Virginia Tech: Blame the shooter

We are all mourning today after yesterday's horrific incidents on the campus of Virginia Tech. But I can foresee the mourning turning to anger and frustration soon enough. I think we're going to start seeing headlines about people demanding answers about the administrations reactions or lack-thereof after the first shooting.

While ideally we would all like to believe that the second half of this rampage, which took exponentially more lives than the first, could it have been avoided, I am not so certain that it could. It is far too easy to look back with all that we know now (which still is not much) and say this could have been prevented. In truth, this student seems to have been on a mission and had predetermined that he was going to kill others. I am not so sure that an "aware" student body would have stopped someone with concealed weapons who was also a student.

Listening to the timeline and first response of both police officers and school administrators, I don't believe, initially, that they fell short of what should be expected of a college campus. I was thinking about what the response would have been 20 years ago, and there would have been no e-mails or web site messages or emergency phone public bulletins. All these things were the right use of the technology. I also don't think there was any reason that the shooter would go on the second rampage that occurred. In fact the police seem to have been questioning their primes suspect at the time of the second murders.

Ultimately, we only have one person to blame for all of this: the shooter. And since that person has been counted among those lost, people need another outlet for their pain and frustration. The easiest target becomes the police chief and the school's president, but this doesn't mean they are deserving of such blame. We must give the administration and police credit for doing what they could with the information they had.

It's so hard to be powerless in a situation like this. We want to be mad at the shooter, the administration, the police, the government… maybe even God. It's natural to feel this way, but it doesn't mean that anyone deserves blame for this shooting other than the man who pulled the trigger.