Cop The Truth: Va. Tech. and the 'active shooter'

April 16, 2007

Va. Tech. and the 'active shooter'

Let's start here: the Chinese national, believed to be the gunman that killed 32 people at the Virginia Tech. campus today before killing himself, may have been here on a student visa. It seems he argued with his girlfriend over her seeing someone else, then he shot her and her student adviser in their dorm.

And then it really got bad. He apparently went to a lecture hall on the other side of campus, chained the doors to hinder the police response, lined up as many students as he could find, then began executing them.

He clearly had planned the event well. He may have called in bomb threats earlier in the month to test University Police responses. He was reportedly wearing body armor, and one source claims that he had changed clothes between the two shootings. Two nine mil. pistols and plenty of ammo. And if he was a student, he knew the campus and how to get around. There was no way that this thing was going to end well.

DRUDGE has the best, and frequently updated, coverage around.

You can read my school violence rant from last October, which applies to today's incident, as well.

As usual, the news coverage was abysmal. And I was watching Fox News, which I generally feel has the most balanced coverage and knowledgeable experts around. Today, they were horrible.

ugFrom the actual reporting to the panel of experts, and right up through Bill O'Reilly, I was disappointed. It seems that the entire event is the fault of the police, as usual. They actually had Criminal Profiling "expert" Pat Brown on the air within hours of the shooting, without any knowledge of the facts, advising people to sue the College. O'Reilly blamed the police for not shutting down the campus. Unbelievable.

And the gun control nuts are coming out of the woodwork, again.

Let's be clear: there is only one person to blame for this horrific event, and that's the shooter. Not the College. Not the responding police. Not the makers of the 9mm's he carried. It was the PoS who actually pulled the trigger who should be held to account for this.

Some of you may have actually been on a college or university and know that they are virtual cities unto themselves. Dorms, cafeterias, classrooms, students who live off campus, faculty, employees, visitors, delivery people... tens of thousands of people. Several hundred acres of ground. A few hundred buildings. "Experts" like Brown and O'Reilly can say that the entire campus should have been placed in 'lockdown', but that's easier said than done. They don't have to respond to these things for a living.

To secure every building, every student, every faculty member, every employee, every vehicle, while simultaneously conducting the initial homicide investigation and looking for the shooter would have required a small army. And as just about cop can tell you, University and College Police Departments are extremely limited in size and resources and rely heavily on local agencies for help.

Perhaps the prudent decision would have been to lock down the campus. But the cops on the ground, who make these kinds of decisions for a living everyday, acted on the best information that they had available to them: a domestic-related homicide. The suspect confronted his girlfriend, killed both her and the RA who tried to help her, then fled. Is it reasonable to assume that the suspect had left the campus, based on that synopsis? Yes.

Anyone who says that the ensuing carnage should have been foreseen by the investigating officers is delusional.

Thousands upon thousands of investigative hours - by the college police, local police and sheriff's office, FBI, DOJ, ATF, DoHS, etc. - will have to be completed before we know everything we can about what happened at VT today. Let's keep our criticisms in check until we know the facts.

But there is no question as to who is at fault. Let's blame the right person, for once.

"Active shooters" cannot be prevented, they can only be stopped. No amount of security, of training, of police officers, of video cameras, of student warnings, of mental health preparedness and evaluation, of new visa policies, of gun control, can prevent these attacks unless and until we turn our schools into virtual fortresses.

America is a country of soft targets. Malls. Movie theaters. Schools. Office buildings. Sporting events. Police and fire stations. Buses. Trains. Airplanes. All open to attack by a determined nut with a gun, a plan and revenge on his mind.

And terrorists are gathering intelligence, too. We, as a country, had better wake up to this realization before events like these become and everyday occurrence.

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Posted by Mike at 07:32 PM in Law Enforcement, What Pisses Me Off | Permalink