It's been four months since the Virginia Tech massacre. The tragedy is no longer in the national news, and the school is once again more associated with Michael Vick and a good football team than it is with the largest school shooting in modern history.
However at Virginia Tech, nobody has forgotten. Approximately one out of every 600 students at Virginia Tech died during the rampage, leaving enough holes in the lives of the remaining students and faculty for that day to be indelibly imprinted it their lives.
Obviously those left alive asked for answers. And just as obviously, answers meant scapegoats. When the man who murders your friends doesn't have the decency to stay alive long enough for you to ask him why, you turn elsewhere for the answer.
Thanks to the recent report that came out on the shooting, fault can now be pointed at administrators, advisers, counselors, faculty who didn't notice the kid was loopy… basically everybody.
But what about this instead? Blame the kid. We can learn from what happened and the breakdowns in the system that occurred, but placing blame on anyone but that guy is as cruel as it is stupid.
We all meet people every day who seem a bit anti-social, or mad at the world, or crazy, or just kind of weird. They live among us. And sometimes, completely randomly, somebody snaps.
But we can't, and will never be able to predict it. We can't predict the weather, the stock market, or the outcome of a football game. How on Earth was anyone magically supposed to know this kid was going to kill 32 people?
Was it a mistake not to shut down the campus after the first two deaths? Probably.
But was it a mistake to have not known the man was going to kill? No it wasn't.
Yesterday a girl at UA allegedly stabbed her roommate to death and then stabbed herself. The accused killer is expected to recover.
Because it was a smaller incident than Virginia Tech there are no calls for UA's president to resign. There are no inquiries into how the police department failed.
In fact, according to the Tucson Citizen, many UA students walking around campus today seemed oblivious to the death.
Were there warning signs? Possibly. Could this have been prevented? No more than the initial killings at Virginia Tech.
Virginia Tech has 20,000 students. Here at ASU, we are a campus of more than 50,000 students. Most of us sit in 500 person lecture halls and only learn the names of half our teachers. Professors, administrators, councilors and others expected to watch out for our mental health likely have no idea who we are.
So no, they wont know if that shifty eyed kid from your Computer Science class is about to snap. And neither will you. All we can do is be ready.
