> prob more than thirty now. Why??

Because evil strikes where you are the weakest for the most fear induced.

No guns for teachers, no guns for school administrators, no guns for students = a flock of defenseless sheep for a wolf. A person determined to kill is not going to be stopped by a law preventing guns within 1,000 feet of a school.

We saw it at Beslan, all we have to do is decide if we want to wait to act until this happens on a much larger scale:

http://www.cnn.com/2004/WORLD/europe...ool/index.html

Schools are a very soft target for someone willing to die or that wants to die because at the most you are going to have one or two people able to confront you (assuming a police officer is there - otherwise nooone) and a locked down school is open to anyone with a shotgun.

Only a matter of time.

 

Rebo.......HBO had a special about a year ago called "The Children of Beslan".......GREAT documentary and heart-breaking....as these 9 to 14 year olds (some younger) recounted their experiences during this mass murder......."Mrs so-and-so was shot here".......or "The terrorist laughed at us kids when we went to the bathroom in our pants".......or "They killed Mr so-and-so over there".........

And yes......Gun control laws like the ones at the Campus do one thing....They ensure that the law-abiding student body (and faculty) are sheep ready for the slaughter when something like this current shooting occurs.......

 

What kills me is that the campus security KNEW about the first incident and did NOTHING about it. That makes no sense, if there is a shooting, lock down the school and send in fast moving search teams to find that sucker. They figured it was an isolated incident and that the shooter already left the campus. HOW STUPID!! Why take that chance, they have an actual campus "police" force (whether they have guns..), they prob could've stopped this or at least made it not so severe. At my college, the few of us from the country always have a gun in the car/truck and a knife on us. I always have my shotgun in my truck and my lock-back knife on me, at all times. If anything were to happen, at least we would have a fighting chance. But still, even if teachers have guns with them, whats to say that they would take action and not freeze at the critical moment?? I think they would need to be trained and coached quite a bit to be able to effectively use a gun if someone started a rampage. Hell, even police officers can freeze up and not take action!! There is really no way to stop this from happening short of having a large(depending on the college), highly trained, fast acting police force able to respond quickly to an incident. *********s like that make it harder for normal, law abiding people like me and many others to be able to have guns and carry them. I think the best measures is to teach proper gun control/respect to kids, keep them locked up, and JUST PAY ATTENTION TO YOUR KIDS/FRIENDS!! If you see them acting different and becoming anti-social, SAY SOMETHING! Even if nothing is wrong at least you let people know so maybe they will talk and get help. So many tragedies could've been prevented if someone had said something or just listened to them.

 

The campus police are fully accredited and do carry firearms and have full police powers on the campus.......

Beyond that, there are questions about why the lapse between reporting the first shooting and the second shooting.......Apparently, students just started hearing about the 1st one at about the time the 2nd one was going off.........

And the answer to situations like that are NOT a large, fast acting force.......No force could react quick enough to a mass shooting like that to prevent or minimize it......the answer is a bunch of law-abiding citizens (in this case.....students and teachers) armed and present to stop an SOB like this before too much damage is done.........

This is what prevented the mall shooting in Salt Lake City from being worse than it was........A shopper (in this case, off-duty police) on site and armed and willing and able to take action when the s--t went down.........

 

Any mass killing is sad... no question, but let me offer a different viewpoint on why something wasn't done to protect everyone else.

This is a huge campus, with more people on it, than in the city limits of my hometown, which is an estimated 20,000. The original shooting was initially thought to be a domestic violence type of crime. The killer shot two people and hopped in his black pickup and LEFT.

Now... let's say that someone on the East side of the city of Kalispell, gets shot. The killer, then leaves the scene and the police come to investigate.

Am I supposed to presume that some of you think that the whole city of Kalispell be locked down, because there was a shooting somewhere? And just how in the world do you expect something affecting that many people be IMMEDIATELY done? And why would the police expect anything else, like a mass murder, to happen, when there were OTHER people at the scene of the first shooting and only two people were shot? Are the police and the college people supposed to have a knee jerk reaction..or over react IMHO.. and say there's a killer out to murder the world? Stay where you are!

To even assume that one pair of killings is going to lead to a mass killing two hours later? Come on!! Lets not all sit here and try to place blame on anyone else other than the killer. And there's the possibility that the two incidents may not even be related. Ever think of that?

