Story by Chris Graham

We know, on the one hand, that no matter what we do, no matter how hard we try, we’re not going to be able to stop every single person who is determined to shoot up a school or college campus or blow up an airport or shopping mall or sports stadium.

But on the other hand, we still go at the problem like we can, don’t we?

“What happened at Virginia Tech basically shows how in principle how easy it is to do terrorism. If one guy with two guns can cause this much havoc, you don’t exactly need thousands of terrorists in the country to do damage,” says John Mueller, a political-science professor at Ohio State University and a nationally known expert on national-security issues.

That isn’t to say that we’re all doomed, basically. But for every day that goes by without a terrorist attack or a school shooting, there are the dates that we now know by the numbers - 9/11 and 4/16 - that are going to forever be etched in our collective consciousness.

“The good news is that schools are the safest place for one to be - and colleges tend to be safer than the public schools, in that there’s a greater sense of tolerance, that the folks there are at a higher cognitive level, and tend to have more restraints,” says Tom McIntyre, the coordinator of the graduate program in behavior disorders at Hunter College.

“That said, though, colleges are realizing that they are receiving more students, they are enrolling more students, who have mental-health needs - that medications allow individuals who previously couldn’t have functioned in a social or academic situation, it allows them to function within normal parameters. And ironically, it may have been the medication that allowed Cho Seung-Hui to carry out his plan - instead of laying in bed and eating Fig Newtons - while for the vast, vast majority of those with mental-health needs, medication helps them function within normal realm,” McIntyre says.

“Campus security and police will learn from his methodology and how to prevent that. Emergency responders will learn something else. Professors will learn something else. College and university administrators will learn something else. We’ll all learn something from it,” McIntyre says.

Included on that list are those responsible for security at sports and shopping venues - like Jonathan Lusher, the executive vice president of the Bannockburn, Ill.,-based IPC International, one of the heavies in the shopping-mall security industry.

“The most difficult and perhaps most unique aspect to shopping-center security - and this is the case in similar types of venues - is that the business of security there is not to keep people out, and in fact the business is dependent upon people being able to come in. It’s not a controlled environment by any means - by design and by intent, it’s not a controlled environment,” Lusher says.

“I don’t want to say that we are totally powerless to deal with these kinds of circumstances. It’s important to say that we do training, and a lot of other places do training, to try to recognize these people when they are present. Not to recognize them long ahead, but to recognize a certain type of behavior when people come into a venue - whether it’s a shopping center or a building or whatever - and to try to identify behaviors that may indicate behaviors that are going to be threatening,” Lusher says.
“It’s hard to say with the shooter at Virginia Tech - obviously the behaviors that were a problem were observed long before. But the problems of seeing someone come in with a gun - obviously you have an immediate clue,” Lusher says.

“We train our folks to recognize certain things that may have some commonality with terrorists and some of the behaviors that they may exhibit that are typical to people who are going to commit terrorist acts. And those aren’t that different than what criminals in general may exhibit. Some of the common examples - if it’s August and 95 degrees, and someone comes in wearing a black trenchcoat that’s buttoned up, and he looks very sad, then that’s somebody that you’re going to be paying attention to,” Lusher says.

“We could probably say this case was an isolated event - but it did bring to light discussions of safety and the mental health of students on campus and how we’re handling disturbed students,” says Lynn Jamieson, a professor at Indiana University who is an expert on government and management policies in sports administration.

“In this case at Virginia Tech, it was a classroom. But by the same token, his particular mental logic, you could say, could have been to strike any place on that campus. Obviously there was a certain amount of premeditation here - so he did target. So I guess it wouldn’t be too hard for us to say that sporting events could also be targeted,” Jamieson says.

Jamieson says that surveys of sports facilities in the United States and Canada post-9/11 have shown that facilities managers are taking security seriously - rigorously checking bags, coolers and other items at the door and locking down their environs between events, “as well as performing screening of staff and updating the processes they used for event day, including credentials for anyone who’s associated with a group as well as the group members themselves.”

“Some of them were also monitoring their air intakes - and some of them, a few, were monitoring water pipes,” Jamieson says.

But even with all this attention to detail, “it’s almost become cliche to say that these aren’t the kinds of things that you can do a heckuva lot to prevent,” Jonathan Lusher says.
“You have someone who’s obviously very disturbed - and there isn’t a lot that one can do to really get in the way of someone who is that determined, and in this case, and many of the cases, is determined in fact to die. That’s the first thing that has to be said,” Lusher says.

“Whether or not it’s cliche, or whether it’s the most important thing, it certainly is important to say - that you’re not going to be able to stop someone who is that determined to kill himself and other people. I mean, certainly, real professionals in personal protection, such as the Secret Service, are well aware that such a determined person such as a suicide bomber is just very, very difficult to deter or to prevent or even to intercept,” Lusher says.

But does that in and of itself mean that we’re essentially not safe?
“Of course we’re not safe. It’s impossible to be completely safe and invulnerable,” John Mueller says.

“But then, we’ve been almost perfectly safe since 9/11, in the sense that everyone has been perfectly safe from terrorism since then because none has taken place. And there hasn’t been all that much happening around the world outside war zones, either,” Mueller says.

“One other thought - somebody somewhere should come up with some kind of statistic about how often this happens. In the case of school shootings, it seems to me that we have to go back to 1966 to find a previous example - the shooting at the University of Texas. That is a bit of a statistic - in that there haven’t been any since then. That should be emphasized continuously,” Mueller says.

Filed under: 6-July 2007 Issue