Comment by peterb

January 26, 2009 @ 11:06 pm

Gosh, maybe if Virginia Tech stopped dressing in all those slutty clothes it would stop getting raped so much.

Comment by peterb

January 26, 2009 @ 11:08 pm

Sorry. My comment was a bit harsh. It’s not clear to me, though, how an institution protects itself against students (or anyone) doing crazy things.

Comment by Garrett DeOrio

January 27, 2009 @ 2:13 pm

Such things are always going to happen, but an institution can be vigilant in matters of mental health, for example. Cho Seung-Hui, the shooter who killed dozens in the Spring of 2007, had popped up on at least some people’s radars for his troubles, but there was no apparatus in place to push him towards getting help.

No one wants to see a university put draconian security measures in place, but there’s clearly a need for a system of faster response. The girl who was killed in this recent event was killed and beheaded in a public university building. Presumably, a well-placed security camera and a response erring on the side of caution might have led to an intervention that could have saved her. (I want to stress “might have”, as I, of course, cannot say with certainty that that’s the case.)

At the very least, some people in the “VT community” are having trouble getting by and are lashing out violently. Two people could very well be a mere coincidence and the second murder, as it was only one person, might not have been an act of insanity, which leads to even more questions so on.

VT can’t control what individuals do, but, at a minimum, it should be able to provide enough security to prevent a decapitation in one of its buildings.