Well, fuck.

I don’t know what the final tally is going to be, nor the reason for such senseless slaughter. But the odds are, if one, just ONE of the victims had been armed, it would have been stopped. Hell, if you armed the entire classroom, the casualties from “friendly fire” if everyone opened up would have been far less than what we have here.

Cold of me? Ask yourself, in the end, which is worse — you take one in the back or fifteen more people die? Get back to me when you can come up with a counter that isn’t a variation of “you can’t say that’s how many would die!”

I’d take my chances with overzealous classmates; at least I know the idiot who might shoot me in the back is trying to save lives. Althought I’d guess that in reality, only about one in ten would actually attempt to return fire right away. Most people in our society don’t have what it takes to go from zero to ‘protect the tribe’ instantly.

Update: there’s at least one report that he chained the doors shut to keep people from escaping. Nobody noticed him doing that? Nice. Oh, and it’s already been noted that not only is Va. Tech a “gun free zone,” but a bill in the state legislature to revoke that status and allow students to carry, failed last year.

Update 2:

Steven notes:

I’ve been informed that some reports are now referring to him as “Oriental” rather than “Asian”. Which probably means that the M-word isn’t involved. We’re back to the “lovelorn loser who snapped” theory as being the most likely, based on highly inadequate information.

Very inadequate, and very questionable, the way the media operates. I’m thinking of the fact that, classically, Orient included the Middle East, hence “Orient Express.”

CNN sez:

Flinchum said at a Monday night news conference that they had a preliminary identification of the shooter at Norris Hall but were not releasing it.

With every major news agency tripping over themselves to get any shred of news about this story, if we don’t get a name or a picture tomorrow, my BS detectors are going to start twitching.

There’s been several references to him trying to shoot his girlfriend, so we’re probably all jumping at shadows, but I really, really don’t trust the media on this one. Rumors get reported as facts, and they’ve shown a willingness to overlook ethnicity when it suits them. There’s even hints being dropped that it was actually 2 separate unrelated incidents — which I’m sure the University would like to be true.

Hindsight is 20/20, but I think we’re going to see some failures of nerve and common sense at Va.Tech come to light before it’s all said and done. Sadly, in the modern world, any large-school administrator that hasn’t devoted some thought to the “mad shooter” scenario is remiss; any administrator with a police department that hasn’t drawn up a plan is incompetent.