How did the shootings go on for hours without anyone doing something?

[liberalpragmatist]

I admit I shouldn't be jumping to conclusions and I assume we'll learn more as the days unfold. But from reading the eyewitness accounts , the accounts of students and news reports, I find the situation astounding. Students described getting nothing but a brief email saying there "may" have been a shooting. There doesn't appear to have been a lock-down, loud warnings, no canceling of classes. People just continued to leave dorms, go to classes and more students kept getting killed!

Am I missing something here or do people know more about what went on? I just find the situation remarkably hard to believe.

[poverlay]

1. I heard an interview on NPR with an associate prof. who had just gotten home after trudging

there in shock right after the tragedy. He said that he heard the shooting go on for "about a half hour".

Of course he was obviously in shock and overwhelmed with grief...

[fuzzyball]

2. Schools are the safest places for a shooter to go on a rampage

since all schools are "no guns zones". So the perpetrator
knows no one is likely to carry a weapon in schools. Such
is not the case in a mall or a restaurant. The shooter is
basically a coward and is deathly afraid of someone with
concealed carry.

[sproutster]

7. BS -- Second school shooting

Feb. 19, 1997
Bethel, Alaska

Evan had a gun - Evan was in ROTC (they have guns). Hell students have guns - esp in hunting season. Unless you want f'ing armed school children & teachers - that is not the answer.

I don't know what the answer is, but obviously it's societal right now.

I was in Bethel during the shooting. The highschool is next door to the little kids school, which is where my son was that day.

Part of the blame in this particular shooting was the fact there were guns. So no one at first knew anything was going on.

Also, the part of the story no one knows and big news didn't pick up on?

He told his friends the day before -- They KNEW. One brought a camcorder.

[flying_monkeys]

10. A camcorder?

Wow.


I certainly hope if my kid ever hears about someone planning to act this way he freaking well does a HELL OF A LOT MORE than take a freaking camcorder to school to tape it!


That is pretty bad, in and of itself.....

[fuzzyball]

12. Wrong and right....yes people bring guns to schools BUT IT IS

against the rules. It is also illegal to commit murder.
But that did not stop the 50,000 murders in US in 2006.

Making a law against guns will only stop the law abiding,
not the law breakers.

[jgraz]

13. Yeah, let's give college students concealed carry permits -- that'll cut down on violence

Answer me this: let's say you're a cop who shows up to deal with an in-progress shooting like today, and every other person is running around campus with a glock in his hand. How do you decide who you're going to shoot at?

The teenage wish-fulfillment fantasy of taking out the bad guy Dirty Harry-style just doesn't happen in real life. The reality is that states with more guns have more gun deaths. Period. The NRA/Gun industry talking point that everyone needs to be armed is just crap.

[fuzzyball]

15. Only adult teachers with firearm training should carry concealed guns

In fact Israel started this after its scholls were being
attacked by gunmen and there have been no shootings in
schools there after the rule was instituted.

[jgraz]

18. And how will that help the cops decide who the bad guys are?

BTW, aren't all the students at college technically adults? I would think that in your ideal gun-totin rootin-tootin utopia that you would favor the adult students also having concealed carry permits.

Your fantasy social experiment has already failed. We know that more gun permits leads to more gun deaths. Fewer guns means fewer gun deaths. Your proposal is radical ideology unsupported by facts.

How many domestic shootings are you willing to support to make your Die Hard world a reality? How many impromptu gun suicides? The fact is that tragic though they are, spectacular mass-killings like today's are rare compared to domestic violence and suicidal ideations. What would be the result if everyone in those situations had access to a firearm?

[Dr Fate]

20. The NRA offers us two safety choices- arm yourself, your kid's teachers- or stay home.

Sounds fair to me- but I'm still trying to imagine Ms. Askew, my 2nd grade teacher, taking on a crazed gunman. What if he is a quicker draw than her? Shouldnt the students have guns too in case of that event?

I KNOW- we could require all teachers to be ex-cop or ex-military.

[jgraz]

22. Well, the NRA message is simple

They're willing to take one or two children getting their heads blown off if it means that the gunman could then be killed by a schoolteacher. Really, fantasies like that are the only way Charlton Heston can get an erection these days.

[jgraz]

21. And while we're speculating...

Why don't we speculate on how many lives would be saved if that crazy motherfucker wasn't able to get his hands on two glock 9's? I know, I know -- "only criminals will have guns". But this ain't The Sopranos here. This guy wasn't some drug kingpin -- or some member of an organized terror cell. Most likely the shooter was just some fucked up kid with access to waaay too much firepower.

