The air raid siren sounds much simpler and more effective. The cops should be focused on finding the bad guy, not rounding up the students. College isn’t high school, the university isn’t in loco parentis, and everyone there is legally an adult.
That’s not to say that VT shouldn’t have stopped classes. That’s just absurd. When someone starts shooting, pretty much everything else can wait.
My heart goes out to everyone involved, and I’m glad that our Dopers are safe.
The modern-day snake oil peddlers at Prison Planet are already speculating this was a black-op. :rolleyes:
Zactly.
They should just go off and shoot Franz Ferdinand all over again.
The guards at the entrances are to keep students who live off campus from driving on campus. The air raid siren may work well, but what if you’re walking from here to there? Where do you go? I think you’d need an announcement as well, instructing students where to go.
Kinda hard to do at a place laid out like Tech. There’s not a main gate with the rest of campus fenced in. There’s probably ten or more ways to drive onto the campus and innumerable walking routes. Plus part of the campus is interspersed with parts of town.
I would think having all the students’ cell phone numbers and doing some kind of broadcast emergency text message: **!!! Campus Lockdown. (Name building/area it is at) everyone back to their dorms & report to RA immediately. **
This would also work in the corporate world as well.
The University of Texas recently did just that..
In my latest understanding of events, it sort of makes sense to me. There were two seperate events, a double murder and a spree. I don’t think it’s unreasonable to assume that the murderer is not going to return to the scene of the crime two hours later and increase his body count fourteenfold.
No one would EVER be able to keep track all those students’ cell phones. My company can’t do it, and it’s made of actual professional grownups who are much more diligent about reporting when they change their number.
My friend’s daughter is at school there. I can’t get hold of my friend.
Based on the Science/Engineering major of the classes where the shootings happened, I’d wager that she is safe, but there’s way too much wiggle room in that wager.
My personal sentiments for those involved in this senseless act of inhumanity are echoed. Only the most putrid coward commits “death by police” and tries to take as many people as possible with him. Whether it was the police who stopped him or not remains unreleased, but I continue to wonder why action couldn’t have been taken more quickly to stop this bloodless, murderous wretch after the first shooting occurred two hours earlier in the morning. The shocking thing is that as fast as the Virginia police were to respond to this situation (and they were fast), it still turned out this tragically. My heart is out to those of you personally connected to this.
While I don’t mean to overtly hijack this thread, I am chiming in regarding the issue of gun control which will doubtless be visited upon. I thought it pertinent to convey some of the basics of Virginia’s gun laws, which I find very applicable to the discussion.
In Virginia:
Ironically, one of the only strong points of Virginia gun law is that the only place where concealed carry permits are not applicable are in schools. Pistols can be carried on your person anywhere except a school, even when you, the weapon, and the carry permit are from out of state. For the sake of argument in terms of gun policy, this was essentially the only statute this murderer violated with regard to his weapons before he decided to aim them at someone and pull the trigger. This is how lax Viriginia’s gun control laws are.
Are all of these policies applicable to today’s events? Probably not. Do they make for good food for thought? I think so.
That’s assuming the kids don’t have their cell phones off or on vibrate, since they were up until 5am studying for the Chem 101 mid-term.
I heard the kids in the clubs were calling their members to track them down. I think a phone tree is a good idea…the broadcast text message is fine, but someone has to track down the stragglers, and that’s where the RAs, librarians, bookstore/eatery managers, etc come in. They go lock the doors and everyone who is still in the library/bookstore/cafeteria stays there.
I’m not sure what you’re talking about with the guards. The college I went to, and most of those I’m familiar with, are plunked down in the middle of cities with no entrances to speak of. You can be across the street at a restaurant, then cross the street and you’re on campus. There are no guard posts, no gates. People drive onto campus and park on the streets or in garages or parking lots, wherever there is room. The only way to stop people from entering the campus in an emergency would be to form a police perimeter around the entire area and cordon it off somehow. That takes time and manpower, which are in short supply when an armed madman is loose.
