Sunday, December 12, 2010

32 lives too late

Everyone remembers the tragedy at the Virgina Tech University three years ago when a gunman killed 32 students and staff and goes down as one of the worst campus massacres in history. However, most don't know how slow the school reacted to the shooting. The U.S. Department of Education reported that Virgina Tech did not inform the students about the situation until about 2 hours after it happened. The school had also violated the Clery Act in which universities and colleges must inform their students about crimes that occur at or near their campuses. After this and the Columbine High School massacre, stricter rules and policies should be enforced for colleges and universities for the safety of the students. We definitely don't want to see any more of these tragedies occur, so the U.S. Department of Education should act quick and do something about it.
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6 comments:

devonhanna said...

yea i definitely believe that the quicker the reaction, the less likely these tragedies will occur, or at least they will be less damaging. this reminds me of all the TSA backlash recently. i believe that in some cases, our freedoms need to be restricted just a tad, so that we can remain safe. as far as these campus shooting type tragedies, so many people have been lost that hopefully stricter and quicker enforcement can help to curb these from happening.

December 12, 2010 at 1:49 PM
kiko said...

I do agree and remember that Virginia Tech responded very slowly to the incident. However, as easy as it is to be frustrated and outraged, we have hindsight bias, which is a psychological phenomenon when we look back at an event and think that we would have foreseen it. In this case, we may think that it was obvious that the school should have locked down the school or taken more drastic measures after he first two people were murdered, and it is true that the school should have responded more quickly to prevent anything else from happening. Hopefully this event was a huge wake-up call to other schools and institutions to be better prepared for these kinds of events, but we should stop and think before we point fingers.

December 12, 2010 at 2:41 PM
Unknown said...

Although it is 32 lives too late, incidents like these are big wake up calls and do have some positives. Hopefully there will never be a next time, but if there is I would hope that the US department of Education, universities, and colleges learned from this situation and will react much quicker. Unfortunately they did have to learn the hard way.

December 12, 2010 at 5:53 PM
Jason Galisatus said...

I don't think the regulations which they apparently would have violated would have had any bearing on what happened. sure, it may have reduced the number of deaths (which is, obviously important and wonderful), but it would only put a temporary solution to a very permanent problem. What the real issue that needs to be addressed is what is the cause of all of these shootings? Instead of taking the reactive solution, we should really take a more proactive approach to solving the issue of violence in schools. I've advocated for proactive thinking consistently through my blogpost commenting and stand by it.

December 13, 2010 at 3:23 PM
Andrea Arnoldi said...

Why the students were informed of the incident 2 hours after it already started baffles me. However, like Jason put it, that wouldn't solve the over-all issue that some guy decided to go on a killing rampage. But at the same time, how can one try to prevent someone else (mentally) to not commit such a crime? Something that serious is not something that can just be "talked" over. On the protection side, security could be booted up, but even then people find ways to get around that. Not to mention, were talking about a well known university's where strict security (metal detector status) isn't though to be necessarily needed,not some high school in the projects that would already have that kind of security.

December 15, 2010 at 7:44 AM
Shorhon said...

When a shooting like this occurs, we need to address the root of the problem. To do so, we have to deal with the violence itself and the reasoning behind that. This, however, requires a tremendous amount of time. I believe that both a reactive and a proactive solution is necessary. Eliminating the source of violence isn't something that's going happen overnight. I still advocate for a stricter security system in schools.

December 15, 2010 at 9:43 AM

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