Don't you think that making it harder for lunatics to buy guns would cut down on these types of mass-shooting/suicides?

[Dr Fate]

24. Why make getting guns HARDER when we could make it EASIER to get Kevlar vests?

I'm trying to find a balance here- considering that the NRA will never budge on this.

If folks dont want to get shot, and they are too sqeamish to buy a gun and train themselves on NRA gun culture, they should at least have easy access to Kevlar and other body armor.

[jobycom]

14. Uh huh.

Couldn't have anything to do with the fact that schools are places where individuals face a ton of pressure for the first time in their lives without their parents, in a situation that may make or break their occupational future, their romantic future, and every other aspect of their transition from pampered child to independent adult, could it? You know, the same reason there are so many suicides on campuses? Nah, must be that some dick who plans to shoot a bunch of people and then kill himself is afraid that someone else will kill him instead, so he chooses a school rather than a shopping mall or restaurant.

Well, except the guy in Killeen, who killed 22 people in a Luby's. But that's Texas, near Fort Hood, so nobody would have had a gun.

Or the guy in San Ysidro, who killed 20 people in a McDonalds.

Or the guy in Australia who killed 35 people in a bar and a restaurant, thus getting automatic and semi-automatic weapons banned in Australia.

[fuzzyball]

16. In all of those instances you sight, I bet none of the customers

had concealed carry guns. Otherwise the result would have
been lives saved.

[jobycom]

19. Sorry, but this silly American romance with the gun needs to end.

I grew up around a lot of guns, and have had a lot of friends who were military, and police officers. Most would say you are flat wrong. A chair, a stick, even a fist could stop one of these mass-killing gunmen. The reason they don't has nothing to do with access or ability to handle a weapon, it has to do with fear and shock. Cops here in Austin tell me about a training exercise they run to illustrate this to their recruits. They put a cop in a room with a gun, they tell the cop they will come barging in the room with a battering ram, screaming and with weapons drawn, and they tell the cop he is supposed to pick up his weapon and tell them to halt before they reach him. They never do. Never. Even though the other cops tell them exactly what, when, and how they will break in, the cop always freezes.

I'm sure there are people who can keep their head in such situations, who could draw their gun, quickly appraise the situation, figure out who the bad guy actually is, aim, and fire, without panicking. I am also far more certain that most people would not be able to. Most people will just freeze in that type of attack, in the few seconds (at best) they will have to respond. Some people will draw their guns and begin shooting wildly, hitting the wrong target if they hit anyone. But let's say your dream becomes reality, and several people carry guns into one of these places, and they hear shots, and one of them happens to be the one in a hundred who will respond well in that situation, how will they know who to shoot? There will be several people with guns. What if they shoot the wrong person? Even trained cops and military troops do that.

The very few lives that would be saved would be offset by the people who draw guns in anger and shoot someone in an argument, or the people who shoot loved ones thinking they are intruders (I almost got shot by my brother that way, once), or the people who lose their guns and have the bad guy take them over and kill more people. Or the people who get shot by cops because they drew their guns to shoot the bad guy and were mistaken for the good guy. All those things have happened, and far more often than anyone has been saved by a concealed weapon. I remember when the passed the concealed carry law here in Texas, Bush had to make a lot of phone calls to DAs to prevent them from prosecuting a lot of gun deaths. People were getting shot at traffic accidents, or in their apartment complexes, or just on the street, in situations that at most would have resulted in a fist fight if a concealed weapon hadn't been involved. Bush was getting DAs to drop cases so his law wouldn't look so bad.

It just doesn't work the way you think it does.

[Dr Fate]

23. You are assuming that we dont inject a Spartan like, para-military atmosphere into academia.

Arming students and teachers means that gun culture and proper gun use becomes part of academics- along with survival, urban combat, and other necessary learning.

Clearly we have only two choices handed to us by the NRA- para-militarize yourself and your kids who are students- or stay home and let the real men fight all this out.

[Name removed]

3. Deleted message

Message removed by moderator. Click here to review the message board rules.

[proud2BlibKansan]

5. What an irresponsible and ignorant comment!

[Dogmudgeon]

4. They didn't

There was the first incident around 7 AM (2 killed), then the 29-fatality "rampage" at 9:15, which took about five or ten minutes.

