“THIS is the face of the girl who may have sparked the worst school shooting in US history.”

I cannot believe anyone in the the media would run with this. Oh, wait. Yes I can.

This shooting didn’t happen in a private home or in the street or in an off campus apartment.

It happened on-campus.

If it had happened in a courthouse or a public school (or hell, even in a mall), then even if they had a suspect, the place would have been shut down and they would have made absolute 100% certain that everything was okay and the shooter had been caught and there weren’t any other armed persons on the loose. Because government buildings and schools are responsibile for ensuring public safety and can’t take stupid, unecessary chances with the public’s lives. Just like colleges and universities have responsibilities to their students, faculty, and staff to prevent FORSEEABLE consequences.

Like, say, the consequences of letting a guman roam around campus freely without trying to stop him or do anything to protect the college community.

The fact that this girl had a boyfriend and he had guns in his house isn’t really good enough evidence to completely drop the ball on the good possibility that there was still a dangerous person on-campus–especially in VA, where gun laws are very lax and there’s a big hunting culture. If she had been killed by a really unusual weapon that’s banned in VA and he had it, maybe, but even there not nearly enough evidence to take such a chance with the entire campus population. It’s insane.

Evidence would be something like finding a signed note with the boy’s name on it saying I hate her and I did it, and even then, anyone with half a brain would start evacuating and posting guards at all the buildings just to be safe.

Yeah, a girl was killed, but as you so charmingly pointed out, so was a guy. Even if it’s somehow a given, which it isn’t, that girls can only be killed by their boyfriends, how do they know the target wasn’t the guy, and the girl just happened to get in his way, or the killer knew the guy’s helpfulness MO and decided to get in some random girl’s face to smoke out the guy and get him out of the building? How do they know that the whole thing wasn’t a case of mistaken identity with the killer on his way to his actual target, or that the killer had another target and shot both initial victims because they wouldn’t tell him where to find the real target? How do they know the gunman doesn’t have an equally maladjusted couple of buddies who are killing people elsewhere while all the attention is drawn to the dorm? How do they know that the whole thing isn’t a completely random case of a lunatic going around shooting people indiscriminately?

Yeah, see, they kind of don’t. That’s the problem with taking ridiculous chances with public safety. You don’t know anything except somebody with a gun came on to your campus, you have two dead bodies, and you don’t have the shooter. A few cops questioning and containing a potential suspect while everybody else locksdown the campus, makes sure everyone else is safe and makes sure there are no other shooters, would be reasonable. But neglecting to do anything beyond “knows one victim, has a gun, no, not here but in an off campus townhouse with the 9 million other guns in town, CASE CLOSED, we have no real reason to presume that this is the guy, but can you prove it isn’t”? Not so much. When somebody’s already opened fire outside in a public space on an open campus, you need to be damn sure you’re right or the potential consequences aren’t that hard to envision.

It’s not about hindsight so much as about not being a complete and total moron. Doing everything in your power to prevent an easily forseeable tragedy. I don’t know any psychics, but I do know hundreds of people whose first reaction was, “did they just say he killed people in a dorm AND a classroom? How is that even possible? How could he kill people in two different buildings?”

“Um, it must be one of the dorms that has classrooms in it. There’s no way he could have killed people in two different locations with the campus secured and cops posted everywhere after the first shootings. Well, maybe he managed to kill one cop outside before all the other cops closed in on him.”

I wasn’t doing it to score a cheap political point. I’m not sure how else to explain this, other than to say that I do view the world from a particular perspective — feminism is what I write about, what I study, what I read, and what I want to do with my life. It colors how I interpret things. To me, the gender thing wasn’t political — if I had somehow blamed the pro-life movement or right-wing extremists, then to me, that would have been political. To me, pointing out gender issues or misogyny isn’t always for the furtherance of a political ideal. It’s an observation, the same way I’m sure a lot of people observed during the Columbine era, “Wow, there are a lot of angry white boys shooting up schools” without trying to blame men or whiteness or making a political point about the 2nd amendment.

My intention was not to promote a political ideal. I was reacting as it was being reported, the same way everyone else was. That was my reaction. I didn’t over-think it when I posted it, any more than I over-thought posting that this is the deadliest school shooting in American history. I’m sorry that it came across as my trying to score a political point.

Look, you have a good point in that there is a theme of misogyny running through these shootings, and that some stories are already shamefully exploiting this tragedy by blaming the first victim/young lady.

As someone who isn’t exactly exposed to feminist theory often I find this blog enlightening, I enjoy reading it. All I was asking was that maybe you can wait a day before you start making your political points regarding this tragedy . . . but I guess that was too much to ask.

you mean the guy cho wasn’t specifically targeting? The guy who’s death must have confused the hell out of the campus police; it’s a domestic dispute, we think a guy killed both his male and female lovers.

So clearly it’s not misogynistic because the college thought it was a bisexual domestic dispute – which is why they didn’t pay much attention to it. It’s all about the bi menz obviously.

It would also explain why the email they sent out told students to “be cautious of a man who is believed to be armed and may in fact sleep on both sides of the bed if you get what I mean. If he attempts to kiss you and you’re a guy, react in over exaggerated horror while secretly getting mildly turned on.”

so, detaining the most likely suspect in a domestic violence dispute is doing jack shit?

So in between arresting the wrong man for the crime, and releasing that pissant email warning of the fact that the killer was still at large – not putting it on the speakers that there’d been a few murders and that the college was closing down or anything that would have saved lives, oh no, an email message telling people to “be cautious” because, umm… what was it again? oh right A CRAZY MAN WITH A GUN IS GOING AROUND KILLING PEOPLE! – they knew that the boyfriend wasn’t the killer and yet… an email was the best they could do?

Oh right, they did launched into some sort of inexplicable ethnic profiling thing after the second lot of shootings was underway – and succeeded in nabbing one random asian student with a camera. while the shooting was still going on. Presumably because the sound of gunfire was a routine thing in the engineering section of the college, and so the police felt they had the time and leisure to just arrest any old asian guy – which I think is fair enough becuase they all do look alike, and also project a field that makes us roundeyes unable to tell whether or not any particular asian is currently proceeding to go around shooting people for shits and venting.

If someone shoots two people on the campus the school should shut down – doesn’t matter if they think they’ve got the killer or not, the college should have sent everyone away on the basic principle of the thing, seeing as two people had been killed – the failier to do which would have looked fucking odd anyway had the killings actually stopped at just those first two – but they didn’t, and even when they knew the killer was still around somewhere, they decided that drawing too much attention to the fact that an armed killer was wandering the grounds would have been uncouth or something.

Clark (remember him?)

Yeah, thanks for not being an asshat. We do remember him. And see, that’s another problem. Because if we’re supposed to think along with VT that abusive boyfriends only pop their girlfriends and would never dream of hurting anyone else, whoops. This guy already killed somebody else. Wow. That’s random violence. Seems like he might be a real danger, huh? Well, let’s hope we got the right guy, the only guy, based on no actual evidence but statistical probabilities, I’d hate to think what might happen if we just took the attitude of “ehhh, let’s hope for the best” in an ongoing emergency crisis situation.

But I have no doubt that if this guy had killed two men and the cops excused not doing anything about the possibility of a gun toting maniac running around with, “Dudes are way more likely to popped by guys they know. We figured he popped who he came for and that was the end of it, yeah he killed one other guy but why wouldn’t he stop there? We were totally interviewing his best friend!” then that would be accepted as reasonable, proactive police work that’s all about public safety. Hindsight, it would take a clairvoyant to predict any problems with that scenario.