Let the excuses begin.  The School and the Government are going to vigorously defend themselves and blame the other.  I am going to deconstruct this dreck in detail.  At the bottom, I will note the real solution which the panel ignored.

 Va. Tech president defends school’s response, while the Governor-appointed panel sharply critical of university’s actions

Virginia Tech’s president, facing calls for his ouster, defended his university’s response to the nation’s deadliest school shooting, saying Thursday that officials couldn’t have known the gunman would attack twice.

He is right.  The initial attack was a homicide in the dorm, and like it or not, sometimes that happens.  There was nothing overt to suggest he was planning to make it a massacre, and in fact, one of the victim's boyfriend was considered a person of interest initially.  As the timeline shows:

TIMELINE:  7.15am -  Virginia Tech Police Department receives an emergency call to go to a dormitory room at West Ambler Johnston Residence Hall at the Virginia Tech University.  Officers and members of the Virginia Tech rescue squad arrive to find two people, a man and a woman, have been shot dead in a dormitory.  The hall is closed off, students are asked to remain in their rooms and police begin collecting evidence and identifying witnesses.

The university authorities believe the deaths are "an isolated incident, domestic in nature."

Between 7:30 am and 8:00 am: Heather Haugh, Emily Hilscher's friend and roommate arrived to meet her to go to chemistry class together. When she asked about Hilscher, Haugh was questioned by detectives and gave them the information that Hilscher would usually spend weekends with her boyfriend, Karl Thornhill, at his off-campus townhouse. She explained that on Monday mornings Thornhill would drop off Hilscher and go back to Radford University where he was a student, and that Thornhill was an avid gun user. This led the police to seek him out as a "person of interest."

Right out the gate, they were looking in all the wrong places.  It wasn't until several hours later that the massacre began.  So the question is, should they lock down the campus any time there is a death in the dorms? 

And why is no one blaming the girl?  She fingered the boyfriend and led the police down the garden path.  IsSn't she partially respnosible for their failure to act?

No.  Why?  Because it was a logical, typical and very reasonable belief.  It is more likely to have been a murder by someone known and close to the victims then a crazed mass murderer.

“Nobody can say for certain what would have happened if different decisions were made,” President Charles Steger told a news conference.

True, but that is a meaningless evasion.

“The crime was unprecedented in its cunning and murderous results,” he said.

True I guess, but again that is no excuse.

A governor-appointed panel that investigated the April 16 massacre at the Blacksburg campus released a report late Wednesday criticizing Virginia Tech officials, saying they could have saved lives if they had acted more quickly to warn students about the first shootings that morning at a dormitory and that a killer was on the loose.

Dude.  There are killers on the loose every friggin day.  Unless they had a reason to believe the killer was armed and still in the area, what good would that have done.  Sure, notify faculty that a murder was committed, but are you proposing a general panic on that basis?   Should any campus violence cause an immediuate lockdown?

Instead, it took administrators more than two hours to send students and staff an e-mail warning. The shooter had time to leave the dormitory, mail a videotaped confession and manifesto to NBC News, then return to campus and enter a classroom building, chain the doors shut and kill 31 more people, including himself.

“Warning the students, faculty and staff might have made a difference,” the panel in its report. “The earlier and clearer the warning, the more chance an individual had of surviving.”

Might.

First, if this had been an isolated act of violence, it would not have made a difference.  Since there was no warning about a possible mass act of violence, this point is meaningless.  A general alert for a murder, thought to be domestic violence killing, would have only pointed the faculty to the wrong person, the suspected boyfriend.

A general alert would also not have stopped the killer, he was a legitimate student, and as he was using hand guns, he would have not appeared remarkable until he started shooting, which is what happened.

President defends the school's actions  Steger said the administration was responding during the hours that passed after the first two students were slain in the dormitory.

“The notion that there was a two-hour gap is a great misconception,” Steger said. “There was continuous action and deliberations from the first event until the second, and they made a material difference in the results of the second event.”

True.  They examined the evidence, and even if their assumptions were later found to be wrong, the evidence and circumstances support them.

“Cho is responsible for the carnage,” he said. “In respect to suggested changes, we recognize, as does the panel, that no plausible scenario was made for how this horror could have been prevent once he began that morning.

Well, yea that's true.  This was an unimagined scenario.

“I am not aware of anything the police learned that would have indicated that a mass murder was imminent.”

Nothing has been demonstrated yet.

One victim’s mother urged the governor to “show some leadership” and fire Steger, and other parents demanded accountability for the errors.

{cough}Scape goat{/cough}  So far I cannot fault him except maybe for one point I will discuss later.

Kaine said instead that parents of troubled children who are starting college should alert university officials, and those officials should “pick up the phone and call the parent” if they become aware of unusual behavior.

Pipe dream.  Most parents live comfortably in a world where their child would never do that.

The eight-member panel appointed by Kaine spent four months investigating the attacks.

