On April 16th, 2007, an incredibly senseless and selfish act occurred. I'm sure to all of my subscribers this is not news to you - it has now taken over the airwaves and has been earmarked as the worst school shooting to take place in our contry. Brandon Paddock posted a great article related to this whole scenario that I really recommend everyone reads. I won't reiterate it here, but it definitely represents how I feel about the situation.

Some of the things I've found interesting related to this though, are the needs for a scapegoat. Outside of the obvious fact that Cho Seung-Hui is taking the fall for this (rightfully so), it seems a lot of people want to hang this on the university and the police department who investigated the first shooting. Hanging this on the police or university officials is unjustified and a little frustrating to say the least. While I agree all students should have been notified that a shooting occurred, I personally can't think of any way a notification like that could have gone out to them on a multi-building campus. I've heard reports of people suggesting text messages, but I know while I was in class at Sinclair Community College, cell phones had to be off. This was because a few years back this became a very popular method of cheating on an exam - send/receive texts to other friends who can look up answers for you and help you pass an exam you forgot to study. While I don't currently go to college, I am positive rules like this still exist. So chances are pretty high most (if not all) students would have had their phones off during class (or muted) and wouldn't have gotten the message anyways. And calling every classroom wouldn't have worked either - I'm sure there are hundreds of classrooms and going through all of them would have taken far longer than this whole event did anyways.

Not to mention, they thought this was an isolated incident. I remember pulling up CNN and seeing an article about two people being shot on campus and the suggestions of a murder-suicide were rampant. Right away my heart went out to the victims involved, but I (as many others across the country) probably quickly looked at it as an open/shut case. Just as I was leaving for lunch I pulled up CNN again to check (I do this many times during the day, every day) and was shocked with what I read. No one could have predicted what happened with the evidence at hand, so trying to hang guilt on law enforcement is just absurd. Everyone wants some form of justice - something Cho will never see (depending on your beliefs of course - I won't go into this side of things though), just don't add to the guilt those officers are probably experiencing anyways. They know it was the wrong call, but they couldn't have known that at the time. I think they did an excellent job overall, and while it's 100% regrettable what happened, we can't burden them with this.

A very close friend of mine, Rauni McMillan wrote a little something about this incident, and I've included it below with her permission. If anyone takes this to post on their blogs or shares with friends, please make sure she gets the credit for it. The poem was actually written last year in response to the 1999 Columbine school shootings, but it is more than applicable here as well.


Also, even more disturbing is the article on CNN from Lou Dobbs. While there are times I don't agree with him, this article hits it dead on. It's very sad that it takes something so gruesome, brutal, and public to get our attention - but if it does, and we correct these things then those who lost their lives on April 16th won't have died in vain.