestly think that if we stopped production on all guns today and required all gun owners to return their guns for destruction that there still wouldn’t be millions of guns in circulation, just in this country alone, and for the next thousand years?
Do you honestly think that the man who committed these atrocities would pause longer than the time it takes for you to be bitch slapped by a hummingbird to consider that guns were now illegal before going on the killing spree that he went on, with his illegal gun?
Let’s say that you somehow manage to wave your magical liberal wand of delusion and vaporize all firearms in this country. How do you propose to stop the import of guns from other countries? You can’t stop the import of drugs, why do you think guns would be any different. At best, you simply strip guns from law abiding citizens.
It’s precisely what is meant by the popular phrase, “If guns are outlawed, then only outlaws will have guns.”
And this board is supposed to be fighting ignorance? I think there is a reason that it is taking longer than we thought, and I think that reason is posts like yours.
As I mentioned before, I’m not a liberal, so I have no “liberal wand” to wave. I just happen to agree with them on this particular issue.
And I say it’s worth a try. I’ll always vote to do it. If you don’t think it is, then vote against it. That’s how it’s done, not by mindless insults like yours.
On the political hijack, I’m a liberal and pro-gun control. I do not like guns, and I do not understand the mindset behind the desire to own them. So I’m not trying to argue that gun control laws are pointless or anything like that.
However, in 2002, there was a bombing at Hebrew University in Jerusalem, where I studied for a time in college. Several people were killed, including a former classmate of mine. And Hebrew U has insane security. When I was there, during a very quiet and peaceful time, no one could walk onto campus without their bags being inspected by a security guard. I’m just saying that if something like that can happen there, it can happen anywhere.
It’s a depressing thought. I wish there were some magical answer, some law we could pass to make horrors like this cease. But there isn’t. It’s incomprehensible.
My heart goes out to the families of the victims of this tragedy.
I’m a liberal, I do not own a firearm, I’m for reasonable gun control, but I do believe in the right for ordinary people to bear arms. What’s so hard to understand about the mindset? It’d be nice to have one around if I ever needed to defend my home and family against an intruder. They’re also a ton of fun at the shooting range.
