May 2007 — News
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Long Odds, Short Fuses
Still, these things can and do happen, and with much greater recorded frequency than major asteroid strikes (albeit with much lower destructive power).
So how do you plan for such an event? Is it preventable?
Following the Virginia Tech massacre, security products vendors went on their own rampage, implying or stating outright that the whole incident could have been avoided if only the university had deployed [fill in name of product here] at the time. In editorials, television media personalities lambasted Virginia Tech's administration for failing to shut the university down following the first incident of the day, in which two students were murdered.
Both of these are utterly wrong.
First, the vendors. Aside from the extraordinarily bad taste exhibited by some of them in issuing self-promotions on the very same day as the Virginia Tech massacre and using the massacre as a vehicle for selling products, their assertion that any one technology product could have prevented the mass murder is, simply, false. There absolutely are great technologies out there that might have helped somewhat in that situation and could help in other crises. But prevent?
Technology can be an effective tool in deterring rational criminals. For example, security cameras placed in obvious positions, along with posted notifications that active surveillance is taking place, might very well deter kidnappers and thieves from engaging in criminal activity on a campus--the types of criminals who are there to gain something, not just to wreak destruction on crowds of people before ending their own lives. Technology can also be immensely effective in crisis response, regardless of the type of crisis occurring. It can help communicate en masse to students and parents; it can help direct people to assistance; it can help first responders assess the situation rapidly. But, short of motion-tracking machine gun nests that can somehow differentiate between a mass murderer and a student, it can't do anything about suicidal-homicidal maniacs attacking your students. Metal detectors can often prevent guns and other weapons from being brought into a school; but the thought of bunching up all of your students in one location at one time to pass through a metal detector in order to prevent a mass murderer from bringing a gun into school ought to strike you as fairly ill-conceived. And in the context of mass murder, the same is true of any solution that causes large masses of students to bunch up at your school's entrance waiting to get in.
How much security--technological or otherwise--would it require to make a student invulnerable to bullets or other lethal weapons? Bullet-proof vests? Gas masks? Anti-aircraft missiles for the time when somebody decides to crash an airplane into a school? Do you assign security guards to form a human shield around each individual student? Do you put Geiger counters in your school in the event that a neighborhood kid is building a nuclear reactor in his back yard? Yes, that has actually happened (Silverstein 1998). Incidentally, the neighborhood kid, David Hahn, was allowed to stay in his high school following the revelation of his activities. Times must have been much simpler way back then in the '90s.
