HMMMM. I see Keelin McDonell has decided that just mentioning the domestic violence angle raised by the police as an explanation for their actions in the Virginia Tech shootings is a great chance to haul out the hoary neoliberal anti-PC schtick I'm sure we all remember exhaustedly from the 1980s. Did I allege "good-ole'-boy misogyny" in this item? No. Did I try to make this "a lesson about un-PC attitudes"? Not unless you think trying to figure out ways that the horrific murder of 32 people could possibly have been prevented is a futile exercise in P.C. Did I decry "sexist" attitudes? No. I never used that word, and for good reason. Had the initial murders been related to "drugs or gambling rather than romance," I'd have made the same point about taking all murders seriously as threats to the community and not just small groups of individuals who know each other. Though I do suspect a drug murder, at least, might have been taken a bit more seriously, since drug addicts are thought to be especially unpredictable and bad, bad people.
But that's purely hypothetical. What's not hypothetical is that murders on college campuses are extremely rare. According to the FBI, there were fewer than five of them in 2005. And Ross Douthat is correct to note that there's no more reason to think intimate partner murders would lead to additional violence than would any other murder. But there's also no less reason to think so, and, since it's human nature to second guess tragedies -- the sad mental refrain "if only, if only" drums alike in every skull -- the point here is to try to see if there can be any lessons learned (cheesy as that phrase may be).
So far, the clearest lesson is that police and college administrators ought to treat every college murder with the same level of concern and speedy community notification, whether they think it was intimate partner violence or not, because every on-campus murder is an "extraordinary" occurrence. There are so few murders on college campuses that such a standard won't create any onerous burdens on colleges, and it's certainly going to be easier for everyone to make that change than to, say, alter the gun-laws in Virginia.
In any event, the more information we get the more it's looking as though the initial police conclusion -- that the the first two murders were an intimate partner incident or some kind of love triangle -- was incorrect. The first woman killed appears to have had no relationship to the shooter, and for all we know the killer never found his girlfriend, for whom witnesses say he was searching. It's possible nothing could have changed yesterday's outcome, and that even immediate notification of the student body of the first murders would have been too little to prevent further carnage, given the killer's grim determination. But right now it's hard for people to hear much over the thudding refrain, if only, if only.
--Garance Franke-Ruta
