Here's my question about the recent $5,000 fine levied on Virginia Tech for failure to adequately preserve the safety of its students during the 2007 campus shootings:
If it had turned out that the two initial deaths in West Ambler Johnston Hall had been the only ones, and not the preamble to an unprecented bloodbath precipitated by student Seung-Hui Cho, would the school still have been penalized? I wonder.
I know that the Clery Act, which requires "timely" reporting of crimes on campus, came about because some universities seemed more focused on hushing up violent incidents than broadcasting them. The agenda was obvious -- no school administration wants the public to start thinking of its campus as dangerous.
That wasn't the issue on April 16, 2007, however. According to U,S. Department of Education, Tech officials should have locked down the campus immediately as soon as the first two bodies were found.
Yet if you've ever been to Virginia Tech, you know that's not as easy as it sounds. It's not like locking down a high school, where everyone is in the same building -- the Blacksburg complex sprawls across considerable acreage.
And where should the campus police have directed students to take refuge, anyway? Norris Hall might have been a good place, except that's where Cho killed 30 people and himself two hours after the first shooting.
I wasn't privy to the conversations among school officials immediately after a student and a resident advisor were found dead in West Ambler Johnston, but I'm sure nobody said: "Hey, maybe if we keep this quiet, no one will find out about it."
Moreover, correlating this to the public sector, I don't think the Lynchburg police would try to evacuate an entire neighborhood if two bodies were found in a house there.
Sure, Virginia Tech officials and campus police could have done some things differently, and had the resultant massacre not occurred, the federal government may well have leaned toward being instructive rather than punitive.
The problem was, it did happen, and Seung-Hui Cho wasn't around to absorb the blame. And so all these issues, along with the question of whether clues were missed in regards to Cho's mental state, became a substitute catharthis.
It's very easy for me to say, because I knew none of the students and faculty members who died that day, but it seems that no matter how vigilant we try to be, chaos sometimes breaks through our defenses. The ticking time bomb in Seung-Hui Cho's brain finally deotnated, and the victims were just in the wrong place at the wrong time.
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