Maybe there should be a siren and electronic announcement boards posted around campus, where one is viewable from just about everywhere. If there is an emergency, a quick message can be typed in and broadcast all over, and you don’t have people trying to listen to a garbled announcement asking, “What did they say? What did they say?” They see the sign and everyone has the same instructions. “Shooting reported at engineering building. Seek shelter or leave campus immediately.” Send the same message by text message and e-mail, and you will reach as many people as possible. It’s impossible to reach everyone, but you can get close.
CNN now says 32 dead as well.
Not meaning in any way to minimize the horror of what has happened, but I hope that “Asian American male” doesn’t turn out to mean Asian as in west Asian=Muslim (Iran, Pakistan, etc.). If the murderer is East Asian I can’t see a backlash and he’ll just be seen as a mass murdering lunatic but an Asian from an Islamic country will create a politicized shitstorm of conspiracy theories and opportunism all across the board.
And this thread would seem another reason to change Mundane Pointless to Miscellaneous Personal or some other acronym as discussed previously, for there’s nothing mundane or pointless about the thread itself and yet it’s really not applicable to IMHO, PIT, CS, or GD. (Perhaps a “current events discussion” thread?)
anamnesis, I just re-posted your comments about VA law in the other thread. Do you have a cite - I may get asked over there. Thanks.
True. I posted briefly about it here.
Thanks again to everyone for their thoughts, hopes and prayers. I’ve heard from almost all of my closest friends and many of my acquaintances. As I said, it seems unlikely that anyone close to me was seriously hurt or killed but it’s still nerve-racking waiting to hear from my friends and heartbreaking to hear from some of them.
One of them actually heard some of the shots from Norris and says that she saw people jumping out of windows to escape. Another friend has a friend whose boyfriend’s sister was shot in the chest (last time she heard, the girl was in surgery.) Another of my friends knows a girl who the shooter actually shot at and missed. Still another works for a professor who was shot in the arm and hasn’t been able to reach two grad students with whom she works. Please keep these people and all of the other victims and their friends and families in your thoughts and prayers.
The lock-down seems to be over now. A few students are out and walking about thought most are just staying home right now. The phone lines are jammed with students calling their friends and families to let them know that they’re alright. I’ve already called most of my relatives and emailed all of them but earlier, the email server was spotty at best (giving error messages every other time you tried to log in) and you’re lucky if your cell phone will connect when you try to call out.
I’ll chip in agreeing with how bad Tech is at canceling classes. I’ve seen some heavy snows in the three years I’ve been here and never seen more than a two hour delay. The only time I’ve seen classes canceled besides today was for the fugitive I mentioned in the post I linked to earlier. I still can’t believe that it took them until 10 o’clock to send out an email about a shooting between 7 and 8 AM.
Again, thank you all for all of your support, thoughts and prayers during this tragedy. I’ll keep you updated if get any major news.
Oh, and the president of the university is on TV now. He says that there were 31 dead from Norris Hall and 2 from AJ for a total of 33 dead (though I didn’t catch whether or not they’re counting the shooter.)
Good lord, not the one from last night with the murdering chimp band! :eek:
See my post 168 for my guess as to why. The first shooting was not a bloodbath, it was a murder. There was no reason to assume the shooter would return.
The news conference on now has said 31 confirmed dead in Morris, including the shooter, and additionally two confirmed dead in the dorm. So that’s 33 confirmed.
And they just stated that the gunman shot himself, the chickenshit.
When I heard the news running around for work, I had to think that I know two engineering students at VT. Was able to get confirmation that one was fine right away. She heard through word of mouth of the dorm shooting and decided to just leave campus, since she didn’t have to be there that day. The other took a while, but he is fine as well.
I don’t know, Sampiro; the reports of the man’s appearance seem to have come mostly from young American witnesses, and I think they mostly say “Asian” for East Asian and “Indian” for South Asians. I also hope there’s no politics involved in this.
The news conference at VT is on now and the campus police won’t even say whether the 7:15 am dorm shooting and the 9:15 classroom shootings were even related. Uh…OK.