Josh the Aspie’s Blog

For those of you who might not know, there has been yet another school shooting, this time at Virginia Tech, a University in Blacksburg, Virginia.

At the time of this writing, according to the school’s website, 33 are dead in the wake of this shooting, the highest death toll in a school shooting in the US thus far. 31 of them, including the gunman, died at Noris Hall. The other two died at the dormitory known as West Ambler Johnson Hall.

According to CNN, the shooter used two hand guns, one a .22, the other a 9mm.

The first two murders were committed at about 7:15 a.m. in the West Ambler Johnson Hall dormitory.

About two hours later, a second shooting happened in the Engineering building, Norris Hall.

At 9:26 an e-mail was sent out, warning students to stay where they were on campus, and warning students not on campus not to come to campus.

At about 9:50 a second e-mail was sent out warning students about a gunman on campus.

At 10:17, a Campus Lockdown was initiated.

Soon after, the police stormed Noris hall, and found the doors chained shut.

At about 12:22, the campus has been declared secure.

There are two main questions that people have been asking. The first is why was campus security so generally lax as to allow something like this to happen. The second, is why it took so long for the school to close it’s self down for the day.

The problem with security and the possibility of guns on University campuses is two fold.

First of all, a University is a place where thousands upon thousands of people come in and out (sometimes multiple times) in the same day. Some by car, some by bus, some by foot. And on top of that, you have the problem that fairly often a university will be spread out across multiple sub-campuses, not even counting auxiliary locations where people can take classes off of campus. Trying to police that kind of environment can be an incredibly challenging one. However in that respect it’s rather similar to an environment like the major malls, and smaller strip malls that serve a community.

Another similarity between the two is that while security is necessary to keep the patrons safe, a visible presence of security can be damaging to the reason those places are there. In malls, it is because the mall and it’s stores want people to feel light, and care free so that they will be more likely to spend their money. The obvious site of armed guards can put a damper on that feeling.

At a universities, this is the second main problem, the atmosphere that Universities tend to cultivate which is conducive to learning, and the free exchange of ideas. I’ve read interviews with Campus cops for my Al Ma Mater that were shocked at the difference in culture inside the campus vs the off campus culture. At a university, people of all different races, political affiliations, and creeds tend to get together peacefully. And when a situation really boils over, the weapon of choice is usually large colorful signs, and a large amount of trying to beat the other person’s ideals with your own, not trying to break their body with yours. Disagreements are not only allowed free reign, but in many classes you are encouraged to argue your points, to expose other people to your ideas… but to listen as well.

Chalk drawings and scribbles, complementary or otherwise were viewed as free speech and students actually organized times and places to draw their free speech in in an organized fashion. One cop decided to clean a bit of it away as a favor to the university, and a professor stopped him, rather upset about it.

At my Alma Matter, you could go weeks without seeing any sign of security, unless you went into the administration building, where you saw security guards working on parking permits and tickets about any time the office was open, and then that one time you do see security, it’s usually someone in a campus security truck trolling through the parking lots to make sure that everyone has their parking sticker. It’s true their patrols tend to double as a patrol to make sure people don’t get hurt, but I’m sure the reason they structure their patrols the way they do, is so that people just dismiss it as them trolling to give out parking tickets. Security is rarely seen, and when it is, is brushed off even more easily than you’d brush off the presence of a police car.

And there’s a reason for this. In the year I lived at the Dorm on south campus, there was only one reported theft, it was of a PS2 when they first came out, and it was returned the same week by the friend of the person that stole it. There is a feeling of camaraderie, a feeling of alliance between the majority of those at university, even if you don’t like one of your fellow class mates, generally you feel more allegiance to them than you would to a random stranger even in your own neighborhood. And yet that also creates a sense of complacency, a lack of watchfulness.

If anyone ever makes mention of killing someone, it’s usually a particularly frustrating person on the other side of the teacher/student divide, and usually more in frustration and jest than anything else… which makes it even harder to take a real threat seriously.

And so because, in general, a campus is a low crime environment, there tends to be little call for security, and keeping on more than is ‘generally’ needed is hard to justify… thus making it all the easier for such tragedies to occur.

Well, unfortunately, it looks like this week, there will be a different kind of chalk drawing on the floors and plazas of Virginia Tech.

