BLACKSBURG, Va. - After a student gunman killed four of his classmates and his German teacher and then left, Derek O'Dell had to wedge one of his sneakers under the classroom door to keep the attacker from returning to kill even more.
There was no lock on the door to protect Derek and his wounded classmates against Seung-Hui Cho, who killed 30 students and faculty members, plus himself, at Virginia Tech's Norris Hall. Two others were killed in a dormitory.
Safety experts say that while school officials across the nation re-evaluate campus safety in the aftermath of the Virginia Tech tragedy, many are overlooking a simple solution: putting locks on the inside of classroom doors.
Of course, the solution is anything other than actually arming the student body. Most of the people Seung Hui Cho gunned down were in the hallways, or those that he shot through doors. What this would've done, in effect, is trap the few students in the halls who were seeking refuge. The very article shows why this wouldn't have worked:
O'Dell was shot in one arm, but he and some classmates barricaded the door to Room 207 with his shoe and their bodies — "the heaviest thing in the room was bolted down and the desks were pretty flimsy," he said — as Cho returned twice to try to finish them off. When he couldn't get in, Cho stepped back each time and fired a round into the door, one shot penetrating O'Dell's black fleece jacket but missing his body.
"It's kind of crazy to think that you have 1 1/2 or 2 inches of wood between you and a person with a gun who just killed half your classmates," said O'Dell, who is working at a veterinary clinic for the summer.
When Cho couldn't get in, he just shot through the door, in this case, hitting a student. In another case, he shot through the door killing teacher Liviu Librescu, 75, as teh teacher barracaded the door with his own body to give his students a chance to escape.
At the end of the day, the best solution costs the school nothing. And that solution is to let the students be armed. To date, there has never been a shooting rampage that has happened on an armed populous. There have, however, been numerous attempts that have been stopped by an armed citizen. If a killer wants to massacre people, it's really quite stupid to suspect that a lock will stop him.
Hell, it doesn't even stop a robber.
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