That 2-hour gap, though, is mighty puzzling, and Chief Flinchum is probably going to be grilled over it.

BUT ... we don't have nearly enough information yet to even start piecing the thing together. The next few days will be likely to yield many details.

--p!

[MiniMe]

8. Wonder if he will "Flinch"

sorry, couldn't resist. My first thought when I saw his name. :rofl:

[Suich]

11. I just "heard" they were questioning a

"person of interest" during that gap...maybe they thought they had the guy.

:shrug:

[Virginian]

17. More info -- Cell phone video of shootings - 27 shots counted.

First of all, he chained the doors to the building. Not sure if intention was to keep help out or prey in.

In the video the networks keep showing, there are 27 shots heard in less than two minutes.
illegal codecnnVideo('play','/video/us/2007/04/16/sot.va.tech.shooting.barghouti.cnn','2009/04/15');

MSNBC gave the name and showed the picture of the RA who was killed in the earlier shooting.

The two shootings may not be related.

After one of the injured witnesses described the later shooter as Asian, Nora O'Donnell referred to him as an "Asian-American." Not sure how she knew his nationality. As it turns out, he was not American but was a Chinese national on a student visa. He has been reported to be a student and then not a student and then a student again. Not sure which is true.

About 35 years ago, when I was a student at Radford College, there was an urban legend rumor going around that Jeanne Dixon had predicted there would be a mass murder in the largest girls' school east of the Mississippi. The story gave me the willies, but I pretty much dismissed it as one of those scary stories told at slumber parties. Radford University is about 15 miles away from Tech and is now co-ed. For something I hadn't thought about for so long, now, it sticks in my mind and won't go away.

[Dogmudgeon]

25. Jamal Albarghouti's cell phone video?

I think he started recording after the first shots were fired. If more close recordings turn up -- as I think there will -- acoustic analysis can be used to construct a pretty accurate picture of what happened.

I likewise feel certain that at least one or two of the people in those classrooms had the presence of mind to turn their cell phone cameras on. Some highly disturbing files are likely to emerge from this. I think the police will downplay their evidence collection efforts, but a major effort is probably underway even now to canvass for all the recordings that may have been made.

We're still only in the early phases of getting detailed information about the shootings; I don't trust any of it to be definitive yet. The V-T police have been painfully close-lipped about all of this, to the point of alienating a lot of people. And I also think that, given the numbers involved, another two or three people will die as a result of their wounds. It has been an horrifyingly gruesome day, and the full impact has yet to settle in. The Big News is going to turn into Deep News, and it's not going resolve easily.

--p!

[flying_monkeys]

6. Seems they thought the first one was handled....

They were talking to a suspect when the second gun shots erupted. The campus cops nabbed the wrong guy, apparently, and the real shooter (presumably the two shootings are linked) wandered into that German class.


It was 2 hours apart. But other than that, I have no clue. I imagine we will know more in the next week to come....

[jobycom]

9. They didn't go on for hours.

The first shooting that morning was in a dorm, and seemed to target a specific person. The cops thought they knew who the shooter was, and that he'd left the campus (according to them). There were even early reports that the shooter was in custody. That's their reasoning so far for not locking the campus down.

Then, two hours later, the second attack happened, and lasted a half hour or so. The cops have all but said that the second shooter was not the person they suspected in the first case. In fact, they are still not sure the first shooting was done by the same person (according to news reports). That's one reason the totals vary--the cops so far are officially blaming the second shooter as responsible for 30 deaths, plus himself. Some reports are including the earlier two victims, too, giving a total of 33.

The cops, if they know what happened yet, haven't said. If the two attacks were the same person, I imagine the cops will have a lot more to answer for than if the attacks were two different people, so they are going to be slow to admit it was the same guy if it was.

The initial reports of the first shooting said the killer was Asian, and that it seemed to be a domestic dispute. There was a story told by a security guard that some witnesses (this makes it third hand, if you're counting along) said the first shooter was asking for a specific person, a girlfriend. No idea if any of that will turn out to be true.

That's just what I've picked up on the major news pages, not any inside knowledge or anything, so it could be as wrong as anything else being reported.

[WinkyDink]

26. Authorities DISGUSTINGLY, INEXCUSABLY down-played the initial MURDERS as a "domestic dispute".

They totally ignored the IMMEDIATE need for campus and student SAFETY.
That's some heavy-duty MISOGYNY going on there, the likes of which we haven't seen in a major story since the cops ignored Nicole Brown Simpson.