This is just a complete nightmare, I feel like my head is going to explode just thinking about it. The way the university handled this situation was absolutely inexcusable, and there's going to be holy hell to pay (to say nothing of the 30+ families whose lives will never, never be the same).

More than two hours after two students were brutally murdered on campus, people were still blithely waking up, taking showers, eating breakfast, packing their backpacks and heading off to class with no idea of the enormous danger they were in, and even at that point the best effort made to alert them was via E-MAIL?! I don't know about you, but my experience of college students (and professors!) is that they roll out of bed at the last possible moment, especially if they have morning classes, and there is no guarantee they'll have (or take) time to check their e-mail to see if they're in imminent peril of being shot in German class.

It's appallingly, needlessly, senselessly tragic how many times and at how many junctures the ball was dropped by the authorities charged with these students' safety and welfare. After the first shooting it was "assumed" the gunman had run away and left campus...oh, that's all right, then, back to business as usual?! Why on earth wasn't the local media alerted? That first incident should have been on the radio, on the television, announced over every loudspeaker on campus and in every forum anyone in that community had access to AND e-mailed. Had they done so, it's very likely that a number of lives might have been spared. I heard some "expert" on the news opining that to have done so would have risked causing a panic. Well, what did they get instead? Panic and the mass slaughter of innocent people.

I'm sick at heart that such a thing could happen: that a young person so sick and damaged should have gone unrecognized, that he had such ready access to such deadly weapons, and such an ungodly amount of ammunition, the feebleness of the response to the deaths of two young people in a place where they are supposed to be safe and free to develop their minds, that so many of their peers and teachers had to die as a result of that feebleness...I'm with Giok: the NRA can fuck off, we need stricter gun control and we need it yesterday.

~D