And, yes, I’m quite aware that universities are different than high schools. I have attended a few myself.

…such as using the PA to inform students of the situation…

None of the colleges or universities (three, thus far) I’ve attended has a full-campus PA system. The library will have a PA system that works only in the library. The student union or dining halls may have a PA system if they are set up with Muzak. But not all dining halls will be.

The classrooms and dorms never had a PA system.

High schools use a PA system because they’re set up with everyone in a compact area, and on roughly the same schedule. You can have a daily announcement over the PA system during homeroom, which justifies the cost of installing one.

Universities really don’t need a PA system as part of their ordinary operations. Things like daily announcements during homeroom don’t happen. And the community is much larger, so that there aren’t many announcements of interest to everyone, and there are far too many specific group announcements to fit into a reasonably timed PA announcement.

Elementary and High schools are designed to control movement and keep track of everyone. Universities are designed to facilitate easy movement, and let people move from room to room or building to building as their personal academic needs require.

It is a totally different architecture and infrastructure. Designed to open up, not lock down. Wide doors, open atriums, lounges, libraries, public greens, bridges and tunnels to connect buildings, etc.

10,000 people in 70 different buildings, each on their own schedule, just aren’t controllable in the way that a county high school would be. The entire concept of “lock down” as drilled in elementary schools is impossible.

But a close look at the patterns of murderous violence in the U.S. reveals some remarkable consistencies, wherever the individual atrocities may have occurred. In case after case, decade after decade, the killers have been shown to be young men riddled with shame and humiliation, often bitterly misogynistic and homophobic, who have decided that the way to assert their faltering sense of manhood and get the respect they have been denied is to go out and shoot somebody.

Dr. James Gilligan, who has spent many years studying violence as a prison psychiatrist in Massachusetts, and as a professor at Harvard and now at N.Y.U., believes that some debilitating combination of misogyny and homophobia is a “central component” in much, if not most, of the worst forms of violence in this country.

“What I’ve concluded from decades of working with murderers and rapists and every kind of violent criminal,” he said, “is that an underlying factor that is virtually always present to one degree or another is a feeling that one has to prove one’s manhood, and that the way to do that, to gain the respect that has been lost, is to commit a violent act.”

Violence is commonly resorted to as the antidote to the disturbing emotions raised by the widespread hostility toward women in our society and the pathological fear of so many men that they aren’t quite tough enough, masculine enough — in short, that they might have homosexual tendencies.

In the two hours between the murders of Hilscher and her dorm neighbor Ryan Clark, and Cho’s mass killings at another university building, they chose not to cancel classes or lock down the campus. (They did choose to do so, however, in August 2006, when a man shot a security guard and a sheriff’s deputy and escaped from a hospital two miles away.) Virginia Tech President Charles Steger said authorities believed the first shooting was a “domestic dispute” and thought the gunman had fled the campus, so “We had no reason to suspect any other incident was going to occur.” The assumption, apparently, is that men who kill their cheating girlfriends are criminals, but they are not crazy, not psychopaths, and not a danger to anyone other than the woman in question. (Or, as one reader commented at Feministe sarcastically, “Like killing your girlfriend is no big deal.”)

I should have said that the majority of men who kill their wives don’t then go on to kill strangers.

Majority? No. But it’s common enough that the possibility shouldn’t be blown off. Several of the more infamous high school shooters (including Kip Kinkel) killed their parents or grandparents before showing up at the school with guns. On the adult side, you have people like Mark Barton in Atlanta, who killed his family before he shot up his office, and many, many other examples.

Again, the cops’ mistake was assuming that it was a domestic incident and not exploring any other possibilities. A lot of times, that kind of mistake is fairly minor, but in this case, it came right back around and bit them in the ass. Hard.

It’s not nearly as uncommon as you seem to think.

Fair enough.

I should have said that the majority of men who kill their wives don’t then go on to kill strangers.

But I think the OJ case supports my point instead of refuting it (it was the ex again in that case).

Take a look at it, there seems to be a myth that domestic violence murders on campus are very frequent, and if you had shut down the school for them, you’d have to do it every day and the terrorists will win, or something like that. According to this piece, there were 23 murders committed on campus in 2002, I couldn’t find anything more current. If this piece is true than it’s actually even more rare than I would have thought.

http://www.acha.org/info_resources/Campus_Violence.pdf

Isn’t that assumption supported by the fact that the vast majority of men who kill their girlfriend / wife don’t kill anyone else?

I’d have to disagree with you there. Out here in Los Angeles, we’ve had several cases just in the last few years of disgruntled exes killing not only the ex-girlfriend/ex-wife, but the children and/or other family members. Sometimes even innocent bystanders (you may have heard of a famous case — I think the defendant’s last name was Simpson?)

It’s not nearly as uncommon as you seem to think.

That’s really the issue here — they saw a woman shot dead, and chalked it up as a domestic dispute rather than treat it as a murder.