I’m in a blustery mood tonight, so here’s another rant.

I’m sick of people, primarily the media, using hindsight to reach absurd conclusions about how people should have acted.  This issue set me off after the Enterprise tornado when some people suggested that the school should have let kids go home earlier.  It’s easy for a reporter from New York or LA who isn’t familiar with frequent tornado producing storms to make such a statement.  But this is Alabama, a tornado prone state.  If schools throughout the South and Midwest did a knee jerk dismissal and sent kids to their (usually less structurally sound) homes then they might never finish the school year.  When storms are predicted sometimes you have to wait and see how the storm progresses before you release the kids.

Think of it this way, how many times have schools not promptly released kids in the face of a dangerous storm that eventually doesn’t produce a tornado?  Certainly there are no hard figures, but I would hazard a guess that it is a fairly frequent occurrence.  No one ever complains.  But in the extremely rare instance when a tornado does hit a school some fault the administration for a decision that would not have garnered a single critical observation otherwise.

As for the shooting at VaTech and the now infamous two hour gap between the first shooting and the second, much larger scale shooting…

Think about this alternate scenario.  Supposedly the campus police were under the impression that the shooter in the dorm attack was a former boyfriend.  Typically in murders (we see enough reports of them on the news to make an educated guess) the assailant leaves the scene of the crime and tries to maintain a low profile or flees in order to avoid capture.  It is rare to hear about further violence hours later after an apparent crime of passion.  So given that scenario, what if the university had used their severe weather sirens to transmit voice notification that a gunman was on the loose?  Would that have caused mass hysteria?  I can see the headlines now if that happened and a couple of students were stampeded to death in a mass rush of people and then it turned out that the first murder was in fact an isolated crime of passion, posing no threat to the campus at large.  The media would excoriate the administration for their rash warning.

The impetus for issuing a prompt, sweeping warning after the first crime isn’t clear to me.  VaTech is home to over 26,000 students and faculty, which makes it larger in population than my hometown of Enterprise, AL.  Although murders were rare in Enterprise I don’t recall any hysterical warnings to the public immediately after a homicide.  Ironically no one complained about the lack of instant notification after subsequent shootings didn’t occur.

It’s natural to want to know why tragedies happen and it is productive to explore ways to better react.  But, far too many people use the enhanced hindsight we enjoy today through greater information access to assume that these tragedies were preventable.

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This entry was posted by Brian on Wednesday, April 18th, 2007 at 8:30 pm and is filed under Rants. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site. Please note the copyright policy.