It found that even before the killings, the university had failed to properly care for the mentally troubled student gunman, Seung-Hui Cho. On April 16, a quick warning could have made a difference in 31 lives.

“The alert should have been issued and classes should have been closed,” the panel’s chairman, Gerald Massengill, told the AP Thursday.

How would that have helped.  he was not yet connected?  Yes, maybe they should have expelled his crazy ass when they had issues, but so what?  At the time of the event he was not a suspect.

The missed signals make the Virginia Tech case similar to other school shootings. The U.S. Secret Service, which studied 37 school attacks, found that most attackers had engaged in behavior that caused others concern.

That's true.  At the school and beyond he had crazy behavior.  Thank God the liberals insist on touchy feelie approaches to this.  They treat this as a disability, not a disease.

But the panel also concluded that a lockdown of the 131 buildings on campus would not have been feasible. And while the first message sent by the university could have gone out at least an hour earlier and been more specific, Cho likely still would have found more people to kill, it said.

Particularly since no one knew he was involved.  Yea I am going to rub that point in till it stings.  This whole probe and report is crap if it refuses to deal with that reality.

“There does not seem to be a plausible scenario of a university response to the double homicide that could have prevented the tragedy of considerable magnitude on April 16,” the report said. “Cho had started on a mission of fulfilling a fantasy of revenge.”

Ah maybe I was hasty, because that is pure truth.  And ironically it renders the whole report useless.

The report detailed a breakdown in communication about the gunman, who had shown signs of mental health problems for years.

Now, that is a whole separate can of worms.

His middle school teachers had found signs of suicidal and homicidal thoughts in his writings after the Columbine High School shootings in 1999. He received psychiatric counseling and was on medication for a short time. In 2006, he wrote a paper for his Virginia Tech creative writing class about a young man who hates students at his school and plans to kill them and himself, the report said.

Alarm bells are flashing.  And the touchy feelie response?

The university’s counseling center failed to give Cho the support he needed despite the warnings, including his referral to the center in 2005 because of bizarre behavior and concerns he was suicidal, the panel said. It blamed a lack of resources, misinterpretation of privacy laws and passivity.

Bingo.  Lets give him support, make him feel better....bleah bleah.

Individuals and departments at Virginia Tech were aware of incidents that suggested his mental instability, but “did not intervene effectively.

That would have invaded his privacy and been insensitive to his disability.

The report said the response by university and Blacksburg police to the dormitory shootings was well coordinated, and said the police response at Norris Hall was “prompt and effective,” as was triage and evacuation of the wounded. But it also noted university police may have erred in prematurely concluding that the first two shootings were the result of a domestic dispute.

If it looks like a duck, ans quacks like a duck...

It was obvious the boy friend was the first suspect.  He was gone, he had a history of liking guns...

"As you read the report, it’s clear that so many of the mistakes that were made result from a failure of leadership at the very top levels of the university,” said Cathy Read, stepmother of slain freshman Mary Karen Read.

Wrong.  They went by experience.  Do some research and see how many similar killings to the first two happened in a classic domestic violence scenario.

William O’Neil, father of slain graduate student Daniel O’Neil, called it outrageous that no one had been held accountable. “With the exception, of course, of Cho, no one from the university is held accountable,” he said.

Which one of the victims did the University staff kill?  Look I am sympathetic to their losses, but lashing out at people who could not have made a difference is foolish.

“Had some or all of the student body been notified that 2 students were gunned down that morning, they may have had heightened sensitivity to the sound of gunshots and other suspicious activity,” Strollo wrote in an e-mail to the AP. “One or two minutes of notice may have been critical in saving more lives in Norris Hall.”

Are you honestly suggesting that gunshots were NOT considered suspicious, unless a warning was issued to listen for them?  Or seeing someone chain doors?  Please...

The panel is looking for blame because we as people want to find causes, and taking those causes we want to find solutions.  We sleep better then, knowing that we have made sure it could not happen again.

But it can.  It can, and it will.  No matter how hard we try we cannot prevent all cases of violence.  We can stop some, but not all. 

Here is what would have helped.

• Allow students who have legally obtained firearms to carry them.  The report ignores the fact that Cho had a free fire zone with no resistance and no fear of encountering an armed target
• Teach people to resist.  One guy with two guns cannot stand against 10 or 20 people trying to take him down.  We are too pacifistic.
• Deal with mental illness as a disease not a disability.  Stop being so touchy feelie, and actually lock up the people that need to be locked up.

Part of the problem that let this happen is that we are too conditioned about what to expect.  During 911, 3 planes became weapons because the passengers were conditioned to sit quietly and wait for the government to rescue them.  My personal belief is that some of these students likely felt the same way.  Rather then act, they may have assumed they were to be in a hostage situation.

Maybe.  But the simple fact remains.  A relatively small group of people could have disarmed him and ended this.  One armed  and trained individual could have done it by himself.

Rather then focus on blaming each other they need to focus on root causes and realistic solutions.

We have learned NOTHING.  Our colleges will remain a free fire zone for the next crazy idiot.

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