Virginia Tech Massacre (Worst in U.S. History?)

[Rach620]

I said before that I didn’t know the policy on my campus when it comes to weapons. That has just been clarified for me by a campus-wide email: the school “expressly forbids firearms and any kind of explosives” from campus.

I’m glad. I don’t want people with guns on campus, even if for ‘self-defense’. There is an incredibly low risk of needing to use a weapon for self defense on a college campus. I can’t remember the last time an event such as VT occurred. It’s not a daily threat. We have a good police department, and when incidents happen they only tend to escalate when the victim is armed.

Here’s what I think is a more fruitful way for universities to deal with emergencies such as this one. Again, from that email, my school’s policy:

We all recognize that communication is an important component in responding to an emergency, and our crisis plans include separate provisions for communications. Of particular note, our Office of Information Technology has been exploring a variety of technologies for some time to improve
communication, especially with students. One of those technologies would enable the University to send text messages to all students who provide their personal cell phone numbers to the University. The system could be used during campus emergencies and provide other vital information quickly. The University recently reached an agreement with a firm to pilot the text messaging technology. The pilot version of the service will be put in place this spring and summer, with the goal of implementing the full service by next fall, if satisfactory. As our plans are finalized, we will be in touch with students to ask them for their cell phone numbers, and we encourage them to participate in this important and innovative
communications initiative. Other methods of communication remain in place, including land-line phones, e-mail, the Web, and a campus cable television system.

 

[Rach620]

Attempts were made to help this very troubled young man. Mental health care is a very touchy thing. It’s hard to get a person help sometimes, because of confidentiality laws and many other things. He didn’t want help and probably wouldn’t have complied with it. There were people that tried to reach out to him. There are plenty of mentally ill people out there that could probably use help and aren’t getting it for the same reasons. Lucky for us, most of them won’t ever kill us.

I think Leah had a point though–were there any real attemps made to truly reach out to him? Where were the Christian friendships, loving relationships or even attempts of relationships towards him? No one seemed to do much more for him than what the bureaucratic univ structures required. No one around him seemed to care enough to actually stop and ask him what was up more than to pass him off to the police or state mental health institutions. Is that really love for neighbor?

I think the VT tragedy is really an indication of the failure of our society to reach out to the lost and lonely. It is an indictment on all of us in this culture. The lesson we should take from this is not “well, violence from a mentally altered person is unavoidable, so I just hope they don’t get me” but instead: “we should always be reaching out to those marginalized in our society, showing them Christ through our friendship, because that is what all people deserve.”

THAT is what it truly means to be pro-LIFE.

 

[vern_humphrey]

. Where did I at all imply that I believed that all truth is unknowable?

Originally Posted by Rach620
I don’t think you can make that case at all. Who is to say that he would have been stopped if someone in Norris Hall had been armed? Really…who is ever to say?

:This situation is fundamentally different from that. It’s not like there’s even a truth of the matter to be pursued here, like somewhere we can finally come to grasp exactly how this event might have been stopped, in the same way that we can come to understand how the soul ought to be properly ordered or some such thing. Apples and oranges.

Are you saying violent crimes are spiritual events?

They are not. We have a vast experience with violent crime, and the evidence is overwhelming – armed victims have a better chance of survival – much better.

:
Is there a similar experience with which we can compare this event? One in which a disturbed attacker, armed with semiautomatic weapons, stormed a building with the intent to kill as many people as possible, and was stopped because some person was armed with a handgun?

Absolutely. In fact, in two cases – a school shooting in Pearl, Mississipi and another at a law school in Virginia – people ran from the campus to their cars, got their guns (which were locked in the cars because they couldn’t be brought on campus) and stopped the rampage.

In Israel, there was a similar massacre at Ma’alot. Thereafter, the Israelis began arming school teachers and there has not been another attack on that scale.

:This isn’t like taking another trail or using more lifeboats, things which we can be positive would have saved more lives.

Yes, it is. It’s exactly like that. It is a case where the wrong decision led to disaster, and where the right trail, equipment and so on is well-known.

:It’s enormously debatable whether it would have been more prudent for some of those victims to have been armed. Perhaps that person would have just become more of a target for the shooter, and would have been killed before being able to do anything.

That reminds me of someone who said, “If the Jews had been armed, the Nazis would have killed them.”

:You just cannot say absolutely that the outcome would have been different if students on college campuses were allowed to conceal and carry. Just like I cannot say absolutely that the truth is unknowable.

Ah, the old, “You cannot say absolutely” argument.

A man was making a parachute jump. He suffered a severe partial malfunction of his main parachute, and noted by his altimeter he was descending at about 90 feet per second.

