Virginia Tech shooting
Associate Professor Robert Heath - University of South Australia
17 April 2007
Robert Heath is a crisis management expert at the University of South Australia. In this entry, Robert discusses several issues related to today's shooting at Virginia Tech in the US state of Virginia.

There are various issues that can be summed up in about five areas.

1. COULD THIS TRANSLATE TO AUSTRALIA?

Of course the answer to that is that we have less ownership and less access to weaponry (automatic and semi-automatic) but we have had some university firearm incidents.

One of the major questions being asked was did the authorities react effectively.

People forget that what happened was police were called to a double homicide and then at least one hour later a multiple homicide occurred more than a kilometre away. While it is now quite likely these are connected events, they need not connect the two incidents. The police response seems reasonable and expected.

I would also assess the university response as reasonable. They claim to have used emails and the weather alert system but we need to remember that most students and staff will not check emails as they are coming onto campus.

2. CLOSING DOWN THE CAMPUS

There were some questions about whether they should close the campus down.

This is like trying to close down a large city – with a campus of 2600 acres; there are lots of points of entry. You have to assess thing two ways – if you shut the system down and people are walking aimlessly around the campus then you may be making them vulnerable to the threat.

3. HOW DOES THIS HAPPEN?

I’m surprised that it doesn’t happen more often given the access to firearms in the US and psychological problems that people experience.

At this point I am speculating, but what does happen is that people with specific access to arms and specific psychological issues usually hit a trigger point and this trigger point can be rejection by a partner, or would-be partner, a life failure such as failure in exams, losing a job or failure to get a job, and a perception – and this is critical – that the world has disadvantaged them. So you need A: the access, B: the motivation, and C: the psychology (eg: “I’m better than this, I’m going to show you all” etc).

This decision is either an impulse decision out of anger or it’s pre-meditated. When you have a trigger point and kill one person, it’s easier to kill more people.

4. EXPECTATIONS
I think we again need to look at expectations. Expectations can be split into three parts.

• Our expectation of having a safe society (something that politicians tend to discuss when there’s an election) is somewhat misleading. In general our society is safe. However when a serious incident happens, we expect that solutions will quickly be found. Whether this is because too much crime and mystery on films and TV create this expectation, or whether it is our wish, the reality is that while most of us will never be touched by crime or a disaster, crime and disaster happens on a daily basis.
• Can we expect a better response either in America or Australia than what we saw at Virginia Tech – the answer is probably not and this is because we over-expect personal safety in our communities and fail to understand how difficult it is to make correct decisions when you have missing or uncertain information. By and large anywhere in the western world, when a spree killing happens, the first responsibility of the response agency is to secure the area and try to ensure no further casualties (including themselves).
• For first responders, this leads to a serious question in terms of how much they intervene to prevent further casualties when they do not know whether there is more than one offender and who or what this offender looks like.

5. MANAGING THE MEDIA
This is related to managing the media in these events and dealing with the victims etc. As a society, we need to understand due process in criminal investigation, first of which is that it is usual for the law enforcement agency to inform the family of victims. When there is a multiple fatality this takes time. Second, criminal investigations means things are closed down for some time to enable forensic investigation. Just because one appears to identify the offender doesn’t mean that you can assume you have a solution. The chain of evidence becomes important in these events.

IN CONCLUSION
From a community perspective, there is always some shock and disbelief. It is quite probable that when more information comes out about the offender or offenders that colleagues and friends would say there was no sign that this person would commit such an offence, and this is because the processes are deeply cognitive and psychological. Just what caused the shootings may emerge in time but we need to understand the psychological cause and affect and point of view of the offender. In other words, one reason we do not understand is because at that point in time the human offender is not thinking and valuing elements of his or her world as the larger or normal group of people would.

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