Understand, this was the University of Southern California, a school catering mostly to middle- and upper-middle class suburban kids, located adjacent to one of the most economically depressed neighborhoods in urban America. We lived in South Central Los Angeles, which at the time did not have the ghetto cache of Watts (which, counter to the popular notion of 'SC, is actually located twenty blocks to the south), but was certainly not the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains. This was far from a benign environment, plus crack was making its first foothold, and there were always stories of break-ins and car thefts, though very few muggings. For those individuals who felt they needed it, an (unarmed) escort service was available to accompany one from place to place after dark. Beyond that, USC security reserved the right to demand a student ID from any suspicious character (and since the surrounding neighborhood was 95% black and Hispanic, that inevitable meant that the overwhelming number of people stopped by security were from a minority, which led to accusations of racism and comparisons to apartheid, quite the thing at the time).
Still, the university refused to seal off the university from the surrounding community, on the grounds that doing so would cause more harm than good. As it happened--and for whatever reason--the physical university survived the King riotof 1992 entirely unscathed, even as whole neighborhoods to the north and west burned to the ground.
Still, deciding to leave the campus open brings with it some certainties, one of which is: Nothing, nothing is in place to prevent whoever should desire to bring a weapon on campus. Nothing exists to prevent said person from opening fire on whoever he or she decides to shoot.
And finally, no mechanism exists--none--to alert a sprawling campus of 26,000 students and 2600 acres as to a "lock-down," evacuation or whatever.
In Godfather, Part II, Al Pacino put it well: "If history has proven anything, it's that you can kill anyone."
Lee Strasberg, as Hyman Roth, put it better: "This . . . is the business we've chosen."
Jack Dunphy (a nom d' cyber of an LAPD officer writing for NRO), puts his expertise to good use:
Let us suppose that the police had indeed shut down the school at 7:30 A.M., just after the first shooting. The Virginia Tech campus has scores of buildings spread across 2,600 acres, and there are 26,000 students enrolled there. There aren’t enough police officers in the entire state of Virginia to seal the campus off completely. But even if it had been shut down, then what? How long does it stay shut down, and how do you know when it’s safe to open it up? Do you strip search every last person on campus before letting them leave? And if the suspect is contained within one of the buildings, what’s to prevent him from killing the people he’s contained with?
The rush to blame the school’s administration and police is a reflection of a society that believes any and all misfortune can be averted by the proper application of government will. At this very moment, politicians in Richmond, Va., and Washington, D.C., are exerting their tiny brains trying to be the first to propose legislation that will “prevent the next tragedy.” The number of laws the killer broke on Monday will probably run to more than 20, but there are those who actually believe he might have been deterred by a few more strokes of a legislative pen. I can’t put it any more simply than this: There are evil people in the world, and no amount of laws will make them any less so.
There may be a level of security that would deter a suicidal maniac from carrying out the kind of horrors seen on the Virginia Tech campus Monday morning, but I doubt anyone would want to attend the school that implemented it.
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