Comments on: Virginia Tech Shootings and Hindsight Bias

By: Bithead

Bithead — Thu, 19 Apr 2007 12:46:14 +0000

The point is simply this;

All it would have taken would be one... ONE legal firearm, and the perp would have gotten one, perhaps two shots off, and that would have been the end of it... and 30-some-odd less people would have died.

That's not a political point, except perhaps by extension. What I'm making here is a point of saving LIVES.

By: anjin-san

anjin-san — Wed, 18 Apr 2007 22:42:13 +0000

I am still having a hard time seeing how gun control has anything to do with this tragedy. Seems like using the deaths of so many young people as an excuse to try and score a political point is pretty crappy.

By: just me

just me — Wed, 18 Apr 2007 20:12:22 +0000

Bithead-the initial shooting occurred before most classes started, if VT is anything like my college, classes started at 8 with few exceptions.

Every time there is a murder in NYC (or any city), the mayor should play it safe and shut the city down until the suspect is apprehended. You never know, a murder on the lose could walk in to a shopping mail and open up. Better safe than sorry!

Not the same thing. And I know that police have at times notified the community when there is some kind of dangerous person at large.

I don't know that shutting down the whole school was in order, but at the very least I think people coming on the campus had the right to know that a gunman had killed two people that morning and the police didn't know who or where he was. In the end it would have been better to have tried to do something, rather than assume safety.

By: Bithead

Bithead — Wed, 18 Apr 2007 17:49:56 +0000

Clinton, particularly?
No.

Just gun controlers in general.

By: anjin-san

anjin-san — Wed, 18 Apr 2007 17:25:45 +0000

Bit,

Maybe they were not up to dealing with it because they were not up to dealing with it, but I am sure you will get around to blaming Clinton soon...

By: Bithead

Bithead — Wed, 18 Apr 2007 15:03:58 +0000

the question is, would it have made any difference, in the end?

I doubt it.

The actions of officials we don’t know fully, yet… and we won't for a while, as the investigation unfolds. But in the end they do not matter all that much.... regardless of what they did, campus officials simply are not equipped to deal with such conditions, due as much to their own gun phobia as political correctness and gun control laws.

The large numbers of people, and the lack of instant communication ability with everyone on campus, renders anything the president of VT did or did not do, nigh on insignificant. How do you empty a campus in time to do anything about such an event?

By: tom

tom — Wed, 18 Apr 2007 13:49:33 +0000

By: Herb Ely

Herb Ely — Wed, 18 Apr 2007 12:10:47 +0000

After an auto accident my insurance agent told me an old Virginia proverb: "Hindsight is better than foresight by a damn sight."

By: just me

just me — Wed, 18 Apr 2007 10:53:45 +0000

While I agree that you can't accuse every loner that writes creepy or off the norm stuff, I am not so sure I agree that the campus shouldn't have been shut down, or at least students notified that there was a gunman on campus that hadn't been aprehended yet.

I think that is where your rainstorm comparison falls short. A rain storm is a normal occurance, a gunman shooting and killing people in a dorm is not.

I think what bothers me about this situation is that two people were killed at just after 7 in the morning, and the person that killed them was at large. I think students and staff should have been at the very least notified and given the option to decide whether they wanted to come on campus-there was time to do this and yes it may have been disruptive for that day, but it may have prevented some of what happened.

I don't think tragedies like this are really all that preventable, I don't think they make a good springboard to create any policy from, but I do think continueing with school that day was a mistake.

By: anjin-san

anjin-san — Wed, 18 Apr 2007 07:26:49 +0000

There was a bomb threat at the local JC a while back and they totally shut the campus down. Better to be safe then sorry.

By: Start Locking Up the Wierdos » The American Mind

Start Locking Up the Wierdos » The American Mind — Wed, 18 Apr 2007 05:33:08 +0000

[...] When you include bureaucracy’s problems we’d have a horrendous mess at noted by James Joyner: Do we want every odd teenager turned in to The Powers That Be for certification that he’s not a potential serial killer? Given what we know of bureaucracy, we can rest assured that a whole lot of people would be unnecessarily locked away in order to ensure that false negatives don’t occur. (Which is why it’s unlikely we’ll ever see a terror alert level below Yellow unless the system is scrapped.) [...]

By: laura

laura — Wed, 18 Apr 2007 04:26:31 +0000

I think that one of the student's professors did make some kind of referral to a counselor for the student.

I'm not disagreeing with the point of your post. Just sayin'.