Making Schools Safer

It's time to upgrade security and communications on campus.

THE READY availability of handguns in America in general, and in Virginia in particular, is one obvious likely factor in the calamity at Virginia Tech on Monday. As a condition of owning and carrying a gun in Virginia, state law requires practically nothing but a relatively cursory background check -- one that often takes just minutes -- to ensure that a purchaser has no criminal record. The fact that Cho Seung Hui, the killer at Virginia Tech, was able to walk into a Roanoke gun store and buy a 9mm Glock last month -- despite reported concerns by some of his professors about his mental and emotional health -- testifies both to the inadequacy of background checks and to the lunacy of this country's romance with firearms.

Still, even as we applaud advocates of gun control and wish them success, it is naive to think that the gun lobby's influence and money will shrink anytime soon. The massacre at Columbine High School spurred no great rush to enact saner gun laws; unfortunately, Virginia Tech's tragedy may not either. In the meantime, it is critical to examine what can be done to deter, prevent or impede the recurrent episodes of deadly violence that afflict American campuses.

Even schools and colleges constrained by tight budgets and limited resources can take some basic steps, at minimal cost, to prepare for emergencies. One critical way to do that is to improve communications systems so the great majority of students, faculty and staff can be quickly alerted in the event of threats of violence and other emergencies. This can enhance security without turning America's freewheeling campuses into gated communities patrolled by squadrons of armed guards.

On Monday, Virginia Tech sent an e-mail to students, nearly two hours after the first murders, informing them of the shooting -- which at the time was thought to involve a "domestic" dispute -- and advising them to exercise caution. In addition to the obvious-in-hindsight misjudgment, that was also a sadly insufficient way to communicate with 26,000 students, more than half of whom are commuters who may have been already on campus or en route. School administrators must be able to reach students by text message and through the Internet, possibly by using dedicated blogs and networking sites such as Facebook. And prerecorded robocalls to cellphones and telephones in dorm rooms could also be used to inform students more quickly.

A lone gunman bent on mayhem is very hard to stop. We don't know that any systems, no matter how sound, could have averted the carnage at a campus as sprawling and populous as Virginia Tech's. Even if the university had taken just an hour, rather than two, to sound the alarm, and even if it had issued a more dire warning than it did, it may still have been too late to stop the killing. Classes started at 8 a.m., barely 45 minutes after the first shootings, and the gunman might simply have struck sooner if he knew he was being pursued.

Still, it is also possible that information distributed more quickly and widely may have succeeded in keeping some students and faculty from danger. The university's public posture -- its insistence that it made the best possible decisions given the available information at every step of the way -- represents a judgment that is understandable but at best premature. Gov. Timothy M. Kaine (D) is right to appoint an independent panel to examine the entire chain of events in Blacksburg, and administrators at Virginia Tech, and at other campuses across the country, must reexamine, reinvigorate and rehearse their security and communications procedures. For as we all have been reminded, American campuses are not havens from society's pervasive violence.