Even though I am currently mulling over ways to revamp this blog (to make it less “smart”, to include fewer “links”, to write more “often”), I am going to write another post that no one wants to read.
If you’ve talked to me IRL, you may have heard me rant about this already but here goes the electronic version.
Virginia Tech. 33 Dead. Crazy person w/ a gun. What went wrong / what should have been done / what could make schools safer?
Not much. A crazy homicidal maniac won’t care too much if he breaks a law when he obtains a firearm. Yes, it may make it harder, but guns, like drugs and abortions, will always be available to desperate people with cash.
We can close campuses, but we can’t close campuses to um... students, which above referenced crazy homicidal maniac was.
We can get police some turbo packs so they can fly really fast to the scene of a crime but see above: crazy homicidal maniac with gun. Oh, and chains to chain doors together.
See my point? Crazy people will do something crazy if they have their mind set to do it. So we have to stop the crazy.
I’m not in any sort of counseling / psychiatric / pastoral field. I’m sure people who are will have lots of insight and wisdom and advice on how to address potential craziness in people.
But I am a lawyer, and I know *something* about laws. Here in Texas, where I am licensed, we have some laws to prevent child abuse. One law is, if you are someone who works with a child (teacher, social worker, day care teacher, etc.) and you have a good faith reasonable belief that the child is or has been abused you have 24 hours to report that to authorities. If you do so, you are immune from civil liability, meaning a parent can’t sue you for making a false claim. If you do not, you are not only immune to civil liability, but you are subject to criminal liability for failing to protect a child. Anybody else in Texas also has civil immunity if you have a good faith, reasonable belief that a child is being abused, and you report it to authorities.
Maybe it’s because I’m a lawyer, but with this Cho guy, I’m hearing a lot of people who saw the warning signs, even administrators at VT, but for whatever reason, their hands were tied, or they were scared to do something.
We need similar laws to the child abuse reporting statutes, for potential school violence. Not only do we need to give civil immunity to those who report potential crazy homicidal maniacs to police, but we need to MANDATE school administrators to do so.
I’m still not sure the Chos of this world can be stopped, but we need to give ourselves the opportunity to do so.
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6 comments:
A big part of the problem though, is how do you figure out who is truly not a threat... didn't one professor actually report him? I thought I'd heard he'd actually been examined by some sort of mental health professional.
It's all so hard. I'm honestly totally confused by ut's campus wide alarm system... how does that work? What are the students supposed to do when it goes off and do they know that? To me it sounds an awful lot like yelling fire in a theater. Plus at VT would they really have set off an alarm because two people were shot and killed on campus? I can't imagine that anyone could have predicted that was a possibility.
There are no easy answers and that sucks.
~~Jenn
Amen! You said that quite well.
Okay, to comment on Jen's post. Had the campus police at least notified the area/state police that he had been accused of stalking another student and sent for psychiatric evaluation, it would have set up flags when he went to buy the guns in the first place. As a legal gun owner, I had to go through an FBI background check and I'm fingerprinted and just about everything I do now is tracked. Big deal. I have no problem with that if it keeps idiots who shouldn't own guns from buying them through the legal channels. Now, it doesn't stop them from buying from Joe Blow on the corner, but, then the penalties are even harsher when you do something stupid with that gun.
Amen. Great point.
Even though this was a smart post I read it. I agree with you!
Good for people to know.
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