The Whistle of a Distant Train

I checked the News and Observer this morning and saw a rather disturbing story about a purported "school shooter" exercise at Elizabeth City State University. Evidently some students and staff had not been informed by administration email messages that a mock gunman was to storm into a classroom and take a class hostage at gunpoint for a readiness exercise. One unfortunate class last Friday saw their class members lined up execution style, a la Virginia Tech massacre to what they believed was a real gunman. Members of other classrooms barricaded their doors and students began to frantically text message their parents and even contemplated taking potentially life threatening measures (such as jumping out of windows) to escape the alleged gunman, according to the article.

Although I usually like to reserve judgment on such things, I feel that if the article is accurate, the school administrators were dangerously incompetent in how they carried out this drill and perhaps there should be serious repercussions for those who made these decisions. It really was a wonder that no one was seriously hurt as a result of this. Other schools such as UNC-Greensboro have reportedly had such drills, but over breaks when there were no students. One can only wonder what was going through the administrator's minds in having a mock gunman exercise (in the recent wake of the tragedy at Northern Illinois) on an occupied college campus.