No Excuse

There is absolutely no excuse for this:

Virginia Tech officials could have saved lives if they had quickly warned the campus that two students had been shot to death and a killer was on the loose, a panel that investigated the attacks said Thursday.
Instead, it took administrators more than two hours to get out an e-mail warning students and staff to be cautious. The shooter had time to leave the dormitory where the first two victims were killed, mail a letter, and then enter a classroom building, chain the doors shut and kill 31 more people, including himself.

Two hours. For two blasted hours those students were sitting ducks for that madman. If it was one of my kids that had been on that campus that day, dead or not, I'd have been trembling with rage right about the time I read that. This goes way the hell beyond bad planning if you ask me; this, folks, clearly rises to the level of flat-out criminal malfeasance. If Virginia Tech administrators were not going to allow students the means of defending themselves, then damn it, they should have come up with a better plan than the one they had in place. Seems this one takes the old saying to an entirely new level: "When seconds count, the cops are only two hours away."
And as if that wasn't bad enough, consider the response of the Virginia governor to one parent's demand that university officials be held accountable for their complete and utter failure:

Mr. Kaine, however, told the Associated Press that school officials have suffered enough, and that firing them wouldn't help prevent future incidents.

Call me crazy, but I would think "future incidents" damn well could be prevented if the fired officials' replacements came up with a better plan than the one that was in place before. And call me insensitive too, but considering said criminal malfeasance of these officials, I for one couldn't give a tinker's damn about their "suffering." It was their dropping the ball several times along the way that facilitated that massacre. Heads should roll, and sniveling bureaucrats like Larry Hincker should be called out and loudly ridiculed to boot; after all, we see how his "parents, students, faculty and visitors feel(ing) safe" remark turned out to be the verbalization of such an outrageous delusion. But it's looking as if none of this will happen, and students at Virginia Tech will remain easy targets.