My wife and I, like all of you, have been watching it on TV all evening. Our opinion is that the police and college did all they could do, with the knowledge they had to work with. So, let's not be hasty to place blame all over the place, when we know that it's the killer or killers who are to blame...period.

The killer also was last seen driving a black pickup. I haven't heard that they've even found the black pickup on campus, not that the dude couldn't have changed vehicles.

There are too many questions unanswered and already people are looking for someone to hang. Now THAT's stupid. If the cops here, were to broadcast that two people were killed on the other side of town, would I lock myself in my house and quake with fear? Not in this lifetime! I'd go on about my business and perhaps tuck my .357 into my waistband or put it on my belt, in its holster. Would the police even be forced to try to lock down the whole city? No.

Let's not get excited and rush to judgment on the college police, the city police or the campus president. That campus is huge and there's almost as many people there, at any given time, that would encompass the whole population of my city limits.

And... like the others, my heart goes out to the families who know and to the families who don't yet know.

 

I agree 100%. The news media have already jumped on this thing like wild dogs and are trying to blame the police for not locking down a college of 25,000 students. Are you kidding me? Lock down an entire college because of a double-murder likely related to a domestic issue? Let's put the blame where it belongs-the murderer. BTW, I'd love to slap the crap out of Katie Couric.

 

Why did it take the police so long to enter the building?

 

The DC sniper caused some lockdowns
http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,65103,00.html

 

[QUOTE=jake00]The DC sniper caused some lockdowns
http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,65103,00.html[/QUOTE]

the DC Sniper was a different animal altogether. Random shootings at random sites at random times. Yeah, I'd say people were a little frightened.

 

I agree in the fact that the University, University Security, or the Blacksburg Sherrifs office should be to blame. My initial thought on the alert being sent out by email about 2 hours after the first shooting was "dumbfounded". Why did it take so long? Well, there really wasn't a system set in place to alert Thousands upon thousands of students who many are not even on campus and in transit. You can say two hours, that's a long time, but when first finding out someone had been shot in the dorm, first action is to make people in that particular building safe and find out if there is still immediate danger in that particular building and then spread out from there. 2 hours can fly by pretty damn fast and I'm sure without any "real" kind of emergency alert system in place on campus to notify everyone at once, it takes time and by the time word was getting spread across the city wide campus, it was too late. Emergency sirens for storms and fires exist, now maybe implement a special siren on campus for "terrorism". Once the siren goes off, everthing is in immediate lockdown and an emergency alert goes off immediately over mutiple local radio and television stations.

Hopefully something positive can come from this terrible tragedy. It is indeed another sad day here in America. My thoughts and prayers go out to all the people affected by this terrible act, especially those that have lost their lives.

 

This world sucks, no one is at fault, except the shooter.

 

that campus is the size of the town i live in about, if someone gets murdered in the town, or heck, even the same apartment complex, i seriously doubt they would lock down the whole town over it. i don't expect the same from such a large campus either.

everybody can go back and analyze this to death,point is there is only one person at fault and there was nothing no one could do about it.

 

We could learn from it, but mostly likely we won't.

For the most part, short term memories.

 

The definition of gun control is hitting where one aims. I agree with you 100% we should be teaching our kids proper gun safety and how to use them, instead of being scared of them. Want to learn how to use one in an adverse situation, joined the armed forces, they will teach you or send you home.

An armed society is a polite society. Do you really think this could have happend in Virginia City, or San Fransisco in the late 1800's. I very highly doubt it. If 10 people just 10 had a concealed carry permit and knew how to shoot that he came in contact with, he might have only got 3 or 4 instead of 30. As to the other point of what was the liberal media tonight on TV, VA's gun laws would have not prevented this in the least, he got the gun a month before hand. Thus surpassing even the longest "cooling off" period. He would have gotton a gun reguardless if this was his ultimate goal.

I feel sorry for the people killed and hurt, but lets not turn this into a soap opera. It kinda makes me want to puke knowing how soft our society has become. During the 911 attacks real brave Americans stopped the 4th attack, knowing they were going to die, to save others. It really worries me that this is our new product of colleges. Cel phones, palm pilots, and laptops were useless. A trained gun onwer could have minimized the number of casulties greatly, nothing more, nothing less. You could enact 100 laws, and if no one was there to inforce them, it was all for not.

 

if an armed society is a polite one than america should be the politest because america has the largest private gun ownership in the world.

the UK has very strict gun laws, and they had 40 something murders last year out of over a population of 50 million.