He said to himself, “I can try to ride it in, or I can cut away the main parachute and deploy the reserve. Which should I do?”

Then he asked himself, “Can I say absolutely the reserve parachute will open?”

Can you guess what happened to that man?

 

[vern_humphrey]

One of those technologies would enable the University to send text messages to all students who provide their personal cell phone numbers to the University. The system could be used during campus emergencies and provide other vital information quickly

So how do you get your text message when your cell phone is turned off because you’re in class?

 

[ThuribleGuy45]

I think the VT tragedy is really an indication of the failure of our society to reach out to the lost and lonely. It is an indictment on all of us in this culture. QUOTE]

Personally, I don’t appreciate your blaming me, my wife, Karl Keating, and everyone else on this board, to say nothing of millions of others, for the shootings. Any examination of urban budgets for our large cities would reveal enormous sums being spent on care for the “lost and lonely.” That much of this seems to be ineffective is another issue.

What do “reaching out,” “Christian friendships,” and “loving relationships” mean when someone spends months not even speaking back to a room mate? Read the articles: colleges have been successfully sued for trying to intervene with apparently unstable people. Colleges have also been successfully sued for NOT intervening with apparently unstable individuals. If you want to indict someone, why not start with starry-eyed privacy zealots, and the ever-eager tort bar - the kind of people who sue cities in the winter for trying to “reach out” to the homeless by removing them to a warm shelter, thus violating their “right” to freeze to death on a grate?

 

[vern_humphrey]

What do “reaching out,” “Christian friendships,” and “loving relationships” mean when someone spends months not even speaking back to a room mate? Read the articles: colleges have been successfully sued for trying to intervene with apparently unstable people. Colleges have also been successfully sued for NOT intervening with apparently unstable individuals. If you want to indict someone, why not start with starry-eyed privacy zealots, and the ever-eager tort bar - the kind of people who sue cities in the winter for trying to “reach out” to the homeless by removing them to a warm shelter, thus violating their “right” to freeze to death on a grate?

I have said it before – with the greatest good will in the world, we have done enormous damage.

And part of the problem is taking a doctrinaire approach – too many of us see our “solutions” as handed down from the mount, and refuse to even consider that they might not work, or – heaven forbid!! – be counter-productive.

We need to adopt a different mindset and recognize that our solutions not only might not work, but almost certainly **will not **work. But now and then, just by accident, we might do something that has a slight beneficial effect. So we need to stop the counter-productive programs and concentrating on the handful that actually make things a bit better.

 

[seekerz]

So how do you get your text message when your cell phone is turned off because you’re in class?

How about putting the phone on “vibrate” mode or using one of the several other communication methods mentioned in the post you quoted?

 

[vern_humphrey]

How about putting the phone on “vibrate” mode or using one of the several other communication methods mentioned in the post you quoted?

So you have your phone on vibrate, and your best friend, Suzy Schnicklefutz calls you. You whip out your phone – and what does the professor say to you?

You use the phone **after **the general alarm is sounded. I mentioned earlier using a siren, with codes (long blast means “tornado,” short blasts mean “turn on your cell phones.”)

But beyond all that you need two other things:

• A plan, which tells you what to do in the event of a disaster and who is responsible for doing it.
• A means of surviving until help comes. In the case of the VA Tech shooting, this means a method of defending yourself.

 

[Rach620]

So how do you get your text message when your cell phone is turned off because you’re in class?

I would say that more than 90% of college students have cell phones with texting capabilities. I am almost always around other students with their phones on, and I hardly ever shut mine off. It’s the way our generation is wired. Texting is **the **best way to reach a college student in a situation such as this one. If mine doesn’t come through, I guarantee I will hear about it from my roommate, fiance, classmates, or friends in my dorm within 2 minutes.

 

[vern_humphrey]

I would say that more than 90% of college students have cell phones with texting capabilities. I am almost always around other students with their phones on, and I hardly ever shut mine off. It’s the way our generation is wired. Texting is **the **best way to reach a college student in a situation such as this one. If mine doesn’t come through, I guarantee I will hear about it from my roommate, fiance, classmates, or friends in my dorm within 2 minutes.

And have you never had a professor say to you, “Shut that thing off and put it in your pocket, or get out of my classroom?”

 

[Rach620]

I have said it before – with the greatest good will in the world, we have done enormous damage.

And part of the problem is taking a doctrinaire approach – too many of us see our “solutions” as handed down from the mount, and refuse to even consider that they might not work, or – heaven forbid!! – be counter-productive.

We need to adopt a different mindset and recognize that our solutions not only might not work, but almost certainly **will not **work. But now and then, just by accident, we might do something that has a slight beneficial effect. So we need to stop the counter-productive programs and concentrating on the handful that actually make things a bit better.

