No Adequate Title Came to Mind Here

I know, I know, it's been damn near a month since I've written anything here for the 5 (maybe 6?) of you that still check this spot on the occasional basis, and for that, I apologize.

I could give some mundane updates about the job, life in general, or the shabby state my apartment has undertaken since I started working a full-time job again. Then I spent the last 30 hours or so peeking at the TV, CNN.com, and any other place that had more information about yesterday’s tragedy at Virginia Tech. From there, I realized that:

a)my problems are pretty simple by comparison and
b)some of the Big Mouths that offer barely informed opinions on TV are going to have a field day with this. You have to almost think that some of them are absolutely are simply salivating at the prospect of deconstructing these events. It’ll mean big ratings, and even bigger exposure.

Perhaps it is because I’m only a few years removed from college, or perhaps because I went to a quiet, reserved campus, in a safe area, that I feel very moved by this whole thing.

Even at a cursory glance, it’s obvious that there will be plenty to debate about, and for all the yapping, a whole lot of problems will go unsolved.

They’ll talk about all the aspects of this tragedy, till they’ve beaten the story so far into the ground that we’ll forget the fact that this was the worst civilian massacre in the history of this country. We’ll forget the fact that 32 very innocent, contributing members of society were gunned down for no other reason than their mere existence.

They’ll ask: Is there too much violence in our society? Do we need stricter gun controls? Should someone have seen this coming? Did the University do enough to try and prevent the attack from claiming 32 lives as opposed to only 2? How accountable are they?

And you know what? It’s a whole group of questions with zero simple answers, no matter what some makeup wearing, loud-voiced- jackass, and his louder mouthed, hair-piece wearing counter part will want you to believe.

First of all, I don’t think that there was any way that anyone could have seen this coming. The angle that a lot of the news agencies are taking on this at this point is that the man who did this had shown a lot of disturbed ideas in his writings. They were disturbing to the point that the head of his English department had referred him to go to counseling at the school. Therefore, someone obviously saw signs of a troubled individual, and they made an attempt to help him, as a representative of the university. Being able to foretell an incident of this nature, from that information, would have been next to impossible. People will compel the authorities and the university to release the man’s writings, under the guise of “perhaps we can find clues so this won’t happen again”.

However, he was an adult, and an adult with no prior history of violence or aggression, no less. He was not obligated to go to any type of counseling beyond being compelled by a concerned educator. Judging from the small excerpts of writings that have been released, he seemed to have a problem with the culture that surrounded him. If that’s the case, and I can only go by the little bit that’s out there, then it’s entirely possible that he would have resisted any type of therapy, instead choosing to believe that it was the rest of the world that had a problem.

Additionally, it will be very hard to say whether or not Virginia Tech, as an institution, did enough to protect its students in the two hours that elapsed between the dorm shooting, and the attacks at Norris Hall. As one friend very astutely pointed out to me, according to the Clery Act, which has been around since 1990, a school is required to give a “timely warning” to students. According to the website for the act: “The timely warning requirement is somewhat subjective and is only triggered when the school considers a crime to pose an ongoing "threat to students and employees"”.

What will be called into question then, is if Va Tech reacted quickly enough. I’d like to think that they did the best that they could with the information that they had available. Think of it in these terms: Most college administration buildings don’t open until 8 am. The average college student, I’d wager, doesn’t get up until 8 am, and that’s if they have a 9 am class. That’s for the on campus kids. The commuters are already on the road around 8 am, making sure they get places to park for their 9 o’clocks. The first attack occurred at 7:15 AM. Chances are, in this case, that the first attack had more “direction” to it, if you will. The victims were a woman and a ‘companion’, if I recall correctly. Therefore, chances are, in this case, that the shots probably woke up students in the surrounding rooms, giving the shooter plenty of time to stow two pistols in his backpack and make his way out of the building, relatively unnoticed.

The best-case scenario from this point is that 911 receives a call around 7:25ish, meaning cops hopefully show up by 7:30-7:35. If they are lucky, an administrator gets tracked down via cell phone around 7:35-7:40, on his or her way into the office, most likely. At that point, the most anyone can hope for is that the administrators get some information together and get something out to the streets by maybe 8:30. Even then, all they know is that two people got shot, and the gunman isn’t accounted for. Even then, an email to the campus, and notification of as many resident assistants and professors as possible, isn’t going to get notification to every student before a little after 9, especially on a campus that big.

Remember, not everyone checks his or her email all throughout the day, even on a college campus. Between shuttling through to classes, stopping at the dining hall, etc, there’s a good chance that not a lot of people would have gotten the information all that much more quickly. By then, most likely, the killer was already very close to, or already at the classroom building where the worst of the killings occurred. Perhaps they could have made it happen faster, however, I find it hard to blame the university for the deaths of the students in Norris Hall.

However, there will be those who blame the university. They will get lawyers, big time, flashy, good lawyers. The type of lawyers that can win big judgments against negligent parties. Virginia Tech will get sued, the Clery act will be cited, and experts will be called to testify. Some will say that the school did all it could; some will say that they were too slow, and they cost students and professors their lives.

Somewhere along the line, most likely, a jury, or better, a group of juries, will award a lot of money to families of the survivors. It will be said that they deserve to be compensated for their loss, and additionally, that the awards will serve to “send a message” to not only Virginia Tech, but schools across the country that they must be swift to act in situations such as these.

I certainly don’t feel that either of those above statements have much validity to them. A cash award has never put a family back together, to my knowledge. It definitely won’t bring someone back from the dead. I can only hope that if there are financial considerations paid to those who lost loved ones that the recipients of those awards will use that money to help build foundations, and push for social change in whatever area they see fit. Perhaps they can push for greater control over the types of weapons that are available to the general public, or more research on the links between depression and violent criminal outbursts in adolescents and young adults. In that, they would be following the lead of those who fostered the Clery Act, and affecting some positive out of this.

Furthermore, in regards to the notion of “sending a message”, I would hope that doing so financially would only serve to put a very small exclamation point on a very loud statement. I don’t believe for a second that any university administrator that has seen the images on TV, read the accounts online and in the paper, and listened to reports on the radio, doesn’t already have every available resource towards reevaluating their schools’ plans for dealing with incidents like this. Whether its for self preservation, or better yet, I hope, for the notion of protecting valued young lives, I wouldn’t think that any administrator would want to see anything even closely resembling this nightmare taking place on their campuses.

And that, right there, kids, is the scariest thought. The fact that this can, and probably will happen again is right there in front of us. We live in a country of 275 million people. The majority of them are law abiding, decent people, who are just doing what they can with what they’ve got. There are some bad ones too. Before anyone feels too badly for this individual, calling him a tortured soul, etc. remember that he had to go through the steps to acquire these weapons, and take the time to at least plan out some of the events that would take place.

The bottom line of all this is that there are a lot of families out there going through an unspeakable amount of grief. This applies not only to the families of the victims, but the friends, and families of their friends whose children will most likely never look at the world, or their university, the same way ever again.