Thirty-three. Thirty-threeuniversity students dead. DEAD.
At Columbine, two men armed with Tech-9 assault weapons and homemade pipebombs killedthirteen people. At Virginia Tech, one man killed thirty two and then killed himself. There is only one word that can describe the reaction of VT tothis situation: incompetence.
All the details are not out and frankly, they do not have to be for me to be angry at what happened today. Virgina Tech is completely to blame for allowing this tragedy to go as far as it did. Thirty-three people. Just think about that for a minute. One man managed to kill thirtytwo people on a college campus that has its own police force.
There are only two possibilities forexplaning this disaster, either the police department was inept or the university did notactquickly enough to protect its students.
There is no evidence that the police force was incompetent as of yet. At first glance they seem to be well funded and staffed as indicated by the VTPDwebsite:
"We have 38 full-time sworn police officers who are complemented by security guards, campus watch officers and safe ride officers."
I have to ask the question, where were they? Do they just have the worst response time in the history of modern law enforcement or was there some other reason for their inability to act?
I am not blaming the police but there are many questions that they as well as the universityneed to answer. Why, when at 7 in the morning a student was found dead and the shooter had not been apprehended, was the campus not closed or evacuated? Every year, there is an incident like this at a grade school or a college. Virginia Tech, as far as I can see, has no excuse for allowing this massacre to occur on the scale that it did.
This incident is a tragedy but there is much to be learned from it. All schools must be prepared for this type of thing. The result of not being prepared is readily apparent in today's tragedy. God forbid anything like this massacre ever occured at Vanderbilt, but if it did, I would hope that our university would act more effectively to stop the bloodshed than Virginia Tech did today. If we do not have a procedure toundertake in the case ofone of these madmen,I demand that one be instituted and I hope that other students will ask for it as well. We deserve to be protected.
