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Virginia Tech Shootings; 4/18/07

What has occurred around the recent shootings at Virginia Tech raise many questions and concerns. As with so many tragic occurrences, there are both positive and negative aspects to the reactions of others not directly involved and to the incident itself.

Actions of Others. Much of what has happened after the shooting on April 16, 2007, has been beautiful. The outpouring of true sympathy and efforts to help have been tremendous. The reactions of people of good will in this country have been truly amazing, a common reaction by the generous people of this great country.

On the other hand, some of what has been written in the press and some of the actions of people in the press who are on location have often been stupid or provocative. Questions during press conferences have often not been aimed at just getting information, but have been accusatory. The press may hide behind the statement that they are just trying to get facts and infomr people, but real efforts to do so could result in much better questions rather than veiled accusations. There are serious limitations upon what could be done in a free society such as ours and on a college campus which is essentially the size of a small city.

It is not possible to lock down a whole city over what appears to be an isolated incident occurs.

To paraphrase a poignant question in the local Charlottesville paper, "If there is a shooting on a street in the Southern part of a city, should you shut down a shopping center two miles away in the Western part of the city?" Yet many of the questions involved why the whole campus was not locked down. There were other questions about notification - questions which seemed not to consider the difficulty of notifying over 25,000 people, many of whom are in transit on foot and bicycles and thus not able to be informed.

From some of the questions, there appears to be a fundamental misunderstanding of the role of police. Police do not protect. They investigate and solve crimes and arrest suspected perpetrators. We are responsible for out own protection to the greatest extent possible, and we each must choose the means we feel comfortable using for that purpose.

From other questions, there appears to be a misunderstanding of the ability to restrict the freedom we enjoy. We cannot lock up people just because they write spooky or perverse literature. Some may seem disturbed, but such often is not actually the case. What Tech authorities, including teachers, did to try to determine the possibility that the murderer was actually dangerous was very reasonable. If we locked people away just because they wrote or created perverse literature or art, we would not have many of the movies which are shown regularly, and we would be missing some books by writers such as Stephen King and Dean Koontz. Yet these people have produced literature and movies which many have enjoyed, as bizarre as some might find them. I have enjoyed many of the books written by both of these men and have enjoyed some movies the producers of which would have been restricted under some of the tests suggested by the questioning.

Further, there appears to be some misunderstanding of the role of a university. Some commentators have mentioned that parents send their children off to school with the expectation that the school will protect them. Any such expectation is misplaced. One should not expect more than normal safety which arises primarily from the community in which a school is located and the nature of those attending the school. Students are primarily adults who are given wide latitude in their actions and decisions, and along with that classification we have lost the concept that the school stands in the place of the parents. Parents are not even entitled to know grades and activities unless the students authorize the school to provide such information to the parents.

Finally, some of the questions seemed to be more aimed at placing blame than providing information. I blame much of this aspect upon two things. One is the expectations which have arisen from the efforts of my profession - the legal profession - and a society which always tries to place blame on someone other than the person taking the actions. The legal profession, with its highly publicized personal injury litigation involving lawyers regularly pushing the envelope to develop some new theory to have someone else with a lot of money pay for our own stupid actions, has encouraged an attitude that someone else can be blamed for or least made to pay for misfortune. Our society also eschews most criticism of inappropriate activities and constantly seeks ways to absolve people of their poor choices, such as overeating and smoking, which approach leads people to try to place the blame on someone else.

The other factor is the need for many news media to create stories or controversy to feed the constant thirst, possibly created only by the ever present news media, for what some call "news," but is often merely created controversy. This can be seen by some of the reactions the presence of the news media has provoked from students at Tech many of whom just wish the press would leave.

The Incident.  There are some beautiful heroic stories which are gradually unfolding about what occurred during the incident. It has been suggested that the dormitory advisory who was killed was responding to the first killing. It appears that two of the professors who were killed were trying to help students, one shot coming down the stairs to try to get to the killer and the other shot through the door while holding it shut so students could jump out of the classroom windows. One student who survived was holding another classroom door shut with the help of another student and kept the killer from entering that classroom and killing more people.

But questions have also been raised about the role of a policy at Virginia Tech against having guns on campus. The Wall Street Journal had an editorial in its April 18, 2007, issue addressing this matter and noting that many similar incidents had been stopped far short of their potential death toll because someone who was present had a weapon and either killed or otherwise stopped the killer.

Some have called for stricter gun laws because of the incident. Such calls are misplaced. As John Lott so well documented in his book More Guns, Less Crime, places where a person has a right to carry a weapon on balance are safer than those places with restrictive gun laws.

None of these concerns can take away from the horror of what happened and should not lead to condemnation of anyone other than the killer. The reactions of those around the country and the efforts and actions of the Tech community to deal with an unbelievable tragedy have been truly beautiful. All of us should try to understand and appreciate the freedoms that we have and the limitations such place upon our ability to stop tragedies. We should look to ways to be more helpful to those in need and to protect ourselves well, but placing blame on anyone other than the killer is wrong.