As usual, both sides of the gun issue have used, or tried to use this tragic event as evidence for their views on guns. Those who advocate gun control have said that if guns had been made illegal, a shooting death like this couldn’t have occurred. Those who decry gun control are tending to say that if everyone on campus had a gun and knew how to use it, the gunmen wouldn’t have been able to get as far as he had. Really, I think there is evidence for both of those positions.

Some criminals in the UK, where guns have been made illegal, have turned to knives, swords, bats, and other melee weapons, meaning that it’s much harder for a single individual to mow down others, and reducing the total number of gun deaths. However now the UK has the problem of rising murder and gang crimes related to knives. So now blades over a certain length, including many chef knives, as well as ceremonial sabers, and display pieces have been banned and made illegal. What happens once all of those weapons are off the street? Well, the next likely trend is that they go to improvised weapons, or some other class of commonly used weapon. And it’s still not impossible to commit a gun crime, as a person can still steal a gun from a shop that’s been closed up that sells guns to those who can legally have them, like the police.

There are also countries where their citizens have much easier access to guns, and have much lower death rates than people here in America, such as Switzerland. There isn’t really a total correlation between reducing the number of guns on the streets, and reducing the number of crimes.

On the other hand, if everyone in that school had a gun, and knew how to use it, it’s unlikely the shooter would have gotten far. Still, even if we as a society embraced the owning and use of firearms, only a minority of people as a whole, and even a smaller minority of students would both carry and know how to use fire arms. There are multiple reasons for this.

The first goes back to the culture of the university I talked about above. If the presence of armed security personnel might be disruptive to a pleasant, care free learning environment that fosters the exchange of ideas, how much more so might be a campus where you see people walking down the walk with guns strapped to their hip?

Many stores refuse to allow people into their shops with weapons, including employees. And if someone sees another person walking down the street with a gun on their leg, they will often call into the police, who will actually come down and question the person, making their day rather less enjoyable. Yet, in an amazing social conundrum, in many states and cities, open carry is the only way that one can carry a gun. So what is a responsible gun owner to do?

But back to campuses. On many campuses, even in states where one can carry a gun, a student caught doing so can face suspension, or even expulsion… so it’s unlikely many students, even if they know how to use a gun properly, and are licensed to carry them, will be doing so on college campus, unless the social stigma against guns wears away.

And as for people owning an knowing how to use guns? That’s a bit of a problem as well. First of all, it takes time, effort, and a fairly size able chunk of cash just to get properly trained in how to use a hand gun safely. It costs you a full 8 hour day, and nearly $100 in some areas for a full basic class, and even more for some advanced courses. It can also cost $20-$40 and a few hours to learn how to safely handle a specific gun you own. Then there is the cost of the gun it’s self, which for a reliable gun (assuming you aren’t already an expert that can clean and rebuild a used gun) is often hundreds of dollars. Really, you can get a cheep computer for just a bit more than the cost of all this, and most people would use the computer more often.

I’m an RPG nut, a short story writer, and I hope to some day start my own webcomic. In addition to fantasy settings, I enjoy playing in Spycraft, WoD, and other settings that involve firearms. So I felt that even if I never fired a gun again in my life, the full class and the knowledge it imparted would be worth it, so I know how to safely operate a handgun… that doesn’t know I know how to shoot one well. For that, I would either have to buy a fire arm, or rent one multiple times. Either way that can be hundreds of dollars. Then I would need to pay for ammunition, range time, and targets. All in all, just learning that single skill would involve days, or maybe even weeks worth of hours invested in it, as well as multiple hundreds of dollars.

With only 64% of high school students enrolling in college out of high school according to the National Science Foundation, how many people would bother with the necessary education in gunmanship unless they wished to do so for recreation, or did so as a part of job training (police, security guards, those in the military), or did so for hunting?

Some people purchase guns for a specific instance where they feel the need to protect themselves, however with the wait period on getting such a gun, there is little reason to imagine that many of them would both get it -and- the necessary training to stave off even an attack they believe to be coming, much less one they have no way of anticipating.

So, how can a tragedy like this be avoided in the future? I’m honestly not sure.

As for the question of why it took so long to warn students to stay away from the campus… well, Universities are rarely closed unless they are somehow forced to, and often close the proverbial barn door after the horses are all loose. I’m not sure what it is about University administration structures, but this seems to be a near constant.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, April 17th, 2007 at 2:53 am and is filed under Current Events. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.