Whatever our differences on the gun issue, vern, I completely agree with you here.

I will not step down from my argument that the culture of death is what led to this incident, and that we all are culpable in this culture of death. We can only try our hardest to bring the true Christian life into the world, and that is the only way we can fix anything.

Budget limits are not an excuse. The bureaucracy is not an excuse. The ineffectiveness of our therapeutic methods is not an excuse. Our culture is really very…lost. It will take a lot to heal it from the damage which the modern world, which has lost an understanding of the God-given dignity of the human person. But to pass off the blame to the very bureaucratic structures which are not helping to create a good political community is definitely not helping the situation in the least. Until we realize that bureaucracy itself is a form of pro-death despair, and that much more is needed to actually help the lost and lonely, no progress will be made.

 

[Rach620]

And have you never had a professor say to you, “Shut that thing off and put it in your pocket, or get out of my classroom?”

It’s usually on vibrate, and I don’t check it in class if it does vibrate usually. But if all of a sudden students’ phones are simultaneously ringing…we’ll know that something is up.

That’s only part of the whole emergency-preparedness thing here, too. There are other parts of it too.

 

[vern_humphrey]

Whatever our differences on the gun issue, vern, I completely agree with you here.

I will not step down from my argument that the culture of death is what led to this incident, and that we all are culpable in this culture of death. We can only try our hardest to bring the true Christian life into the world, and that is the only way we can fix anything.

Budget limits are not an excuse. The bureaucracy is not an excuse. The ineffectiveness of our therapeutic methods is not an excuse. Our culture is really very…lost. It will take a lot to heal it from the damage which the modern world, which has lost an understanding of the God-given dignity of the human person. But to pass off the blame to the very bureaucratic structures which are not helping to create a good political community is definitely not helping the situation in the least. Until we realize that bureaucracy itself is a form of pro-death despair, and that much more is needed to actually help the lost and lonely, no progress will be made.

What we need to do is break out of our dogmatic mold and adopt a pragmatic approach. When dealing with a problem, ask these questions.

1. What are we trying to accomplish? State the goal in clear, measurable terms (for example, "Reduce the homeless population in the city by X%.)
2. Determine what information we need to see if we are accomplishing or approaching our goal.
3. Establish a mechanism for collecting and presenting the information to the decision-makers.
4. Set a review date.
5. Incorporate a change mechanism, so we can change course as necessary to improve – or even abandon – our project.

When we are talking about laws, I strongly favor a sunset provision – if we can’t prove the law is working as it should by a reasonable period, the law should lapse.

 

[Aramis]

Oops, sorry, he was a legal, permanent resident–one step below citizenship…and he was legally allowed to purchase a gun (for good or bad…)

Jennifer

And that, friend, is the root of the issue. The second amendment probably should not apply to non-citizens. Would make lots of bits about stopping terrorism QUITE easier on the feds.

 

[Hesychios]

I am pretty sure more died at Wounded Knee.

 

[LeahInancsi]

There was nothing to do about this situation without taking away rights that you and I demand. Mind reading was the only solution and** fast** mind reading, at that.

 

[rayne89]

It seems Catholics have gone overboard when they compare 4,000 babies killed through abortion with the senseless deaths of 32 college students. Let’s get real. These college students have proven they have something to offer society, while 4,000 unborn babies haven’t. :banghead:

Personally I don’t like it when ever there is a any human tragedy that happens we have to bring up -“but what about abortion?” This was the worst shooting massacre in modern US History. Abortion is horrendous and evil but a separate issue from this current tragedy. That being said…

Are you saying it would have been better for the shooter to go to a neo-natal unit and shoot up 32 newborns because “let’s get real” these newborns “haven’t proben themselves” yet? That is outrageous.

Life is not precious because of what you can accomplish or what you do but because you are a creation of God. So according to your thinking it would have been better to shoot up a room full of mentally handicapped children than promising college students? Or maybe it would have been better to hit a nursing home, or how about those waiting at the welfare office? Is it better to shot a room full of non-college graduate blue collar workers than promising college educated professionals? Where do you draw the line? Are you saying one life is worth more than another?

 

[Montalban]

I am pretty sure more died at Wounded Knee.

And that number included children!

 

[mgrobertson79]

Lets not forget that this is not the worst school tragedy in American history. That dubious honor goes to a bombing by a school board member in Bath Michigan. 48 were killed and 58 more injured. This happened May 18, 1927. Please pray for the souls of all those killed in tragic acts such as this.

This is a list of school massacres on record. Though disturbing, it shows this was not the first in a long line a killings aimed at the innocent and defenseless.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_school_massacres