Nobody has this in the playbook.
“I’m satisfied that the university did everything they felt they needed to do with the heat on the table,” Kaine told CBS’ “The Early Show” on Wednesday. “Nobody has this in the playbook, there’s no manual on this.” - Virginia Governor Tim Kaine, quoted in FoxNews.com
Nobody has this in the playbook.
Given what Fox News said this morning - that the police made some educated guesses about the first shooting, and that they were wrong - there’s going to be a tendency to lay blame about the VT massacre. People will blame. They’ll blame the campus police, the college president, Congress for not having better gun control, Congress for not allowing people to carry guns, each other, and heck - maybe me for posting this.
What it comes down to, though, is this:
Even if cities and towns, schools and universities spend gazillions of dollars on security and disaster preparation, drilling and getting ready for everything from fires to floods to shooters to bombers to (you name it!)… there’s always going to be something else. In a natural disaster, when circumstances are happening beyond control, sure - you can be prepared up to a degree. But when events don’t happen according to plan, you back up ten yards and punt. You do what you’ve got to do in the heat of the moment. In a human disaster like this shooting, you can’t predict when. You can’t predict where. You can’t predict how.
Guess what, guys? If they’d locked the campus down after the initial shooting, chances are they’d have locked the shooter INSIDE HIS OWN DORM. What exactly would have prevented the escalation of violence then? Different scenario, different people - same result.
Well, almost the same. If there’d been a lockdown, people would be blaming the school, saying that if they hadn’t taken that measure…
Surely there are things that police and security personnel everywhere will learn from this horrible tragedy, and those things will make us all safer in the long run. Yet even those things will not necessarily keep us “safe” - just safer. Because nobody has this in the playbook.